Shadows on a Wall

NEC Display solution projectors bring Japanese artist’s vision to life.

When a Silicon Valley art museum was chosen for a world-renowned Japanese artist’s first solo exhibit in the U.S., which included video animations, its staff needed a way to present the exhibit that would stay true to the artist’s vision but also be easy to operate and maintain during the six-month show.

In initial conversations with exhibit curator Rory Padeken, Tabaimo made it clear that she wanted NEC Display Solutions projectors to show her work, titled “Tabaimo: Her Room.” The museum had worked with the company in the past and owns 17 older-model NEC projectors.

“Whenever we hear that an artist wants to use NEC products, our ears perk up, because we have quite a bit of experience with NEC projectors,” said Rich Karson, the museum’s chief of design and installation. “They are easy to work with and have very few technical issues, even when we put them through quite a bit of use by running them eight hours a day, six days a week.”

Tabaimo specifically was looking for a cutting-edge, durable projector that could sync up multiple images into one animation, and also needed a lens that would let the projector be relatively close to the wall without distorting the images. Her gallery in New York, James Cohan, provided three NEC PA500U projectors for one of her animations, while Padeken was tasked with finding four more projectors for another. The artist specified a different projector for a third animation.

With the projectors secured, the museum turned its attention to transforming its gallery space into an environment that would complement and enhance the experience for visitors.

The total exhibit square footage is slightly less than 6,000 square feet, Padeken said, with multiple unique spaces that visitors encounter during the show.

“The majority of people are not familiar with this artist before they come to the museum, and it’s hard to imagine the work before they see it,” he said.

The museum renovated its galleries in collaboration with Tabaimo to create three distinct environments for the three main projection pieces to exist in, creating an immersive experience for visitors using sound and video.

After the renovation, Karson and his team had to configure the projectors’ setup in a way that accurately portrayed the artist’s vision. This required some creative thinking from the installation team.

For example, “yudangami” utilized four synced NEC PA550W projectors with NP12ZL lenses. The design team needed to hang the four projectors in a semi-circle, mirroring a convex semi-circle wall build-out. The projectors form one side of the circle, and the wall construction forms the other side of the circle.

The team had to measure out the exact radius of the circle and triangulate the positions of the projectors before suspending them from the ceiling. The projectors do not hang flat horizontally, but at an angle. Two of them each connect to one Mac Mini, and both computers are synced through Tabaimo’s software to play one continuous image.

“It’s been a really positive experience – not just in terms of having the project match our creative vision, but it’s always a roll of the dice when we do video installations and have them up for a long time,” Karson said. “This show has a six-month run, which puts a lot of wear and tear on any piece of technology, and the team and I have been blown away that we’ve only needed to change one bulb. That’s unheard of. These are incredibly robust machines. “

Click here to read the full success story of the San Jose Museum of Art.

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