Video mapping: where did it start and when?

that depends…

It would be difficult to claim that video mapping was invented in such or such a place, on such or such a date, by such or such a person. Since 2004, the expressions “projection mapping” and “video mapping” have been used simultaneously in several countries around the world: in the USA, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, South Korea, etc. If we look at the history of the techniques, it was Disney and General Electric which patented procedures for the projection of video images adapted to uneven surfaces in the 1990s. And yet, the history of patents does not necessarily reflect real life — which includes a range of unofficial and more or less confidential practices, which do not share any direct link.

Retrospectively, and if we agree to expand our concept of video mapping, a number of experiments conducted prior to the year 2000 could be considered part of its history, or prehistory. We can thus go far back in time — for example, Ludovic Burczykowski (a research engineer at the DeVisu Laboratory at the Polytechnique Hauts-de-France University) evokes rock or cave art since, in all likelihood, prehistoric men and women took account of the depth of the walls on which they painted, just as mappers do today.

… 2003: Save the date!

Let us return to our era: if the term video mapping appears and becomes widespread internationally during the mid-2000s, it is because of the fact that, around that date, the practice consisting in projecting animated images onto volumes had been identified and that our societies were seeking a more effective way of talking about it. At that time, it seemed that this form of expression had a key role to play in our visual culture, on the eve of an age which we hoped would speak to us, in its own way. We still need to fully understand this highly significant context, which was so favourable to the development of video mapping. We will therefore set this period, i.e. the first half of the 2000s, as that when video mapping emerged.

In France, a pioneering experience can be taken as a point of reference: 3min2 by Electronic Shadows (2003). 3min2 is the first work assumed as such and supported by a cultural institution (the Parisian ‘Nuit Blanche’) which can be classed as video mapping in the technical sense of the term and which we have been able to reference at this stage. We are now entering the history of video mapping. Before 2003… this is thus its prehistory : the time of ‘pre-mapping’, just as there was a ‘pre-cinema’ before 1895. There will always be something arbitrary in establishing such a historical milestone (the year 1895, considered the birth of cinema, remains both debatable and open to discussion), but it is necessary for reconstructing the history of video mapping in France.

Go back