On March 26th from 7-10 PM in Pilsen, Chicago T 1344 18TH Nick OBrien hosted a night of “Bring your own Beamer”, a night in which people bring projection units and show a piece on the walls.  In attendance were people from Columbia College, SAIC, and the general New Media community.  About 30 pieces were displayed, which meant one thing – continual breaker blowout.  We decided to rotate pieces every 20 minutes, which gave the electrical system a break and gave people more room to show.

My favorite pieces were Sarah’s projection of striped video onto holohgraphic streamer curtains, which was simple but lovely, and she was a power star by running her Optoma LED projector entirely from battery.  Another was Judd’s Arduino-based piece that ran off a car battery which had a pixellated sun that sat as the battery died.  Marvelous.

I showed my Basic Stamp piece, “Snofall” which is a basic install of black and white pixels falling onto a white ground, like pure 16×24 resolution digital snow.  Since the source board has a hard time syncing to a projector, I either run it through a VCR as a preamp or record and make a DVD out of it, which is what I did here.  Keeping it simple is keeping it real.  Thanks again to Nick and the gang for making this happen, and cheers to all the wonderful people I met.