Rebirth: light and sound show at Strutt’s North Mill Belper
So the event on Saturday 29 March went well. Sarah (mill manager) and Ruth (engagement officer) reckoned we had about 120 visitors for the show.
While Stuart set up the laptops I measured and cut out film to stick to the windowpanes of the six windows, each window had six panes, so we had to measure, cut and stick 36 sheets. Meanwhile Stuart discovered that the laptops went to sleep after five minutes and we didn’t have administrator rights to cancel the sleep mode.
Still it all worked well. We staggered the startup of each laptop by the time it physically took to get each one going. So a relaxed synchronisation and a kind off delayed playback coupled with running or crawling (in my case) to each laptop to tap its trackpad to ward off sleep. Not live but certainly performative animation happened behind the scenes and largely out of view of the audience.
We are reworking the animation and sequencing for the North Mill’s ‘Museums at Night’ event on May 15. We will project the animation onto eight of the 26 monumental stone piers – all that is left of Jedediah Strutt’s first mill (1786) that burnt down in 1803 – that form the foundation of the ‘new’ mill built in 1804.
More information about Culture24’s national Museums at Night festival here and Strutt’s North Mill Belper
