Narracje Festival, Gdańsk · Projection-mapped live installation
Designing and performing a real-time sound-reactive light sculpture on a 56 x 72 metre building facade, as part of the Narracje Festival in Gdańsk, across three live evenings in November 2009.
Narracje Festival: Projection mapped light sculpture
01 / Setting
In November 2009, YUVa (Nick & Dan Roy) travelled to Gdańsk to take part in the Narracje Festival, an annual art and technology event held across the city. The installation was projected onto the facade of the CTO building on Rajska Street, a block away from the entrance to the Gdańsk Shipyard, the site where the Solidarity movement began in 1980.
That adjacency wasn’t incidental; the building sits in a part of the city where industrial history is still physically present, and the scale of what we were doing felt appropriate to that context.
Projection tower
CTO Building
02 / Collaboration
The project was a joint commission with Gdańsk-based artist Dorota Walentynowicz. Dorota owned the audio dimension of the work, designing and performing a live sound piece in Ableton Live that would drive the visual system in real time. YUVa, Dan Roy and I were responsible for all visual content, the custom software patch, and the live performance of the projection across three evenings.
View of the installation & projection tower from the car park roof
03 / The Surface
The CTO building presented a facade measuring 72 metres tall by 56 metres wide. Dorota described it well: the surface is a natural mosaic of concrete, metal, and glazed windows, each material catching light differently. Rather than treating the building as a flat canvas, the piece worked with those material variations — letting the projection respond to the physical texture of the facade.
To cover that area, a Polish AV company installed two 30,000-lumen HD projectors, stacked vertically and mounted on a three-storey scaffold tower erected on the roof of the car park directly opposite the building.
04 / Technical Approach
The visual system was built around a custom OpenGL patch written in Apple Quartz Composer, running inside VDMX. A ring of microphones placed around the building perimeter fed a continuous stream of ambient sound data into the system, which used real-time audio analysis to drive the visual output. Dorota’s Ableton Live session sent a parallel audio feed that shaped the broader structure of the piece across each performance.
The result was a system that was genuinely reactive, not triggered by pre-set cues, but responding to the live acoustic environment of the building and its surroundings.
05 / Performance
We performed across three evenings in late November and early December. Outdoor projection at that scale in northern Poland in winter carries obvious risks; we were prepared for rain and freezing conditions throughout. The weather held for all but the final thirty minutes of the last night, when it started to snow, enough to close the performance, but not before the run had completed.
06 / Documentation
07 / Reflection
The CTO building was the largest surface YUVA had ever projected onto. What made it technically demanding wasn’t just the scale, it was the facade geometry. The front face sat at three distinct angles, so a single flat projection would never align correctly across the full surface.
To solve it, we built three independent panels in 3D space inside the Quartz Composer patch. On site, with the projectors running, we manually adjusted the angle of each panel until the projection sat flush against each section of the building. There was no automated solution, it was done by eye, in the dark, in November, before the first performance.
Getting that right across three consecutive evenings, with a live sound-reactive system running in parallel, was the most complex thing we’d attempted. It proved that the approach, custom software, live performance, building-scale output, was viable in practice, not just in theory.
YUVA continued until 2013. This project sits near the beginning of that period, and the geometric problem it forced us to solve shaped how we approached every large-format piece that followed.
Bruichladdich at Fèis Ìle · Islay
Microsite, ticketing and live broadcast for Bruichladdich’s Rock’ndaal during Fèis Ìle.