The celebrated LUX Helsinki light festival took place at venues across the Finnish capital during January, with a highlight being the specially created projection mapped visual display onto the intricate façade of the National Gallery Ateneum. The looping, five-hour graphic animations formed a large, 8000px-wide canvas and were projected by six Barco UDX 4K32 projectors and driven by Green Hippo Hippotizer Montane+ RTX and Karst+ media servers.
The festival was staged by Events Helsinki, which brought in Capital AV to deliver technical production and visual consultancy for the Ateneum projections. In temperatures plummeting to minus 20 Celsius, the Capital AV team set up a warm trailer next to the FOH position and the three projector towers. The animation work was designed by Katri Tikkanen and commissioned to celebrate the 60th anniversary of famous Finnish clothing brand Marimekko’s cherished design pattern, Unikko. Marimekko and Ateneum joined forces as major sponsors of the festival, making the projection project a reality.
A music score was composed by Matti Ahopelto, with the piece coming together as projected visuals that danced on the front of the imposing building. “We deployed two Montane+ RTX and three Karst+ media servers to drive the projected visuals as we needed a reliable solution in the cold weather and with enough power for the large canvas, amount of graphics and the five-hour loop,” said Capital AV’s Max Lapinsuo-Sylwén. “The Hippotizers proved to be a powerhouse, running the show for the entire five-day festival without any issues. They just work when we need them to.”
The results were a bright, beautifully executed tribute to Finnish design and visual arts, nodding to neo-impressionist painter Alfred William Finch’s pointillist work Orchard at La Louvière and the Unikko pattern.
The show was projected using the six Barco projectors, with three double-stacked each side in the projection tower and connected to the Hippotizer media servers using Luminex fibre cables. The Hippotizers were supplied by Capital AV, with subsidiary Capital Creative delivering the project with Max Lapinsuo-Sylwén and Timo Kesonen at the helm. It’s estimated that more than half a million people braved the cold to enjoy the LUX Helsinki Festival this year.
