Documentation in support of: Chapter 7 Lilium, a post-digital cine-symphonic mural

Background

Lilium is a cine-symphonic mural, an immersive projected audio-visual installation that re-imagines urban regeneration through the aesthetics of ruin and decay. This public artwork sought to alter citizens' phenomenological perceptions of the socio-technical physicality of Regent Lane by placing them into a dynamic hyperreal world that transcends time and space–where pasts are fused with present realities projected into the city to enchant and stimulate the imagination.

**An expositional film about Lilium in Regent Lane for the Big City Lights Festival 2022**

00:00-02:35 Investigating Regent Lane as a site for post-digital placemaking

02:35-13:30 The installation at the Big City Lights festival

13:30-16:00 Credits

Concept

Lilium attempted to momentarily re-imagine urban regeneration by projecting imagery of reincarnated flora and fauna onto the aged surfaces of The City of Gold Coast to open a different possibility for the city. The centrally located Regent Lane, now targeted for regeneration, is a narrow laneway parallel to the pedestrianised streets of what is now China Town in the heart of Southport–once the CBD of The City of Gold Coast. Lilium participated in Regent Lanes’ existing and undervalued vitality, to draw the broader community’s attention to its small scale and modest charm, and, rather than monumentalise it, magnetise it. Lilium aimed at what Jacobs (1958) described as the power of a ‘focal point’ in the same way a fountain operates as a 'surprising and delightful’ landmark where ‘a whole district will get a magic spillover’ (Jacobs 1958, 128). Perceptions of Regent Lane as a mundane, utilitarian urban infrastructure could be transformed with a simulated hyperreality that transcends the limitations of physical space and time with photographic compositions of life, death, and reincarnation within a forest of lilies populated by exotic human fauna to reflect tensions between natural and artificial life cycles.

Site visit visual documentation and notes

Leading up to the Big City Lights Festival, I spent several days photographing and making video and audio recordings of the immediate area (see below). The high-rise residential towers that overlook the laneway subjugate the social life of the street to a more alienated existence in sealed, air-conditioned buildings, malls, offices, and skyways serviced by elevators, escalators, and Wi-Fi networks. Regent Lane’s buildings, typical of Southport’s once human-scale architecture and the gradually disappearing laneways, have been reduced to a site for parking, loading docks and garbage bins used by local restaurants and businesses. It is marked by graffiti, surveillance cameras, vacant offices for lease, pawn brokers and money lenders. However, despite appearances, the laneway is also vibrant. Regent Lane, used by the surrounding tenants to meet, play ball games, and listen to music, is a site where a part of the community expresses itself creatively.

Regent Lane as viewed from the southern entrance

Before Lilium's installation, the juxtaposition of surveillance cameras overlooking garbage bins had already become a prime site for intervention and creative expression through street art overlayed with graffiti.

A PTZ (pan tilt zoom) camera. Regent lane is under constant 24-hour surveillance.

This image shows the multiple instances of security lighting, signage, and surveillance cameras at entry to the carpark, perhaps suggestive of an expected threat.

This image shows the palimpsest effect of graffiti interventions that consciously extend to the creative expressions of others in Regent Lane. Their removal, suggested by the multiple layers of paint, gestures to an authoritarian rejection of such expression.

The details of the laneway reveal the blending of its technical function with its DIY aesthetic reparation, a function of its whole.

Regent Lane is also a site for recreational activity for the local community.

Regent Lane had renovations underway to restore its decaying surfaces.

The aesthetics of the high-rise buildings surrounding Regent Lane are in stark contrast to its scale and decaying appearance.

The details of the building facade to the south of Regent Lane, which contains offices and apartments situated above a shopping mall and a large-scale parking facility, is typical of the standard aesthetic that has been adopted in the urban regeneration across The City of Gold Coast since the 1980s.

This image shows the ground-level view from the southern entrance to Regent Lane, dwarfed by the high-density tower blocks that overlook it.

The window bays and the spaces between them provide interesting forms with which to separate the image installations’ image three panels.

Visual Treatment

Lilium’s installation involved three fragmented projected moving image panels across a thirty-metre wide two-storey facade that backs onto the laneway. This configuration aimed to redefine Regent Lanes' temporal and spatial qualities. Visitors could not take a particular position to absorb the entirety of the installation if they remained motionless relative to the position of the imagery. The long and narrow laneway's restricted viewing angles required visitors to either gaze upwards at an extreme angle relative to the proximity of the large-scale picture plane or move through the laneway to re-scale the image panels relative to their bodily scale and position. As with sculptural and architectural space, this compelled the viewer to move through the laneway because the imagery could not be fully perceived from any single point of view or timeframe, which results in a unique experience of the work in each instance, which is unlike the linear moving image typically experienced on a single two-dimensional screen or panel and viewed in its entirety from a single point of view.

Lilium’s installation of three projected moving image panels was configured across a thirty-metre wide two-storey facade that backs onto Regent Lane.

Drawn into Regent Lane, citizens traverse the northern entrance to the laneway, parallel to China Town, Southport, central business district, July 7, 2022.

The third of three projected moving image panels in Regent Lane. The ground-level car park beneath the building constituted a significantly high four-metre void between the ground plane and the bottom of the image plane. The sound emanated from the barred car park space beneath the imagery.

This image shows a spectator (bottom left) experiencing the work through a mobile phone as they walked the length of the laneway.

The image panels were separately projected with three projectors. This image shows the middle panel, projected between two of the window bays.

The three panels are shown here as they were configured in the working composite video file. Each panel was separated for projection across the elongated spacing between the window bays in the laneway.

A still image extracted from he working video file.

Production and post-production

The imagery used in Lilium (2022) originate from the two separate, unrelated image databases.

The lillies: The first database comprises 24,748 digital photographs of dozens of lily specimens from the Liliaceae family. Their capture in 2010 involved the automation and pre-programming of computer-controlled imaging apparatus configured in a carefully managed temperature-controlled environment. The lilies were photographed over six weeks, recording their floral anthesis–where their bulbs opened and responded to the light, air temperature, water, and one another's presence–to their eventual death and decay. High-powered artificial stroboscopic lighting and multiple automated cameras were used to record ultra-high-definition imagery that was subsequently edited and remixed over four weeks in Adobe After Effects in 2010.

The human figures: These images were extracted from a dataset of 24,445 digital photographs created in 2017, were initially made for the Bleach* Festival’s 2017 visual identity. These digital photographs captured human performances in 360º at approximately fourteen frames per second with a single digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera. This method reverse-engineered the multi-camera ‘bullet-time’ techniques popularised by The Matrix in 1999. However, the evolution of these photographic techniques has roots in Eadweard Muybridge’s early experimental work and motion studies from 1867 to 1893, when he first devised now common methods for freezing human and animal locomotion and their animation as motion pictures.

This image shows two of 24,748 latent RAW data files created in 2010. The sequence of images represented by thumbnails at the bottom of the Adobe Lightroom interface represents the lily’s lifecycle, captured over six weeks. The larger image on the left was captured on May 30, 2010, at 7:09 pm GMT, and the image on the right was captured on June 16, 201,0, at 4:11 am GMT. The lilies were photographed for a further four weeks to capture their decay.

This image shows the RAW latent image data being manipulated in the After Effects interface. The individual photographic files were spatially composited and temporally sequenced, and animated.

This image shows a 3D pre-visualisation model made in SketchUp to design and communicate the studio setup required to capture aerial performances in a controlled environment.

. This image shows the latent RAW images in the Adobe After Effects interface, where they were edited for Lilium in 2022. The large-scale post-digital cine-symphonic mural projection installation for the Big City Lights Festival was held outside. The image colour and contrast were treated to suit the urban environment that suffered significant ambient light pollution, affecting image clarity.

Composite still used to previsualise the final video.

Composite still used to previsualise the human motion.

Testing the background plate of animated lilies

This video file was created using timelapse methods. 24,748 digital photographs were captured over a six-week period in 2010 were time re-mapped into a video file in 2022. This 4:45 minute file appears quite slow when viewed at a small scale on a computer screen. The imagery was tested a variable speeds and sizes for projection into laneway. It was determined that the timing of the final sequence would be 8:00 minutes, about half this speed.

The combination of speed and scale was used to create a deeply embodied experience of the work in Regent Lane. If the imagery moves too quickly at large scale, it can create a disparity in the viewer’s vestibular system–the visual and kinetic perceptions that synthesise in the middle ear–and lead to motion sickness or vestibular–cardiovascular reflex. Therefore, the image motion's speed, acceleration, frequency, and duration were paced to be perceived by the viewer using parameters synchronising with the body's movement at ground level and at a gentle pace synchronising with walking speed.

The final image plates and spatial soundscape for projection into Regent Lane

The final three moving image panels that were projected across the thirty-metre wide two-storey facade that backs onto the Regent Lane. This 8:00 minute video file was separated into three separate projection plates.

The slow temporal and exaggerated spatial qualities of the imagery below, were processed as smoothly animated image sequences in post-production. This was critical to Lilium's embodied experience. The lilies and human figures gently rise and softly fall. Their synchronised motion across the three image panels was extremely gentle to prevent the adverse ‘sensory conflict’ or ‘mismatch’ typical of large-scale imagery in Imax and 360º screens, where the imagery appears to move across the screen surface very quickly relative to smaller-scale screens.

Aural Treatment

Lilium’s sound was made collaboratively with electronic artists, musicians, and composers, John Ferguson and Andrew R. Brown, who created the generative aural tempos and rhythms. The sound that emanated from the car park, beneath the imagery on the two-storey facade, was projected as elongated synthesised sound from a multi-speaker array aligned with the image panels. This arrangement enabled the sound to spatially pan along the laneway to immerse the viewers into a space that changed as they moved. The multi-channel mix aimed to maximize the perceived movement of sound through space. Like the light emanating from the projectors that filled the space with modulating reflected colour and luminance, a deep sonic hum reverberated through the laneway as the sound waves encountered, impacted, and returned into the open space.