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Portfolio
Electro Magnetism
Visual drama from Electroland.
Text by Karen E. Steen
May 2004
“Urban spectacle” is how Cameron McNall and Damon Seeley
describe the work they do as the architecture-and-design team
Electroland. Spectacle, they point out, is what made Paris great in the
1800s; bold designs like the Eiffel Tower created a mood and helped
define the essence of the city. The two use today’s
equivalents—such as large-scale video walls and computer-controlled
lighting—to do the same for contemporary cities.
“We formed Electroland to celebrate public space and explore the
ways that private and public interact,” McNall says,
“particularly with new advances in technology and the realities of
how people relate to one another in these times.” Their RGB project
at the Southern California Institute of Architecture commented on
private control of public space through allowing individuals to program
a massive light display by calling a number on their cell phones. An
upcoming project at 11th and Flower Streets in downtown Los Angeles will
transform the movement of people entering the building into lighting
patterns on the facade.
Not all of Electroland’s projects are high-tech. For a signage
project in Hollywood, the engine was the sun: enormous cutouts depicting
scenes from famous films cast shadows onto movie-production buildings,
broadcasting the identity of the area as the home of moviemaking.
“People immediately embraced that project, so clearly it taps into
some larger shared values,” McNall says. “Of course the
challenge as we get bigger is, How can we include more people and have
them begin to actually make connections between each
other?” |
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Hollywood Shadow Project, 2001: Large-scale
sculptures of iconic movie scenes are strategically situated to cast
shadows onto the walls of nearby buildings, all of which house
movie-making activities, resulting in shadows returning to the site of
their production. Featured here is a scene from The Wild Bunch. |
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The Hollywood Shadow project: An outline of Raquel
Welch. |
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The Hollywood Shadow project: Cary Grant
being chased by a plane in North by Northwest. |
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The Hollywood Shadow project: The Magnificent
Seven ride again. |
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Bigtime, 2002-present: Conceived of with Gilmore
Associates, this Los Angeles-based project includes the creation of a
new design and media gallery, a newly designed street facade, new office
and parking spaces above, and event-based installations on the building
face. |
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A view of the Bigtime project from the north. |
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A Quicktime film demonstrating the Bigtime project. |
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11th and Flower, 2004: This project consists of a
luminous field of LED lights embedded into the entry walkway of a
building at 11th and Flower Streets, in Los Angeles. The patterns will
be determined by people entering the building. |
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How people’s movement is rendered on the 11th
and Flower building’s façade. |
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A Quicktime film demonstrating the 11th and Flower
project. |
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R-G-B, 2001: When mobile-phone users call a particular phone
number, they change the patterns of these 81 colored lights, which run
across the façade of the Southern California Institute of
Architecture (SCI-Arc). |
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A Quicktime film demonstrating the R-G-B project. |
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Electroland’s brightly colored "Urban
Nomad" inflatable shelters house the homeless while counteracting
their invisibility. |
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