2020 the state of the art showlightning brand Robe provided us with the lights and contacts to create the LD Summit 2020, a closed Event for Light Designers where the lightning fixtures of the company should get presented in an artistical way. Together with Patrick Lenkeit and Sarai Bieber I created an interactive dance performance which incorporated a full packed light- and videoshow.

Our installation was based on a great ramp, which we used as projection surface and floor for the dancing performance. Under it we placed Robe Cycbars shooting to the sides, where Litecraft CubeX pointed upwards. In our rig we had some Robe Esprites as well as some T1 for the robospot follow system. Sarai, our dancer, was tracked using a blacktraxx system, which played right into stageprecision to easily work with the tracking data from the lightning console.

My main part of the project, next to planing everything and closely communicating with Patrick in regards of Lightning-positions, Rigging issues and dramaturgical ideas, was the video side and at least the system design and integration of the audio technics. I planed the projections with all the needed projector positions, optics, playout-system-setup etc. as well as designing and building the content. As we wanted to have real interactivity for our dancer, I choose to use vvvv, to create everything from the previsualisation to the final content and playout-system. One of the interesting points about this setup is the dynamic softedge I developed. Since we wanted to avoid shadows, we placed one projector in front of our dancer and one behind her. Right where she was standing we could set the softedge area and thus get rid of any shadow. When Sarai moved, we tracked her movement and adjusted the position of the softedge.

Content-wise we focused on motions in different scale and forms. Being able to track our dancers body and hand positions as well as the corresponding rotations, we developed a lot of interactive elements, like controlling the direction of the lights by your hands and playing with a huge virtual ball.

In the end I also was responsible for developing the audio playout-system, which was based on a Yamaha CL1, FL Studio, a small vvvv patch for translating artnet to midi and creating some simple logic as well as 12 Yamaha Loudspeakers and 2 Subwoofers, which were all connected via dante. The lightning Desk would send an artnet trigger to vvvv, which converted it to a midi-play-signal for FL Studio. In that DAW the playback of our stereo Sound would start, next to the timecode for the lightning desk. FL Studio also played out some midi-controll-values to remote the CL1. With that workflow we could mix the audio signal over all the needed loudspeakers (eg. Pan it around in a circle of 8 speakers). This solution was especially great as we had no time to build the setup beforehand, so we could just sit right in the room for one evening during build up and adjust all the automation without having to rerender anything.