Projector Hacking

Video projectors have become everyday devices, used for educating, amplifying messages, telling stories and now redesigning physical objects and spaces. This workshop will teach you how they work internally, and how you can modify low cost hardware for increased brightness, dynamic range and frame rate.

The human brain understands the physical world as a principally visual-spatial phenomenon. The optic nerve is the highest bandwidth interface between the brain and the external world, running from the retina along a highway of connections through different regions of the brain. Humans have evolved to principally describe the world in a visual way, and technologies which connect with the visual sense have a powerful effect on the rational human experience.

Many technologies have emerged which communicate with the visual experience, amongst which video projectors are often used for large spatial augmentations of the visual world. From the semi-material tunnels of solid light by Anthony McCall, to the building scale graffiti of Laser Tag, artists continue to discover ways to exploit the field of light emitted by projectors. This workshop aims to further democratize this technology by explaining how projectors work, how you might build your own, and how you can modify low cost projector hardware to match much more expensive hardware for certain situations.

The workshop will introduce the #BlackAndBright projector hack, which modifies standard DLP projectors to be twice as bright (whilst making them black and white). This hack has been employed by arts organisations such as STRP Biennale, dramatically increasing their capacity to host large scale digital artworks, and by numerous art studios to enable new creative possibilities on limited budgets.

Speaker: Elliot Woods (Kimchi and Chips / UK)

Free entrance / no registration