Refik Anadol & Panasonic - Frieze LA

CHALLENGES

Acclaimed media artist and director, Refik Anadol, creates world-renowned site-specific public art, and orchestrates live audiovisual performances, exhibitions and installations throughout the world. Recently, Anadol worked with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (LA Phil) for its centennial season to celebrate both the orchestra’s history and its future. With the aim to use The Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall (WDCH) as a canvas, he needed a solution that could project crisp, bright and clear images onto a unique, reflective outside exterior.
Separately, Anadol held an open house at his Los Angeles studio for the Frieze Los Angeles art fair, with the goal to transition traditional surfaces into unexpected visuals.
With both of these art exhibitions, he needed to find a way to ensure the light could be captured clean and clear in the air, without any distortion or alteration – Anadol is constantly trying to find ways to make light more visible.

SOLUTIONS

Anadol selected Panasonic’s projection technology to create unique and captivating visuals that were able to alter the reflective surfaces of the WDCH and transform traditional backdrops into innovative visual designs during Frieze Los Angeles.
For the LA Phil, Anadol trained machine learning algorithms on the orchestra’s extensive digital archives – 45 terabytes of data – to create the public art installation, WDCH Dreams. To project stunning visuals based on this dataset, Anadol used 42 large venue laser projectors, including Panasonic’s PT-RZ31KU 3-Chip DLP® SOLID SHINE laser projectors. At Frieze Los Angeles, Anadol used the world’s smallest 50,000 lumens 3-Chip DLP® SOLID SHINE projector,
Panasonic’s PT-RQ50KU, to alter flat surfaces into distinctive textures. In his second Frieze installation, Infinity Room, Anadol utilized a “silky fine mist” created by Panasonic’s Green Air-Conditioner as the backdrop for holographic visuals. To produce the dreamlike setting, Anadol used Panasonic’s PT-RZ120U 1-Chip DLP® fixed
installation laser projectors, each with a wide-angle ET-DLE060 lens to project onto the mist.

RESULTS

For both installations, Panasonic’s laser projectors enabled Anadol to implement immersive and engaging visual experiences by projecting stunning, clear and crisp visuals onto a variety of surfaces, bringing Anadol’s artistic visions to life.
Commenting on his work with Panasonic technology, Anadol reveals, “We feel privileged to use one of the best machines in the world, work with some of the best engineers in the world who can tackle big problems using light or mist as a material. I’m really grateful to connect cutting edge laser projection technology with cutting edge art to create something purposeful and beautiful.”