THINKING OUTSIDE THE CIRCLE:

Exploring the Hirshhorn's "SONG 1" exhibit

Doug Aitken's latest piece cascades across the Hirshhorn Museum's 82-feet tall and 725-foot wide circumference, as the "first-ever work of 360-degree convex-screen cinema" of this scale. To make it all happen, trees were trimmed, street lights got anti-glare covers, and the Federal Aviation Administration was consulted to make sure the exhibit wouldn't disrupt aircraft landings. But the work didn't stop there:

Splitting the image

Laid out flat, "SONG 1" is a moving image 13,444 pixels wide. To create a 360-degree display, a computer program cut the image into eleven, overlapping sections, one for each projector. A total 41,500 feet of fiber-optic cables then carry those images from four server computers in the Hirshhorn’s basement to the projectors mounted on the perimeter wall.

Avoiding obstacles

Giving eleven projectors each a clear shot of the Hirshhorn meant avoiding the museum's many trees and two large outside sculptures: the Snelson Needle Tower and the Lichtenstein Brushstroke, and it came at a cost. Projectors must be at different angles, and cannot be equidistant from each other. So even after all the computer calculations, the final images were mapped using a grid, and a programmer manually matched overlapping sections, block-by-block.

SOURCE: Al Masino, director of exhibitions, Hirshhorn; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Christie Digital.
VIDEO: Ben de la Cruz - The Washington Post. GRAPHIC: Alberto Cuadra and Sisi Wei - The Washington Post. Published March 22, 2012.