‘Waxing Arcs’ is probably one of the museum’s best-known works in the Boijmans van Beuningen museum. Visible from the street, it is an unmissable colossus in the entrance area, but is perhaps one of the least understood works in the museum.
To better understand the work the exhibition the space was emptied, as it used to be originally and a twelve-minute multimedia experience was composed of footstep, photos, film fragments and audio that help to transport the visitor into the story about ‘Waxing Arcs’ and the artist Richard Serra, including the work’s museum-related history and the perception of the space.
For this presentation we used a 52 raspberry pi’s connected to 52 beamers to cover all the space of the entrance area. The output of the PI’s was controlled by one PC running a Unity program which send all the appropriate vertex and texture data to all the individual pi’s. All of this was engineered to create a seamless motion of footsteps and images across the whole surface of the exhibition space.
The raspberry pi’s were running a program written in C++ with the help of openFrameworks. For the communication between the raspberry pi’s and the main pc I used OSC for which I made a contribution to make it work. See : http://github.com/jorgegarcia/UnityOSC
This exhibition was awarded the bronze IDCA award “BEST SCENOGRAPHY – FOR A TEMPORARY EXHIBITION” IDCA on October 2015
