Behind YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS – part 2
Where do you put a thirty meter long LED wall?
These are the sort of questions and issues that Project Manager Lucas Bonekamp had to answer.
Having been working on the project to bring YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS for six months, he is at the very centre of all the overlapping parts. It’s not as simple as setting it up and turning it on. Lucas took time to talk with me about what he’s working on.
It was very quickly made clear to me just how many different people and organizations Lucas is working with. I had made the incorrect assumption that the entire “object” would be picked up from the Sydney Festival and transported over to Amsterdam.
“Far too expensive,” said Lucas.
To give you some perspective, the YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS screen is 30 meters long. The Iamsterdam sign at the Museumplein by the Rijksmuseum is roughly the same height but 20 meters long. The Stedelijk Museum itself is about 100 meters wide.
Instead, the Stedelijk Museum is renting the LED wall from a Dutch company. They kept the same dimension as to when the Kaldor Public Arts Project developed YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS for the Sydney Festival, who also rented their LED wall. Lucas contacted them in order to use the same software they did. This included the website to register names, the database behind it, the ability to moderate the input, the allocation of times as well as the actual program used to run the display. Lucas is the one who controls all this information.
When meeting with the company set to build the LED wall, Lucas brought staff from the Stedelijk’s Audio/Visual department, who had the expertise but had also worked with artists before. There were many technicalities to go over, like how the LED screen will be facing the sun and how the brightness needed to be turned down during the night. The level of detail going into the running of this project is immense.
One of the first issues for the project was acquiring a permit from the Stadsdeel Zuid, the district where the museum is located. The LED wall will be on all day for the whole three weeks of the Holland Festival. Was an events permit necessary? The Museumplein has had many issues about the grass being worn down from overuse. Luckily, the Stadsdeel Zuid were very cooperative in order to help realize this project. The permit require was only for the installation of the LED wall.
The next issue was where to put it. Lucas liaised with the builders currently working on the Stedelijk extension. Two solutions were put forward. Either to put it on top of the scaffolding or to build additional scaffolding to the adjacent elevator building and put the LED wall on that. As the wind can get quite strong, a third, safer option was put forward. Lucas would talk to another company in order to strengthen the current scaffolding. The reason being that it is there for the builders to start working on the façade of the building, not to act as any kind of major support. Strengthening what is already there means that the LED wall can sit on a platform about eight meters high. The LED wall will run on its own power supply, again rented from yet another company.
An interesting issue that arose was what alphabet to use. In Sydney they used a straightforward Latin alphabet. What about the international communities in Amsterdam? The Turkish alphabet, for example, has seven characters that Latin does not. Lucas made sure these would be added.
As you can imagine, all these little details have to be run past John Baldessari’s studio and the Holland Festival are kept informed as the project progresses. Lucas is the one keeping in contact with everyone.
You can still register for your 15 seconds of fame at www.yournameinlights.nl
