XL Video designs an LED kinetic sculpture for New York's Guggenheim Museum

A large LED tower, designed and built by XL Video, is offered as the visual center of the show performed by Richie Hawtin at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

New York's iconic Guggenheim Museum combines music and modern art in a show hosted last November by electronic music pioneer Richie Hawtin to raise funds for the Young Collectors Council. In this show, Richie Hawtin updates his best-known alias, Plastikman, with which he revolutionized techno in the years 90, creating a show in which music and lighting are combined. An innovative audiovisual experience in which he has participated XL Video.

For the staging of this show, XL Video built a striking LED tower that was located on the ground floor of the Guggenheim Museum atrium. The objective was to provide a kinetic sculpture that will be shown as the protagonist visual piece of this event sponsored by Dior..

The LED tower had to be designed with a structure that had no visible structure that appeared as if by magic., right in the middle of the performance and that was in line with the sound environment created by Hawtin.

First the superstructure of the tower was built and then the solution was included. Pixled F-11 LED to build the indoor display composed of 12 tiles de alto por 4 width on each side. The titles had to be modified to adapt to the structure, leaving a minimum of 20 mm between one tile and another. To make sure everything went smoothly, First a pre-construction was carried out that would later be completed in the place where it was to be placed quickly and without the hotel., a pre-construction was completed at the facility by XL Video and LED Tech Pieter Laleman.

The video content was generated in real time by Hawtin using computers and TouchDesigner software. Derivative Inc. Production was made possible by video scalers ship ImagePRO-II that allowed switching between the main machine with DVI input and its backup using HDMI.

The control position was located at a distance of six meters, just behind the LED tower. This offered luminous effects with textures that were reflected in the atrium., A large all-white open space with glass roof.

Some additional lighting fixtures were also installed to magnify the image, but the mega-bright LED tower was the main light source that acted to the beat of the music.