Flying Bricks and Twisting Towers: Projection Mapping Drinking Game

You know projection mapping, the technique where video is projected on a (usually 3D, large) surface, often a facade of a building? Then the carefully planned image material changes the surface in amazing and magical ways and makes you go all oohh & aahh & WOW. Right?

In my opinion, that’s usually all they do. Mapping is a wonderful and exciting technique, which easily goes to waste when it's only used for showing how wonderful and exciting it is. I've seen quite interesting things done with it in smaller art works, but when it comes to large scale projection mapping, the art disappears in an avalanche of effects. Which are pretty much the same in all pieces.

Escherian stairs. A classic like Sex on the Beach.

As we say in Finnish: Eihän tätä kestä selvin päin, meaning I just can't take this shit sober. To help people getting drunk enough to stand the horreurs of generic projection mappings, here's a little drinking game. Have a sip every time one of these happens:

1. A tower or a column gets twisted like a screwdriver. Take two drinks, if this happens Rubik's cube style.
2. A planet or a meteor appears. Take two if it's Earth.
3. Building blocks of the house are reorganised. Take two if a wall comes tumbling down.
4. The surface of the building fluctuates. Take two if this happens to the beat of music.
5. Shadows move. Take two if it's only the building's statues' shadows.
6. Flames appear. Take two if the effect reminds you of Barad-dûr in the Lord of the Ring movies.
7. A plant or a forest grows in front of our eyes. Take two if there are also animals not exactly belonging to a forest, like a whale.
8. Music is dour, shamanistic techelectro (in absence of knowledge of the proper terms in the scene, an impromptu word here. If you've heard it, you know what I mean) or a ballet standard. Take two if it's Dance of the Knights by Prokofiev.
9. The pace of animation is too fast to concentrate on details. Take two if you missed an important turn in dramaturgy while blinking.
10. Take three drinks if you can imagine Albert Speer did this.

Drunk yet much?

A mordorian example of flames

It's obvious that large audiences are quite fond of this kind of entertainment (with or without a flask in their pocket), which is good for the arts and culture in general, of course. It’s nice when people are having fun. But still, I’m looking forward to the day, when there’s more to projection mapping than flying bricks and twisting towers.