Video mapping: a narrative

Video mapping is a succession of (video) images projected onto a 3D object for which they have been designed and created. More than just technology, mapping is a combination of means of expression established as such throughout the history of art, well before it actually appeared: some are specific to 3D arts (sculpture, architecture, design, etc.), others to arts of the image (painting, graphic design, etc.), stage and time arts (music, cinema, performance, etc.) or literature.

Video mapping nay be narrative and tell a story (such as Anooki) and implement screen and playwriting techniques. In other words, video mapping is a composite medium… but also a separate medium: an image encompassing a tangible volume which remains visible. It is a particular way of linking the virtual to the actual or, to put it more timelessly, the imaginary to the real and absence (the image) to presence (the support medium), using a projector (or several). This is how a video mapping project can ‘speak’ to us specifically.

In video mapping, the creation of video texture requires a plan and a formal analysis of the volume onto which the artist wishes to project. The relationship between the image and the object medium is firstly graphic and plastic. It may constitute resemblance and proximity, but also difference or even antagonism. This relationship, as well as its variations over time, according to a certain rhythm or sequencing, forms the basis of creating meaning in mapping.

This relationship with the medium may lead to other means of expression, which may be less specific than mapping but play an equally important role: sound (music, noises, words) may refer in a whole range of ways to the mapped site, monument or object. The elements featured, the characters and the story may also make reference to the site, either explicitly (which is the case with a number of mapping projects that celebrate heritage, for example, by telling the story of a building) or more obliquely. Conversely, they may also play on a certain gap or even complete break with the medium. The overall work creates a sort of ‘conversation’ between the audiovisual work and the volume onto which it is projected, like a role play between the two: sometimes, the support medium works as a ‘support’, since it is used for the visibility of the image, while sometimes it works as a ‘medium’ since it is highlighted by the video texture.

Video mapping — which oscillates between the statuses of art and media — enables this perpetual inversion of roles between the image and its medium, within the same proposition. A mapper may envisage his or her production as mediation, enhancement or communication around an existing object (monument or other) or as a work (whether performing arts, installation art or performance), or even as both at the same time without there being any major contradiction in his or her eyes.

It is thus by orchestrating these relationships between audiovisual production and a tangible volume that a mapper or collective will strive to produce meaning. And even more than the meaning thus produced, it is the process of its production that is of interest. It is this work, this process, in everything that may be personal or specific to a collective, that we can refer to as a “narrative”. In order to write this narrative, a mapper will use a certain number of tools, most famously computer tools… but not exclusively: many mappers use much more traditional tools, such as photography, sketches and drawings, the ‘story board’ and those who remain attached to it.

Many also take account of the symbolic value and social environment of the objects they map — something which cannot be obtained from an algorithm. In 1953’s Writing Degree Zero, the semiotician Roland Barthes explains that writing is neither the implementation of a regular code (such as language), nor a ‘style’ that can be reduced to a series of individual reflexes: beyond these determinisms, it is “the relationship between creation and society”. The recent history of video mapping has been punctuated by the launch of dedicated software programs, sometimes intended for specific genres (monumental projection, concerts, installations and micro-mapping).

Since some of these software programs offer libraries of stereotyped effects, or require a certain workflow, a normalised organisation of creative work, there remain some questions about the risk of standardisation. How does the ergonomics of an interface facilitate the development of a personal narrative (or that specific to a collective) in video mapping, a narrative freed — at least in part — from the conventions and mannerisms of language and also freed from the need to produce not a meaning but rather an increasingly powerful visual impact?

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