2024 Long Beach Walls/Art Renzei

Long Beach Walls is week-long, city-wide event that takes place in the summer throughout Long Beach and is part of the globally recognized Worldwide Wide Walls series of street art events, which since 2010 has brought murals to public spaces in cities like Honolulu, Seoul, Washington DC, Taipei and Tokyo. In 2024, Long Beach Walls / Art Renzei brought in b1n4ry Visuals for a number of projects which became one of b1n4ry’s most complex, elaborate, and ambitions projects to date. This project included a task to projection map a portion of the Queen Mary for the week long festival. The first weekend of the activation was also in conjunction and collaboration with Day Trip Festival. In addition to the Queen Mary Activation b1n4ry created a custom animated piece for a structure located in downtown Long Beach that also ran the duration of the week. At the end of the festival, to celebrate the completion of the murals by the incredibly talented artists, b1n4ry projection mapped AL Grime’s finished mural while the other artists celebrated, skateboarded, and conversed about the events of the past week.

The Queen Mary Projections were in collaboration with Brendan Monroe. b1n4ry worked closely with Brendan to create a series of animations and generative content that would grace the structure of the boat’s surfaces. The piece harkened to the waves that the boat had seen in it’s time as an ocean liner, celebrated the work of Brendan, and complemented the structure of the boat.

Due to the nature of the Queen Mary being a boat on the water, the structure was subject to movement with the tides. The projection then also had to be shifted throughout the runtime in order to be properly mapped as the structure moved with the tide. In order to achieve this, b1n4ry did a number of site surveys to determine the optimal projector placement, and lens to ensure the best resolution of content with just enough head room to move the projections as far as necessary. During these site surveys some measurements of tide movements were taken to get some rough estimates of the range in which the boat moved and how it correlated to the tide chart data that would be used to determine the movement of the projections. during load in for the three days prior to showtime, more calibrations were made using the touchdesigner system b1n4ry designed to account for the tide movements. Using an API from NOAA we found the high and low data for the next three nights with offsets planned for the start and end time of the runtime of the projections each night and used these to place the mapping in it’s correct place. Using interpolation that seemed to best match that of the tide, we shifted the projections with these forecasts. As a successful load-in wrapped up and showtime was upon us, the system was set to automate using the API Data for the following week. It all worked quite well and was only off a few pixels here and there due to the challenge of perfectly matching the interpolation each day with the nuances of weather.

In addition to the Queen Mary Project, b1n4ry created a custom animation piece for a building in downtown Long Beach. This was a sort of continuation of a theme that was created for a projection mapping project in downtown Denver for Night Lights Denver, called “The Texture of Struggle”. For Long Beach Walls, b1n4ry expanded on this concept for a piece called “The Texture of Struggle II”. The pieces were both a practice in exploring the story of the cycle of generation, complexification of systems, bifurcation, and death and decay using abstract forms, textures, and other imagery to compliment the geometry of the projected surface, while also allowing for a complex narrative to unfold.

And Finally, a return to b1n4ry’s earliest work 10 years prior, b1n4ry projection mapped AL Grime’s completed mural in our trademark way to accentuate the artwork, and bring it to life.

Credits:

b1n4ry Visuals:

Zac Layman - Creative Director, Technical Director, Animator, Programmer, Producer
Brendon Monroe - Artist, Creative Director
AL Grime - Artist, Creative Director
Gage Nguyen - Stagehand
Robert Blake - Stagehand
Jesse Barnett - Stagehand
Dominic Ricci - Drone Operator
Fuse Technical Group - Projector Vendor

Long Beach Walls/ Art Renzei:

Jasper Wong - Founder
Amy Luu Wong - Co-Lead Director
Cassy Leeman - Executive Director
Julia Huang - Long Beach Advisor
Tokotah Ashcraft - Long Beach Advisor
Brandon Shigeta - Long Beach Advisor, Photograpy, Videography
John Pangilinan - Long Beach Advisor

Daytrip Festival:

Geoff Godfrey - Art Director Insomniac Events