Outside Art Experience #2

Art At Coachella

By Lucas Marsh

One of the worst decisions I made scholastically this semester was attending the Coachella Art and Music Festival in Indio, California.  Aside from having an incredible lineup of musical artists, there was an incredible amount of incorporated, cutting edge art installations.  Since I've been involved in CIA this semester, I was very curious as to how art and technology could be a potential career path.  I saw bands perform that I'd probably only have a once and a lifetime opportunity to see as well as view contemporary art production.

Creator's Project (http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/coachella)
The "Creators Project" is a collaboration between the Intel Corporation and Vice (art and technology magazine) which designed and implemented the extensive art production at Coachella Music Festival.  Specifically certain artists worked on single projects while many others were immense collaborative productions.


UVA (United Visual Artists) along with artist Mira Calix (both from the UK) designed the main stage where some pretty incredible shows were put on visually.

1.)  Arcade Fire:

Artist Chris Milk created Arcade Fire's finale which consisted of 1000s of beach balls shot out of the top of the main stage and onto the crowd, each embedded with IR transmitters and RGB LEDs to control the patterns of color emitted. 

Animal Collective:

While Animal Collective finished setting up, the main stage showed this pretty incredible light show bye UVA:

Chemical Brothers:

This set involved multi angled 3d video projection.  I've never seen anything like it.

Sahara Tent: Designed by Brazilian Artist Muti Randolph not only had a brilliant wall of LEDs and LCDs but strings of RGB leds hanging from the ceiling which also showed animations:

Steve Angello

Afrojack

Sculptural:
Aside from the interactive music installations there were a  barrage of larger than life sculptural creations which intensified the futuristic realm we'd entered.

Insects:

Night

and

Day

Neon Trees (where everybody would try to go and find they're group but almost always fail):

Pterodactyl (if you pedaled really hard for a really long time the wings would flap:

Unfortunately charging cameras and phones was unbearably awful and nearly impossible to do when thousands of people are crowding around a singular location to charge electronics.  Therefore most of these images and video were taken from blogs, Google Images, Youtube, etc.  I don't know if I'll return next year considering how difficult it made school for me this semester, but I'm sure next year's stage production will somehow attempt to out do this years.