The Massey MoshPit on site at Frank Kitts Park on the Wellington waterfront that features the work of staff and students from the College of Creative Arts.
It’s a monster mash! Mashed up images collide with a stunning soundscape when the Massey MoshPit, the University’s flagship contribution to LUX, opens at the illuminating annual light festival on the Wellington waterfront tonight.
Massey is a founding partner of the festival that is now in its seventh year. It is anchored around two distinct precincts featuring a range of national and international artists – including staff and students from Massey’s School of Design and School of Art at the College of Creative Arts.
The exhibitors include technical demonstrator with the School of Art, Michael Bridgman who has designed the Massey MoshPit using immersive screen technology that showcases a sound and light installation, run by VJs (visual jockeys) and DJs, with a large mirror ball suspended above it. He has also enlisted the support of students, including from the School of Music and Creative Media Production, to help out with running the screen set up.
Immersive screens bring the space to life using technology that projects sound and imagery on a wrap-around-type screen that sends out beams of light to engage and entrance the audience.
“It’s a non conventional way of using space to put some people where they don’t expect to be,” he says.
Mr Bridgman, who is known in performance circles as Mike Busy, brings to the Massey MoshPit project a background that has seen him work using the technology on international car shows and pre season events surounding 2014 FIFA World Cup. In the music sphere he has worked on many of the main stages of the New Zealand festival circuit and collaborated on live performances with international artists from Afro Jack, Linkin Park and Kesha to Wellington favourites such as Trinity Roots and Fly My Pretties.
School of Art technical administrator Michael Bridgman (right) with Bachelor of Fine Arts student Will Luscombe-Smith with some of the equipment accompanying the immersion screen.
The varied artistry of performers like them will be translated into files of sound and vision that can be randomly selected and played by the VJs and DJs to people visiting the light festival at Frank Kitts Park.
“We can combine mixed images from the different sources and mash together a series of files and images in real time and create a mashed up artwork,” he says.
The mix of the selected sound and visual effects with the immersive screens should prove a winning combination with the public, Mr Bridgman says.
One video mash-up being played, among more contemporary sound and vision projections, is a homage to the MTV video aesthetic of the 1980s.
He likens the public familiarity with everyday screen technology to times when black and white TV was the norm and before colour television came along to shake the industry up.
Immersive screen technology represents a break-through compared to traditional types of screen styles such as TV and cinema,” he says.
“People see screens all the time so when somebody breaks out of that conventional form something magic can happen.”