Visuals during the festival.
The Poolbar Festival transforms an old indoor swimming pool in Feldkirch, Austria, into a two-month-long music and culture festival every summer. Each year, the festival’s design is recreated in February through the Poolbar Generator, a two-week intensive residency that invites participants to collaborate across categories such as architecture, graphic design, spatial design, digital projects, art, and literature.
For the 2024 edition, the Digital Projects Lab developed interactive visual projections and mappings to enhance the festival experience. The dynamic visuals, displayed on the festival’s main venue during nighttime, embody the theme “Hin & Weg” (“Here & Gone”) by reflecting the ever-changing, interconnected ecosystem of the festival.
Located next to mountains and forests, the team used 3D scans of the festival’s surroundings—stones, trees and the old indoor swimming pool—to create moving point clouds, blending natural and digital aesthetics. I contributed to the project by installing a Kinect camera to capture real-time movements of festival visitors, which were processed in TouchDesigner, dynamically influencing the visual patterns, making the projections interactive.
We created three visual themes in close collaboration, each capturing a different aspect of the festival’s identity while evolving in real-time based on visitor interactions. The result was a breathing visual experience that connected the audience, the environment, and the festival’s theme.
2024, interactive visuals, projection mapping, festival design, motion-capture, generative art
Tools used: TouchDesigner, Kinect Azure
POOLBAR GENERATOR, HOHENEMS (AT) 2024
Photos from the Poolbar Generator.