An opportunity to once again work with, not only a great digital artist but also our friend, Kelly Richardson for her exhibition at the Shoreditch Gallery, London. Kelly was approached by Love Nature, a new online streaming service for nature documentaries, to create a ten screen 4K resolution art piece for their UK launch. The ‘Closer to Nature’ exhibition puts visitors face-to-face with ten critically endangered animals identified by World Wildlife Fund in a thought-provoking exhibition.
ArtAV were given a brief to design a system capable of playing back ten 4k resolution films onto state of the art 4k Sony screens, these were to be mounted on thin floor to ceiling poles, making the installation feel as light and clean as possible to the viewer. Space was also tight in the venue with nowhere to store a rack full of equipment.
Our solution was to use ten Blackmagic HyperDeck Studio Mini’s and an ArtAV custom Synchroniser, placing the HyperDeck Studio Mini’s local to the screens removed the need for a playback rack system to be hidden away. Using in-house designed and custom made mounting plates, a player was discretely above each screen with the signal being sent using HDMI cable.
ArtAV’s synchronisers can use the HyperDeck Ethernet protocol to dynamically control, loop and synchronise the players. This is all done through a custom single board computer and gives frame perfect synchronisation. Also, HyperDeck Studio Mini players use power over ethernet, enabling control through ethernet but also providing power, resulting in less cables being required. For the this project, a small footprint controller was needed so we integrated a web page controller to give access to the system through a wireless access point and a smartphone.
