Ceilings for the Car Process

A new stage purpose-built for driving and simulated travel: a 24m by 5m ground-stacked curved ROE wall and a 10m by 5m high-resolution Absen ceiling, on a custom rig developed with Cirrolite. Rich Phillips, CTO at Garden Studios, names the limitation of large pixel-pitch LED ceilings when used for windscreen reflections; the new ceiling is meant to capture in-focus reflections directly in camera. It has four degrees of movement and runs at 10-bit, 50Hz on a Tessera SX40 with XD units over TAC fibre. The studio's own page says it tilts up to 90 degrees to work as a front wall. Brompton says it travels up to 20 metres front to back; Garden's page says 18. The Tessera S8s from the studio's first volume, which opened in 2021, drive the main wall.

Boston Lyric Opera's Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde), Mahler in Arnold Schoenberg's chamber arrangement, ran six performances between 20 and 29 March in a 250-seat setting at 15 Channel Center St. Epson told the story on 16 September. MASARY Studios, credited by BLO with projection and pre-show design, turned the supertitles into scenery, with type styled and paced to each passage and moving in time with the singing. Two Epson large venue 4K 3-chip 3LCD laser projectors, converged into a single image, carried the words across Sara Brown's set; a third, an EB-PQ2010W on an ultra short throw snorkel lens, rear-projected a window built into it. Anne Bogart directed; Brian H Scott lit. When an HVAC unit that wasn't in the drawings blocked the planned projector position, says MASARY co-founder Sam Okerstrom-Lang, "we quickly re-rigged the system, swapped the lensing, and adjusted the image without compromising the design."

The €20 million FaustForum in Staufen im Breisgau opened in April and hosts two to three events a week. Its stage runs on an ETC Prodigy P2-900 system installed by Scheinwurf GmbH: four motorised hoists, one over the auditorium and three over the stage, with compression tubes, integrated cable management, six power circuits and two DMX universes, flying around 50 fixtures under a clear height of almost seven metres. A three-person team installed and commissioned it in four working days across two visits, including inspection and approval by an independent expert. The hoists run from a QuickTouch+ Mk2 station, with a separate wired remote; ETC says the remote keeps operation within the operator's direct line of sight, while mothergrid's German report says it lets the hoists move outside it. "I can see the current load, the position of each hoist, and save different trim heights," says Simon Weiler, FaustForum's technical manager. "That means positions don't have to be measured again every time."

Sonnier's earliest experiments with neon and argon, first shown at David Kordansky's New York gallery in 2024 and now expanded in Los Angeles. Six works, from Arced Neon (Cool White) and Arced Neon (Violet), both 1968, to Neon Wrapping Incandescent V (1970), made of neon, porcelain fixtures, incandescent bulbs and transformer. The gallery places him alongside Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Gordon Matta-Clark and members of the Fluxus group, and describes the works relying on walls, ceilings and floors as a support, the way a painted canvas relies on stretcher bars. David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, through 24 October.