Resonance Music and Arts Festival 2023 – Beach Stage

Resonance Music and Arts Festival had always been near to my heart. My good friends started the festival years ago and since I’ve been in attendance at every one I’ve seen the festival grow and change and morph. After enduring troubles for years with finding a stable venue to host the festival, organizers chose to bring the festival to and end but not without first hosting a smaller-than-typical event they titled “Resonance: The Last Dance” which was held it at a storied music festival venue in Ohio named Nelson Ledges Quarry Park in June 2023.

The park is home to, as its name suggests, a former quarry which is filled with water and used for swimming. Adjacent to the water and beach is a permanent stage where the park holds a variety of different small events throughout the year. For Resonance, though, this stage was used as the second stage while a temporary larger stage was placed in the field behind.

To modify the space over the beach stage, I first created a structure from wire and yarn which was stretched tight between several trees to create a ceiling-like effect covering the stage and moving all the way to the trees in the rear. The total size of the piece was roughly about 75’x110′. After tight lines of yarn were added with solid-color fluorescent yarn I then added intentionally-drooping sections using multicolor fluorescent yarn. These curved sections were created specifically to add interplay with the effects of my newly custom-built UV laser.

A quick note about the UV laser:
At the first Resonance in 2014 I guided the creation of a piece which was interactive and resulted in a 3D tangled form built out of mostly-fluorescent yarn. I had some tiny UV lights hanging in the yarn, but nothing powerful. On the last night of that festival, late at night, a friend pointed a small handheld UV-laser pointer at the piece and every tiny point of UV laser light produced by the laser grid-lens lit up the fluorescent yarn brightly. It created a stunning twinkling effect, like thousands of tiny bioluminescent flying creatures or tiny stars.
Since then I’ve been on a quest to both recreate that effect and also expand on it. I scoured the internet and finally found a company willing to custom-build a device to my needs, because no off-the-shelf product like this exists in the world. It took a 20 week build time, import papers from Slovakia, government registrations and a crash-course in laser programming to bring that spark of an idea to fruition. Now, here at the last Resonance, after the idea was conceived at the first Resonance, in a strange cosmic resonant echo of sorts I am finally deploying a custom-built UV laser on a yarn installation.

After the yarn-portion of the piece had been woven together, I mounted the UV laser to a trussing on the (audience’s) right side of the stage. This laser then projected a variety of different patterns and effects on the piece, but since the laser beams are nearly invisible the yarn appears to be lighting spontaneously on its own.

This was the first full-blown deployment of this custom-built UV laser and the experience was not without its growing pains. However, I ultimately settled on a handful of effects that played on a loop which covered the majority of the yarn which had been installed. Some effects were geometric while others were more random, and some moved slow while others moved quickly.

Projecting a moving pattern across an irregular surface led to some very interesting effects as the pattern was only visible from the perspective of the laser projector. When viewed from the side the details of the pattern were lost and the illumination of the seemingly-random bits of yarn were all that was available. Straight-line elements had consistent light movement with the laser, while drooping elements would have differing speeds of movement due to their constantly-fluctuating angle relative to the laser projector.
 

PLEASE NOTE: The green laser is not part of the installation, it is coming from a nearby light-toy booth.

 

For the most part the UV laser is nearly invisible, but a dense fog set in for a time and the beams became more visible, as is evident in the next two videos.

The piece also had interplay with the stage lights. Here the general structure of the yarn is visible as well as the UV laser effects. This is a simpler pattern so less individual points of light are visible.

Unfortunately, I did not get great pictures of the complete piece during the day, so its form will forever remain an illusion. Below is a pic during install before the majority of the drooping elements were added.

A picture during removal when portion close to the stage had already been taken down:

And a picture from a friend with his wife that was taken during the festival:

Below is a video from dusk, so the structure of the yarn is more visible as well as the scale relative to the space where it is located.

Here are couple of videos from the perspective of the laser projector, showing the patterns that are being projected on the yarn that are creating the effects seen in other videos.