Architect, artist and industrial designer Ron Arad first met The Horrors’ Faris Badwan over a causal ping pong match. The two would’ve probably never dreamed of collaborating, but after Arad heard the music for Badwan’s new side project, Cat’s Eyes—a collaboration with Italian-Canadian opera singer Rachel Zeffira, a friend of Arad’s daughter—unlikely ideas began percolating in the air. Arad invited the duo to shoot their music video for “You’re The Best Person I Know” in front of a LED-encrusted section of his recent Curtain Call installation at the Roundhouse in London, where they also performed live at the end of August.Using technology “like a raw material” Arad conceived a 360-degree projection and light-emitting curtain made from 5,600 silicon rods suspended 18 meters high, creating a brand new high-tech canvas for performance. He put out an open call for artists to submit proposals for the installation, and reached out to some prominent artist friends for collaboration as well. (See what sort of ideas these artists devised here.)We visited Arad’s studio, or rather, his “progressive playground,” in Chalk Farm and spoke with the designer and his musical cohorts about this experimental and impromptu collaboration, which became an illusory interactive music video, thanks to Cat’s Eyes video director Ollie Murray. By incoprotating live footage and looping layers and layers of projections on top of each other, Murray created a dreamy, mythical visual experience that Zeffira called “a modern version of the house of mirrors.”
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