PAPER PALAZZO
Projection Mapping
2022
MoCA L.I.ghts Festival
Patchogue, Long Island, New York
October 14 – 17

Paper Palazzo transforms the stately facade of the historic Carnegie Library into a bustling collage of texts, illustrations, endpapers and covers. This musical mashup of manuscripts celebrates New York Libraries, the books that they house and preserve, and the New Yorkers that write them. The patterns and textures are collected from the Patchogue-Medford Library itself, as well as from the digital collections of the New York Public Library and the artist's own collection of ephemera and printed matter.

This work was presented as part of the 2022 MOCA L.I.ghts festival in Patchogue, NY. It was projected on the historic Carnegie Library. Thanks to Danielle Paisley, Laura Accardi, Gary Lutz, and The Entire Library Staff of The Patchogue-Medford Library for their contribution of images from the library stacks, and to the Friends of the Patchogue-Medford Library as well. An extra special thanks to the Hungry March Band for their permission to use their song "Underground" as the score for this piece.

The Oracle is an interactive animation installation that invites users to ask questions and encourages users to consider the relationship between intimacy, personal privacy, and trust in technology. It is a fantastic spectacle that provides answers to the user's fears and anxieties through the miracle of modern machinery.

The installation combines animation, light sensors and a projector to create a fortune-telling machine that responds to queries submitted to it on small pieces of paper by the viewer. It consists of the projected animation of the Oracle, the projector itself, and a "petition box" containing a light sensor that triggers the answers to the solicited questions The answers the Oracle grants are chosen at random, and it almost never offers a direct answer--in fact it behaves quite badly. The Oracle will get angry, break in a number of humous ways, and even get embarrassed for the user and simply leave. Only rarely does it provide a "yes" or "no" reply.

The ostensible miracle of The Oracle is one of smoke and mirrors: it is a stacked deck operating on chance. It is a microcomputer responding from external input to play animations that offer nonsensical answers. Even knowing that--and also knowing that their questions will be displayed publicly, the questions that people submit can be deeply personal. Amidst the typical queries into potential romantic interests and verification of the existence of extraterrestrial life are questions brimming with pathos and uncertainty: Does my father love me? Am I on the right path? Will X come home from the hospital?

The true miracle of The Oracle one of trust, intimacy, and our innate desire to know. We might have looked behind the curtain and know that it only conceals a box of ones and zeros, but we still find solace in answers. The answers we receive may be nonsense but still offer themselves up for our own interpretation. As the Delphic Oracle perched on her tripod and muttered spaced-out gibberish to the Ancient Greeks we still find meaning, guidance and even hope in the arbitrary and nonsensical.

Carnival Love Wall is a modular projection mapping work consisting of dozens of small animated elements that can be assembled, much like toy blocks or Legos, to create a complete animated surface that can be remodeled and shaped to accommodate almost any architecture and/or structure. 

Carnival Love Wall celebrates the resulting complexity of deceptively simplistic systems, like a molecule, a living organism or an entire community. Taken singly, each element’s motions are simplistic and repetitive. But when joined by many others and contained within an architectural form, they are much greater than their constituent parts, creating a monumental, dynamic, and playful mosaic of motion and color. 

This image is a maquette of the recent install of Carnival Love Wall for Animafest Zagreb World Festival of Animated Film, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb in 2017.

BABEL is a full-dome animation about the temporality of history, culture, and place using imagery pieced together from historic architectural domes.

The dome is an architectural feature that is common to a wide variety of social spaces. Its strength derives from the natural forces of gravity and tension, with each tier held in place by force exerted from above while supported by the one below. Though this mutual support, these hemispheres of stone, brick and iron are capable of enclosing vast amounts of open space, unoccluded by columns or other supports. One of the first achievements of architectural engineering, domes appear in almost every culture, across every age, and serving a diversity of functions.

Utilizing archival imagery and animation, Babel takes advantage of David M. Brown Planetarium’s domed ceiling to present a 5-minute tour of the iconic structures and institutions that boast this architectural feature, placing viewers beneath the oculus at Rome’s Pantheon; gazing up at our nation’s Capitol Building; and amidst the gorgeous lattices of Tilla Kari Madrasa in Uzbekistan, to name a few.

In Babel, the artist stacks the different rings of these domes like children’s toys, aspiring to build a towering edifice, one atop the other. The domes, however, spin in consecutive circles, and each level erodes and supplants the next in a futile architectural battle royale spanning centuries, geography and ideologies.

As the Tower of Babel presents an allegorical origin of cultural difference, Babel suggests that an ideal monument is one that brings together all ideals—faith, pleasure, beauty, industry—that the balance and tension of these paradigmatic forces allows them to coexist while supporting one another naturally, like tiers of stones stacked to form a domed ceiling.

Rejecting a monolithic, homogenized absolute, Babel represents a unity that does not subsume social and cultural difference, but builds on the strength of all its constituent parts. In Babel the sacred, secular, commercial and political work in concert to realize the best of all possible worlds, all at once.

BABEL was first presented at the David M. Brown Planetarium in Arlington, VA in May 2017. It features the song “Many Horses” from For Stars and Atoms, an album by the excellent yet sadly defunct Baltimore ensemble Yeveto. It has since screened in venues in the U.S., Romania, Spain, Lebanon, India, and the U.K.

Baltimore’s Inner harbor is a thriving, active place. It features amazing institutions like the Visionary Art Museum and the Museum of Industry. Harbor East offers diners a great diversity of gastronomic options. And sometimes it’s nice to blend in with the flocks of tourists to stroll the waterside, or take the water taxi to enjoy a panorama unavailable anywhere else in the city.

One thing one does not do, however, is take a refreshing dip.

In 2016, Baltimore's leading Harbor Health nonprofit, Waterfront Partnership’s annual Water Quality Report Card gave the waterways of the inner harbor a failing grade, citing high levels of raw sewage, nitrogen and phosphorus as the culprits. That same year, Facebook featured a video of tourists diving into the harbor, frolicking as Baltimore locals looked on in horror. Sinkholes and sewage leaks were common items in the news. Baltimore City’s waterworks are over 100 years old—once a source of civic pride, decades of neglect and atrophy indicate that Baltimore’s infrastructure and development plan are in need of more thoughtful consideration.

This is already happening, in unique ways that reflect our city’s offbeat and eccentric character.  The Inner Harbor Water Wheel, casually known as “Mr. Trash Wheel” (and later a second wheel, Professor Trash Wheel) offers an innovative solution has removed over 1 million pounds of debris flushed into the Inner Harbor since 2014, and obtained local celebrityhood. Other actions, like the Floating Wetlands program, and the annual Baltimore Flotilla are examples in which the community addresses the ecological and political aspects of water health that are fun and creative.

The Herd is a tribute to all the citizens of Baltimore City who continue to hope for a healthy city and healthy waterways. It is a cluster of 400 luminous inflatable swim rings—designed by the artists to be similar in appearance to the floats used by swimmers at the seaside—laced together in a net to form a glowing multitude of creatures calmly bobbing in the shimmering ripples of the nighttime harbor.

Waterfront Partnership states that its overall goal is to have a swimmable and fishable harbor by 2020. Boston, Los Angeles, Paris and other cities overcame sewer infrastructure problems – similar to those faced by Baltimore – by making large improvements in the health of their waterways. The trash wheel project, initiated here in Baltimore, has set an example that is inspiring other cities to try this innovative solution to keep their home waters clean.

The best solution, however, to waste entering the harbor is to not have it go there in the first place. Education, and making Baltimorians aware of the big difference they can make by undertaking small changes is the most effective method of all. Light City is a great platform to spread this message. The Herd is a great way to communicate it. The empty glowing rings of The Herd are a hope and a promise that someday, when we take the responsibility of clean water into our own hands individually, they will indeed be filled by happy bathers enjoying the Inner Harbor in a new, refreshing way.

The Herd amused, confounded and delighted visitors to the Light City International Festival in 2018. The installation took three days to complete with a dedicated crew of artists and volunteers, and using over 6000 feet of rope to position and secure all of the inflatables in a 120' by 340' foot area.

A close-up of the inflatables used in The Herd. The artist created the original design of the inflatables and then worked with a fabrication company to produce a run of 400 inflatables for the project. 

Aware of the fact that vinyl pool toys are a significant polluter in landfills and our oceans and other water resources, the artist worked to sell, gift, and recycle the inflatables to ensure minimal environmental impact.The inflatables were sold during the festival, raising over $4000.00 for Baltimore non-profits championing healthy water ecosystems for all Maryland citizens.

The Herd made its inaugural debut at Light City 2018, and appeared in the 2019 MOMENTUM Festival in Toledo, Ohio.

Bay Bingo is a whimsical animation exploring the fragile ecosystem of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay through exploration and play. In the animation, native species such as the Long-nosed Gar and our local favorite, the Blue Crab, cavort in a busy kaleidoscopic sea bed. While concerned with a specific body of water, Bay Bingo encourages reflection on the importance of natural resources for everyone, landlubbers and shore people alike. 

Bay Bingo began as Projected Aquaculture--a large-scale projection mapping animation created with Kelley Bell and Corrie Francis Parks for Light City Baltimore 2016. This 5-minute looping animation was projected on the 250-foot-wide canopy of the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology in the Inner Harbor in Baltimore from March 28-April 4, 2016. Through a whimsical approach to animation, the piece presents the underwater ecosystem of the Chesapeake Bay, drawing parallels between the decline and resurgence of the Bay’s health and the similar decline and recent efforts to transform Baltimore into a livable city.

Projected Aquaculture examines and comments on the current health of the Chesapeake Bay through a series of projected animations incorporating imagery from the delicate ecosystem such as menhayden and blue crab. Mapping these projected images in large scale offers an opportunity to create a dialogue around a similarly described ecosystem: Baltimore City.

Viewers were invited to interact with Projected Aquaculture through printed and online resources, including a field guide and a Bay Bingo game and Field Guide where they could learn about the underwater flora and fauna featured in the projection.

The project has expanded to other locations and media, encouraging reflection on the importance of natural resources. It has appeared in Patchogue, NY, Corpus Christie TX, and The Maryland Natural Historical Society. Now viewers can interact with Bay Bingo by playing along on their mobile device. Scanning a QR code near the video loads an online bingo card (no app download needed!) and passers-by can play a short game in which they identify aquatic creatures from the video on their bingo card and learn facts about the species (through limericks!) as they try to get bingo. The game can be played alone or with others and offers a brief moment to pause to delight in a visit to the Chesapeake and appreciate the diversity of life to be found in its waters from hundreds of miles away.