Video Mapping: The Latest Architecture and News

Have you ever wondered what a thought might look like traveling through your brain? In a recent installation in Moscow's Nikola-Lenivets park, media design firm Radugadesign animated the inner workings of the human brain with an innovative video projection. Universal Mind, a sculptural installation by artist Nikolay Polissky, serves as the immobile backdrop for the elaborate video mapping project. Over the course of nearly eight minutes, Polissky's brain-like sculpture explodes into a maelstrom of light and sound, with carefully curated streams of energetic colour interspersed with dark scenes of manufactured glimmering starlight.

Last night, the facade of Rem Koolhaas' critically-acclaimed skyscraper - De Rotterdam - became the screen for the largest video mapping project ever displayed in Europe. The A15 Project, an initiative of Natuur & Mielieu, re-envisions the A15, the Netherlands' busy highway, into a "sustainable highway." Check it out in the video above!

Powerful video projectors at an affordable price have opened the path for a young, impressive art form: 3D video mapping, a means of projection that uses the architecture itself as the screen. Artists and researchers initiated the movement, developing a new visual language to interpret architecture. Later, marketing adopted this technique for branding, with large-scale projections on skyscrapers; political activists have also initiated dialogues, turning ephemeral light interventions into eye-catching ways to point out and address urban design issues.

More on the ways artists and groups develop this visual language for urban storytelling, after the break…