Symbologies is a projection mapping piece created for the Digital Graffiti Alys Beach artist residency program. It was exhibited alongside several other artist’s work for three days and viewed by over a thousand attendees. Special thanks to the curator John Colette for bringing me on board and for organizing such an immersive event.

Symbologies makes commentary on how humans have used different mediums and symbols throughout history to create signatures of our existence upon architecture. We have evolved from using paint to scanning digital symbols to encode and decode information about our presence in a space. The content begins with analog paint mediums to reference both graffiti culture and the earliest hand paintings in El Castillo cave. It then sequences through paint pen tags, pulling from the landscape of Portland that I see on a regular basis. The piece closes out with digital patterns inspired by QR codes and bar codes, which are often referred to as symbologies.

The projection content of symbologies is a mixture of practical and digital animations that were glitched via the Tachyons+ Dreamweapon module and re-recorded on a vintage CRT screen. The piece evolves from black and white stop motion imagery to colorful digital imagery, which is intended to hint at humans progression from tactile symbols of our identity to a mixture of both digital and analog.

The video piece was projected onto a faceted tower structure consisting of several different planes. The architectural plans were split apart in Adobe After Effects and then masked to the structure using Mad Mapper. Special thanks to John Colette and Cody Samson for teaching me the mapping process on the spot. All the content was output by a single projector source and run off a Macbook pro for the event.

The first portion of Symbologies utilizes spray paint to create 12fps stop motion sequences. I sprayed several silhouettes of my hand to reference the paintings of El Castillo cave, which are the earliest records of human iconography. The sprays were then scanned and digitally inverted in After Effects.

The next phase of Symboligies incorporates photos of hand-written tags found on abandoned buildings around Portland, Oregon. The photos were then sequenced in after effects to create a stroboscopic pattern of surface textures. This phase shows how human symbols evolved from sprayed icons to written language.

The final stage of Symbologies incorporates patterns based on bar codes and QR codes. This shows how humans are evolving from written language back to binary iconography, similar to the hand stencils yet now we need technology to decode them. The various patterns were designed in after effects and then used as stencils for the spray paint elements.

The audio for Symbologies is a combination of spray can samples and modular synthesis. The modular synths were recorded by Justin Lawes and then composed in Ableton Live by Enternull. Various spray can samples were used to create percussion and abstract drone elements that tightly synchronize with the video edit.

Artist: Peter Clark
Curator: John Colette
Music: Enternull, Justin Lawes
Projector Setup: Digital Graffiti Alys Beach
Technical Assistance: Cody Samson, John Colette