This short video helps shine some lumens on what a full-dome theatre is like. It is a large 6-projector installation theater with an active surround sound system. A monster of a dome. Enjoy!

What the hell is fulldome? from DomeFest on Vimeo.

I want to share with you my all-time favorite dome show. I saw it at the 2008 Domie Awards at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. It’s breathtaking in beauty and conceptual content. Just watch.
Hijos del Agua, aka Children of The Water from DomeFest on Vimeo.

What a great idea: Put the world’s most cutting edge video remix/rewire/reculture techs in the same building for days on end. Words have no place here, so watch the slideshow.

Here is an example of immersive or experiential city art. I love the idea of bringing the piece into the real world; reaching many more people than from within the confines of a gallery.

In the video installation Night Watch, a watching eye gazes down at passers-by. The piece is a dialogue on the concepts of safety, conspiracy, and the mechanics of control. Night Watch premiered at the Art under the Bridge Festival in 2006 in Dumbo, Brooklyn. The Manhattan Bridge is considered a main terrorist target, and consequently is packed with hidden surveillance cameras and other security. The idea was to make a very visible watching eye. Night Watch was shown again in Shanghai as part of Intrude Art & Life organized by the Zendai MoMA in 2008.

Initially Night Watch was proposed for the watchtower of an old fire station overlooking downtown Manhattan. The manager refused as he found the piece too political. A similar reaction occurred in Shanghai. A few days before I arrived, the department store that had agreed to have Night Watch projected onto its façade suddenly refused without explanation. Biljana Ciric, the curator of Intrude Art & Life, and I agreed to do the project without permission, an idea I found exciting and appropriate to the piece. Driving around Shanghai location-scouting was amazing: blinking corporate logos and lit monuments are backdrops for millions of people on the move. Shanghai Museum on People’s Square immediately caught my interest. I wanted to project Night Watch onto this landmark building as an eye/icon over the central entrance.

A van was prepared with a generator, projector, trolley, and seven helpers. After testing the projection in a dark underpass, we headed for People’s Square, where we projected the eye under a multistory highway with people racing by in cars and on pedestrian bridges. Some slowed down and stopped, marveling at the eye. Suddenly the floodlights on the Shanghai Museum were turned off, and I exclaimed, “Let’s go for it!” We managed to project Night Watch for two hours before uniformed guards turned us away. The projection at Shanghai Museum has been published internationally but not in China, where the Intrude project ran into problems with authorities.

The next night we headed for Pudong, a science-fiction looking skyscraper area, where I had spotted a park with a pavilion. When we arrived, the park was crowded with police on motorbikes with blinking red lights, and my heart sunk. One of my helpers, whose father was in the police, went to investigate and came back with an unlikely message: it’s OK. A new Narcissus aspect of the piece occurred as the projection was mirrored in the lake while the surrounding skyscrapers were looking down at the watching eye.

Inserting an installation in an external space is different from doing it in the white cube of a museum. Much is at stake in the urban spaces of the city, where political, cultural, and commercial forces manifest themselves. The context of the public space of the city, its speed, and noise level, the intensity and level of awareness and presence among its citizens is a great challenge. I have chosen to address the public in the public space itself by infiltrating its iconography, propaganda, and control mechanisms, and by introducing a multilayered, contemplative dimension.

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Biosphere 2, like Earth (Biosphere 1), is a complex, evolving organism that’s not easily classified, labeled or pigeonholed. The University of Arizona’s glass-enclosed living laboratory sprawls across three acres of high desert near Oracle. It’s part laboratory, part tourist attraction, part sustainability demo site, part conference center, part public-education facility.

Biosphere 2 Mission

To serve as a center for research, outreach, teaching and life-long learning about Earth, its living systems, and its place in the universe.

* Catalyze interdisciplinary thinking and understanding about Earth and its future;
* Be an adaptive tool for Earth education and outreach to industry, government, and the public;
* Distill issues related to Earth systems planning and management for use by policymakers, students and the public.

I’m excited to see how we can use full-dome video environments to present these concepts to others in new and profound ways.

This is another example of wonderful animated shows available for the full-dome environment. The global community is producing content at incredible pace and that trend will continue as immersive environments increase in popularity into the 21st century. Read more about this Grad Student project HERE
Treehuggers – A Studies in Immersive Animation

We’re gearing up to do video work similar to what MONUMENTAL is doing over in Europe. Check it out.

The IXMA stimulates business success by improving the understanding of experiential marketing and helping organizations provide effective, engaging, positive and memorable interactions with their brands.

“Markets have undergone a profound transformation after decades of top-down corporate messaging. As you read this, the marketing world is changing, and with it the way business will be conducted for decades to come. This change is being demanded by the enlightened and empowered consumer – the so-called prosumer – who no longer responds to a media-propelled “brand essence.” Most current advertising still relies on obsessive proliferation of the brand through mass media that seek economies of scale – the more eyeballs, the better. But consumers want more than mass messages sent to eyeballs. They want respect, recognition and relevant communication, and they’ve indicated that the best way to give it to them is through experiences that are personally relevant, memorable, sensory, emotional and meaningful. Consumers have changed dramatically, and the brand world must change to meet their needs and desires, or lose them to those that recognize the unique influences shaping the evolving marketplace.“

“Today, customers take product quality and a positive brand image as a given,” writes Columbia Business School guru Bernd H. Schmitt in the seminal book Experiential Marketing. “What they want is products, communications, and marketing campaigns that dazzle their senses, touch their hearts, and stimulate their minds – that deliver an experience.”

“It is those companies that can deliver the right experience to customers that will succeed in the global marketplace today. Businesses will live or die not by the attributes they promise, but by the experience they offer customers at every touch point – in the store, at the website, with the product, and through events and advertising. “Traditional marketing theories and practices are rapidly changing and becoming less relevant,” writes Erik Hauser, Director of the IXMA. “Experiential marketing is leading the way into the new marketing paradigm.”

Here is IXMA’s Manifesto:
        
1.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING must be predicated on one-on-one personal interaction between a marketer and a consumer.
2.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING will be conducted when the consumer chooses.
3.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING campaigns should clearly deliver a meaningful benefit to the consumer.
4.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING is based on engaging people.
5.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING must be based on individual experiences.
6.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING’s goal is to succeed using innovative approaches and tactics to reach out to consumers in creative, compelling ways.
7.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING is idealistic enough to empower the individual consumer and street-savvy enough to unleash the power of grassroots activation.
8.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING is about authenticity.
9.        EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING assumes that the entire world is media, and the entire universe is the consumer base.

Related Tags: XM, marketing, manifesto, experiential

One of our “big brothers” and respected counterparts is Obscura Digital. As a San Fran based experiential marketing company, they’re pushing the limits of technology and art, just as we are. Take a look at some of the great work they’ve been doing for a hint at what we’re cooking in OUR stew pot!

More videos HERE

Obscura, Elumenati and Google worked together for an incredible dinner event for Google’s top invites last year. Check out this promotional footage from the event. It shows the dome in use as an ambient event space. Very exciting! Very Large!

This event took place at the Adler Planetarium. We went to the IPS conference and Fulldome Summit this year, and it was the most epic pilgrimage of a profession. We recommend you look into the Egypt event coming up in 2010!