Visual Spectrum & Belfast Photo Festival
The Context
Visual Spectrum were Belfast Photo Festival’s main supplier for Richard Mosse Broken Spectre and, with additional support from Arts & Business NI, for Matthias Oostrik’s installation at Riddel’s Warehouse. They have a shared commitment to a dynamic attitude and showing leadership that benefits the culture and prosperity of Belfast.
The Challenge & The Solution
As companies Belfast Photo Festival and Visual Spectrum have a shared attitude for growth, diligence, governance, innovation and most recently intelligent investment in projects with potential for growth, through innovation, diversifying themes and especially projects with high potential for national and international profile. They share a belief that visual culture, innovation in the arts, exhibition or live entertainment will continue to be an integral part of Belfast’s growing economy and the ability to stay abreast of trends in technology and AV design, providing reliable and innovative solutions, and working creatively within fixed budgets is critical.
Belfast Photo Festival and Visual Spectrum collaborated and strengthened their relationship on installations at both Riddel’s Warehouse and Carlisle Church that exceeded the scale, quality and complexity of any previous works as individual companies or together. It also took Visual Spectrum deeper into the exacting and technical field of Art Installations. The teams collaborated flawlessly, within a gruelling and extremely tight install window of only 4 days across 2 venues. This underlined the diligent and exacting planning process that existed between all suppliers.
The Results
Using digital technology, Matthias Oostrik’s SMILE.AI installation responded to visitors with transforming light, video, and sound - reshaping their environment as an intersection of digital art, installation art, film and architecture. With Arts & Business NI’s support it was elevated from a draft element of the programming to its cover story. Unmissable as the glimmering dystopian chandelier, flagship and focal point for Belfast Photo Festival’s 10th Edition, it had sole occupation at the unique city centre location Riddel’s Warehouse, a most remarkable survival from industrial 19th century Belfast.
“What a gargantuan undertaking. Huge congrats. Thanks for the invitation and for doing the installation correctly. I didn’t think it would ever happen in Ireland. I realise that it’s not easy to say the least…Well done!
Richard Mosse, artist
The scale, complexity and precision demanded by both of these installations, in delicate, unique heritage venues, cannot be overestimated. In Carlisle Church, our teams needed to design a complex truss and drape environment to black-out and acoustically house a custom 20m projection screen. The 4 projectors then needed to align within mm tolerance and be colour matched to perfection - as Richard’s piece runs a combination of multiple and single screen scenes over the full width. When accompanied with 20.1 surround sound – again delicately tuned - it combined in an incredibly immersive and impactful way - stunning, captivating and transporting audiences into the piece.
Toby Smith, Director of Development at Belfast Photo Festival
The team at Visual Spectrum partnered with Belfast Photo Festival to deliver two high impact and technically challenging exhibitions. From our perspective the planning and level of detail required to deliver this show was very intense. With a number of months spent on pre-production, building complex 3D Models of the space to consider each aspect of the production and deliver on spec for the two artists’ riders. Operationally the logistics of this show were significant with suppliers from across the continent delivering bespoke production elements.…. It’s been an honour to support Belfast Photo Festival with the delivery of these shows.
Oisin O’Brien, Founder of Visual Spectrum Limited
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