See the Mural in Motion review in the ISTE Daily Leader

What does it mean to be site specific in Multimedia?

Lots of calculations!  The squares on the wall of the Fabric Workshop building had to be mapped in a 1920 X1080 resolution projection.  Talk about a great math question! Here is Eric Okdeh’s first calculations of the wall that he acquired by measuring from the roof of the building.  As it turned out Ryan from Starlite Productions, the company that is providing the projector and sound, provided this mock up of the projection space which allowed us to map the squares in our piece.  I looked all over the Internet to find out how other artist map their walls and one group (Seeper) has created their own mapping software.  

The Fabric Workshop and Museum wall at 12th and Arch

The Fabric Workshop and Museum wall at 12th and Arch

Location of the mural – Ellen Fishman-Johnson

After being given the go ahead by Mural Arts to begin working on the project, we needed to find a wall to project on to.  We knew we had to find a wall that was in the vicinity of the Philadelphia Convention Center and Frank Aloise, the Director of Finance at Springside School suggested we go look (of course it had to happen during lunch so we could eat at the Reading Terminal Market).  We parked right next to the Convention Center and the great wall of the Fabric Workshop and Museum at 12th and Arch immediately struck us both.   This is a street that is used by conventioneers to get to most major hotels. There is parking lot beside the wall, which was really important in order to have enough space to project from.  We began discussions with Fabric Workshop about using this perfect location.