Progressum is an audio-visual installation made for Vivid Sydney 2022 and commissioned by Destination NSW. It’s produced by sound system designer, Des O’Neill, lighting designer, Peter Rubie and composer, Peret von Sturmer. Intense Lighting Hire provided the lighting equipment with Peter Rubie providing the Vista lighting console and MADRIX system. Coda Audio Services provided the loudspeakers and drive. aFX-Global provided the IOSONO processing at Vivid House as well as the audio post-production studio used to create the spatial audio mixes for the creation of the immersive audio content. TDC provided the video system. Special thanks go to Litepix for helping with the MADRIX setup and to Encircled Audio Solutions, based in Germany for IOSONO application support.
Built around precise spatial synchronicity and featuring a state-of-the-art, three-dimensional IOSONO sound system and dazzling lighting array, Progressum is an exercise in sonic and visual immersion.
LIGHTING
In addition to the 4x 9.6m wide by 4.8m high LED walls surrounding the space and the floor projection, the space is filled with 40 x ShowPRO DreamPIX Tubes, each one housing 40 double-sided pixels suspended at staggered heights above the heads of the audience. These 3200 pixels fill the vertical space in the air and extend the same content presented on the LED screens into the middle of the room and upwards into the air which adds a third visual dimension and results in the audience being fully immersed in the visuals presented on the LED screens.
In the top layer of the space is 30 x ShowPRO DreamPIX Strip which provides a further 1200 pixels aimed downwards to give the fifth side to the video content.
A total of 40 x Filament Globes randomly hang in amongst the tubes to give a warm earthy glow and provide a tungsten contrast to the digital LED tubes.
Eight Claypaky Axcor 400 Moving Profiles provide texture and animations that fill the space in between the suspended LED tubes. Their shutters are also used extensively in the digital section of the piece with thin blades cutting through the haze to simulate passages of time passing over the audience.
On the floor layer below the LED screens sit a dozen ShowPRO Fusion Bar QXVLED battens which provide punches of colour upwards into the middle of the room. A further dozen battens sit below the floor to provide ripples of colour below the audience’s feet made possible by several metal grates in the floor of the structure.
Also scattered through these grates are eight Chauvet R1 Wash moving fixtures which provide a multitude of effects ranging from wide blasts of white light alongside sounds of steam to moving beams providing slow-moving waves of light. It’s enjoyable to see the audience’s reactions when they realise the floor also has lights and life coming from beneath their feet.
Two Look Solutions Unique 2 hazers sit below the floor layer and are strategically placed to distribute the haze in such a way that it rises out of the grates and up into the air. This enables another visual dimension as rays of light from the overhead projectors and moving lights dance in time with the sound composition.
The lighting is programmed on a Chroma Q Vista S1 console which is a great portable solution for moving around the space and runs on a single laptop. Pixel control is done with an Artnet merge from both Vista and a separate MADRIX lighting controller which drives all of the more detailed pixel elements in the show. MADRIX is first and foremost an LED pixel mapping tool, but in this instance, it was also used to generate all of the content used in the video design. A strong benefit of this was that the same visuals that are used in the lighting pixel products in Progressum were able to be slightly tweaked to work with the higher resolution LED screens running at 1280 x 10240 px.
“What was great about the MADRIX system was that I was able to manipulate and capture the content in real-time, without the need to wait for rendering time,” commented Peter Rubie. “This helped me, as a Lighting Designer who is used to working in real-time with colour textures and effects. The content was then stitched together in DaVinci Resolve and played back on TDC’s disguise d3 media server.”
All show control systems are triggered off SMPTE timecode coming from the media server, which enables precise synchronising of all lighting and video elements to the audio composition. Much of the programming detail in the lighting and video was spent pinpointing specific 3D sound elements that move around the audience in an immersive XYZ space. Being able to complement the video design with lighting around and below the audio and to be able to synchronise the position and direction of the lighting to the sound objects gives a truly immersive experience and a point of difference from other video installations using the space.
DESIGN
Peret’s composition explores the changes to our shared, aural environment throughout time with 5 movements; The Deep End, From The Ground Up, Heavy Metal, Testing and Digitize Me which take us initially from sounds of nature, through the evolution of sounds of metal, bells and steam into electricity progressing into static and modern-day digital sounds and music. This allowed Peter a huge canvas of elements to play with, in creating the visuals.
“I originally started with basic colours and mood, playing around with different effect parameters to create several different visual effects that would suit the wide range of elements throughout the piece,” he said. “The video content presented to the audience is purposely very abstract. I intentionally wanted to create suggestive shapes and textures without being too literal in the content as the soundscape has a lot of beauty and narrative in it already. There is also lots of black negative space in the content to enable us contrast in the space when combining with the lighting and not have the lighting lost and washed out by the video, which is something I see happen often.”
The earlier movements start with a simple sonar beep before diving into The Deep End. This needed to be organic, with flowing fluid patterns made up of underwater oceanic colours and ripples of light from the surface above which build into rising waves of lights with each melodic chord.
As we emerge above ground, warmer earthier tones take presence paired with tribal-like patterns and foresty sunlit textures. The sounds of wildlife and birds are echoed in smaller warm flourishes of light that fly around the space, closely following the spatial and directional sound composition to encourage the audience to look around in the direction of the sounds.
Early sounds of drums, flutes and plucked fibre are translated in the video and lighting as the patterns and kaleidoscopic textures become stronger and busier and dance around us with a fun and joyous energy to the drum beats, before being engulfed in waves of heat and fire and eventually lightning strikes and raindrops fall from the air through the LED tubes and down the screens.
The Heavy Metal movement takes us through the sounds of machinery and steam. Lighting plays a big part here, with echoed metallic sounds conveyed in amber sweeps and geometric shapes with warm orange hits from the sides of the room and exploding outwards on the screens. Blasts of white light coming through the smoke from the vents below the audience’s feet happen with each blast of steam.
The age of precision and passing of time heard with the ticking of clocks and turning of cogs, are emulated in light through thin blades of light panning slowly in the 360-degree space around the audience. The lines become more broken and distorted opening up to the ceiling and shooting across the floor projections as sounds of electricity and radio communications are heard alongside lighting patterns that suggest broadcasting signals and busy static. Warm filament globes pulse and flicker to show the birth of electricity.
“I generated a lot of monochromatic animated, 8-bit style digital patterns to remind us of the dots and dashes of morse code or the 1’s and 0’s of computer code,” said Peter. “The tempo quickly builds into the digital phase where we hear more familiar and modern sounds, video games and music and with this, the lighting patterns progressively become more colourful and more geometric overtaking the whole space to push us into the bright technological world we are familiar with, and closer to the modern day’s lights and dazzle of the Vivid world outside”.
As the piece draws to a climax, the colours and shapes get more saturated and frenetic, getting lost again in the digital noise, before ending with a surprise crash ending taking us into darkness where we see slices of light cut through the darkness following some remaining blips, an echo to the sonar beeps heard at the start.
