‘Colorism’ Gallery Installation
Timeline
2021 - March 2025
Sly Pup Productions has collaborated for many years with UM School of Social Work professor Rogério M. Pinto, providing AV support for installations and recording services for documenting his project. With an additional appointment in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance, Rogério combines elements of live performance and visual, tactile, and sonic art to inspire students and audiences to think critically about social structures and hopefully inspire transformative change.
Colorism is a project that started developing within the framework of Rogério’s previous installations, Realm of the Dead (2021) and My Gender States (2024). Sly Pup Productions began capturing content for Colorism in 2022 starting with still photography and cinematic video. Editing progressed incrementally and we also added sound design and worked with composers to create soundscapes for each playlist of videos.
The initial installation of Colorism was to be in the UM Duderstadt Center Gallery, a 2600-square-foot octagonal room with an existing grid for lighting and supporting installation pieces. Over about a year, we worked with Rogério and his project manager Emerson Granillo to draft the room and many of the individual elements in CAD.
Rogério worked with local custom audio manufacturer Leon Speakers to create 5 custom-designed display pieces; three featured framed, backlit art prints of still photography we had taken; the other two were framed video ‘windows’, each with dual 28” LG monitors and Brightsign media players to loop our edited videos. Leon Speakers designed each to hang from the overhead grid after we had provided a specification of what needed to mount inside.
Four other zones in the installation featured Epson ultra short throw laser projectors, mounted from the unistrut grid overhead or from the floor on pipe-and-base. Sly Pup performed all the calculations of screen size & orientation, projector lensing, brightness, and position, and that was integrated into the CAD drawing to ensure that Rogério purchased the proper hardware for the installation. Each projector’s source was a Brightsign media player.
Sly Pup Productions also designed, built, and programmed a 6-channel multitrack audio playback rig around the software QLab and a Focusrite audio interface, which fed three stereo audio zones.
QLab was also used to send UDP commands to the Brightsign media players, in turn starting their local playlists. Each player in the 4×4 video frames were synchronized so that they remained frame accurate throughout the playlist. A series of cues were built out in QLab which looped the experience every 14 minutes. Audio playback would slowly fade from zone to zone, with each video starting in time, which drew the audience through the natural progression of the installation.
After 5 days of setup in the gallery, the installation opened on February 13, 2025 and sucessfully looped 24/7 until we removed the installation on March 12th. The entire installation was crated and put into storage, ready to be reassembled in a completely new location.
