We promised you another look at Doug Aitken's Station to Station tour. Well, today's the last day of the month-long nomadic journey across this enchanted country. What can we say? Grueling hours and Gorgeous people and Galvanizing art and Garrulous fans. Picture yourself on a train in a station with a man with a whip and Beck singing songs. Ah, it's too hard to describe... OK picture yourself in a yurt in Santa Fe with a bed and a mirror ball and a lot of smoke. Oh forget it - just check out this great picture that Jose took somewhere between Pittsburgh and Chicago. Adam Rosen = genius. S2S crew from ShowPro = best road crew EVER. I gotta go.
Man, we've done some insane shows over the years, but this one might be the maddest. Bounce helped Hermes open their new store in Beverly Hills and they brought the creativity ON. Guests entered the new 3labs venue in Culver City by walking across a custom wooden plank bridge that spanned a not-so-small Lake. There was a giant rising moon, there were remote controlled boats, there were florescent mono-chromatic rooms with interactive art kiosks, there was an uber-masculine Library with book shelves and ladders and leather couches and windows that were 80" displays looking out in to Paris, and there was the SWIMMING POOL ROOM. We put in a 40' x 40' 9 mil white LED CEILING over the guests' heads, as they partied at the bottom of a swimming pool. Look up and you will see swimmers doing flips overheard and look next to you and you will see young beautiful models in swimming suits synchronized swimming. Insanity. We did wide blended projection from short distances and large vertical displays that looked like windows, and did I mention the Swimming Pool Room? Gonna be tough to top this one...
From the mad man that brought us to Coachella to create a cosmic light prism comes Station to Station. This is a coast-to-coast US tour featuring Visual, Musical, Photographic, Sculpture, Literary and Performance artists performing at historic railroad stations in 9 cities. The entire tour travels by train. Mitchey from Planet Events brought us along to install LED screens on the sides of 7 classic railroad cars, which artist Doug Aitken used to display interactive, environmental visual imagery. Each city is curated by a musical guest including Cat Power, Beck, Jackson Browne, Ariel Pink, Giorgio Moroder, Charlotte Gainsburg, and many more. We are providing sound, lighting, video and projection systems for all concerts. Just finished the LED install, and the trains are rolling to Brooklyn as we speak, for the first show. More to come!
Comic-Con is nuttier than ever. We were in the Convention Center with the Jordanah Girls doing Fox stuff, out on the street doing a costume contest with MTV, and we were here at Petco Park doing a big EDM concert with our pal Adam Stewart from Viacom. The convention center was a riot and populated with the best-ever fraternity of awesome nerds. Neil Patrick Harris even signed stuff at one of our booths. This stuff is giant business now - Be careful who you bully today, kids - you might be looking to that same person for a job in 10 years. Oh, and don't be a dick bully either way. Anyway, this Petco gig was really cool - we did Versatubes and stuff on the stage with a huge variety of vendors doing audio, lighting, staging, labor, etc. It takes a village.
So we pretty much always need to do two entries for June - it's just that kind of month for us every year. Here we found ourselves in the comfort of our long time pal Mary Bonefede at Disney Interactive, at E3. This was a great year for this booth - Gorgeous design and production by Brodey Francis. Lots of projection and killer lighting design by Shawn Richardson. We also had a great opportunity to work on a projection mapping project with Janine and Denny from Production Elements. This was for the reveal of the new Otis Booth building and the 100 year anniversary of the Museum of Natural History in LA. Giant glass building was covered with a huge cyc, which we mapped Radar LA designs on to. Kabuki solenoids popped and the huge drape fell to reveal the gorgeous new building. The crowd went nuts!
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles 100 Years: Otis Pavilion Unveiling 3D Mapping
USC brought us down again to help out with a huge announcement press conference. Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre gifted SEVENTY MILLION DOLLARS to USC. Insane. They are building an academy for arts and technology business. Looking for this new breed of youngsters who have arts chops and are entrepreneurial and are are adroit with new technology. We got the call at 4pm to install a high def LED wall for an 11am press conference the next day. Easy-E! Seriously, from F the Police to magna cum laude? What a country!