I finally got round to doing my backlit projections. I borrowed a projector from the AV dungeon, bought some tracing paper, stuck it to the inside of my bedroom window and set up the projector.




It was relatively easy to do; I hadn’t used a projector before and managed to set it up quite quickly.




I really wanted to do this because it was a way of showing work to a probable none art audience.



This is the view from the window I was projecting from. I know it looks like a futuristic, apocalyptic nightmare, but it’s only Holbeck in the background. The big blue building is an office block, with quite a few people working late. The building to the left is the rest of the apartment block.


The projection is also visible from the road… just.

This is quite a subtle piece as it’s quite high up perhaps hardly visible. I’m not sure whether it worked very well because I’m not sure if anyone saw it. If they did, it would only look like an abstract, fuzzy distortion which is kind of what I wanted.



After messing around with it and playing different videos I decided that the one that worked best was the none figurative, flickering distortion video. There is no dialogue or human interaction, it is what it is; a minimal, colourful moving image.

I do quite like the idea of it being subtle and perhaps unnoticeable.

Anyway I left it on late into the night (as my audience got smaller and smaller) until the noise and heat from the projector became too much to sleep next to.

Whether anyone got anything from this projection is a mystery. For it to work better (by which I mean reach a larger audience), it would have to be on a lower floor or done on a larger scale.


An artist that does large scale projections well is Ross Ashton. He projects images onto large buildings. They are often very celebratory and architectural. They reach a large audience because there’s often a large crowd there to see something else, e.g. the Queen’s golden Jubilee, Edinburgh Military Tattoo, St Patrick’s Day.



I like his stuff but it’s not really what I’m going for. It’s very broad, but I suppose it has to be if it’s part of a large celebration, most of which are televised. The audience most likely isn’t into art, or at least isn’t there for the art, and want something obvious and beautiful.