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The Powerhouse Multimedia Installations Of The Knowledge Olympics In Brazil

Eight intense, immersive interactive pieces art directed by Brazilian fashion designer Ronaldo Fraga.

Consider the sheer, overwhelming intensity of the installations shown in the video above and then picture them all in one place. That was the scene at the Knowledge Olympics, the largest professional education competition in the Americas. Fashion designer Ronaldo Fraga created a multimedia show with the idea that knowledge can take you anywhere in the world. And that's exactly what the installations did, stirring up feelings and taking the audience to a chaotic and stunning Tokyo, to the heart of a volcano, out in the rain, and into the desert.

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Fraga was in charge of the art direction and the environments were created by architects Paulo Waisberg and Clarissa Neves, while Henrique Roscoe (VJ 1mpar) handled of programming, interactivity, creation, design, and both 2D and 3D animations. Brayhan Hawryliszyn did the design and video editing, and Fabiano Fonseca was responsible for the sound design. "We were commissioned to do everything involving video, mapping, audio, and interactivity. The briefs we got were really open to our own creation," said Roscoe.

Tree of Knowledge was one of the interactive installations. "We thought about a tree that would grow and flow according to visitors' positions. Its movements were conceptually related to knowledge, as it tried to "hug" viewers and grow with them. Its thin-edged branches represented the sharp way knowledge can change people," said Roscoe, who also explained that he developed the project with vvvv software, using a Kinect as a sensor to capture visitors' movements. According to Roscoe, "It's a combination of video scenery with a generative tree, both running on vvvv. The operation is quite simple: when there's no one in the room, the tree is just a young sapling that stays still. When someone steps into the area within the sensor's reach, it quickly grows and becomes a tree. As visitors move and change positions in the X and Y axis lines (horizontal and vertical), its branches flow in different directions, while if someone moves in the Z axis (going closer or farther from it), it changes size."

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Here's a small piece showing only the Tree of Knowledge:

Next, Roscoe told us about the other installations, each of them vastly different from the next. While some relied on mapped projections, others used LED panels, and there was also one with a cube made out of Solaris LEDs wrapped in G-lec frames.

Tokyo

Tokyo: a technological metropolis where so many things are happening at once. Here we did the videos for two mirrored panels, where there was a city with building facades that displayed moving images. We designed an entire city, which was explored by several camera movements.

Water

The commissioners' initial idea was to have rain projected on the walls, so we did some video scenography with several circles, each one with the image of a raindrop falling and the sound it makes. Over time, the number of drops increased until it became a storm. In this environment, we mapped two walls with this scenography and ten circles on the floor, with images related to the water theme.

Volcano

There was this low-resolution LED panel where we inserted images simulating the movement of magma inside the earth until it goes out to the surface as lava. This was in a more graphical, nonrealistic fashion. We also did an environment called Desert, mapping the walls and the ceiling with more realistic images of the sky and clouds, also using a soundtrack.

According to the organization of the Knowledge Olympics, nearly 250 thousand people attended the event, which took place during November 12th to 18th at the Anhembi Complex in São Paulo.

@CreatorsProject