Cincinnati’s performing arts milieu is outstanding for a city its size. Our ballet, symphony, Pops Orchestra, myriad museums, and other longstanding institutions are deservedly celebrated. However, the arts have increasingly moved beyond velvet ropes to engage the community. Now in its fourth iteration, BLINK® illuminated by ArtsWave, will awe thousands, beginning with a parade that showcases artists and community and youth-centric organizations carrying illuminated props, puppets and sculptures, followed by a long weekend replete with brilliant light shows, stunning tech wizardry, and vibrant murals writ large on prominent urban core walls.
Taking place October 17-20, 2024, BLINK will provide a significant, positive community impact. According to its website, the 2022 event attracted more than two million total visitors, created more than 1,600 jobs and delivered $126 million to the local economy. But, during the luminescent festival, Cincinnatians are encouraged to forget about those left-brain considerations for a while. Lose yourself in larger-than-life old- and new-school artistry that inspires and absorbs that will feature approximately 80 artists’ work on both sides of the river. Three artists who will contribute to BLINK’s immersion describe their inspiration and process.
Chaske Haverkos
Chaske Haverkos is a 2008 UC DAAP graduate who majored in digital design. He eventually settled into a role as an interactive and graphic designer artist at Trivantis, a local e-learning company. Later, he leveraged animation and 3D-graphic side gigs into a role managing a video-production department at Eric Mower & Associates. Since 2015, he’s melded a unique career as both a freelance designer and animator and business owner.
His imagination raced to the possibilities a projection-mapped experience could provide when he observed light-projection shows as a UC student and attending BLINK’s predecessor, Lumenocity, during its 2013 to 2016 run. A public-art and light-show extravaganza was reimagined as BLINK the following year, and Haverkos made his inaugural festival installation in 2018.
He said one of the most important facets of such a behemoth animation is projection mapping to optimize the transmission of light to develop colorful, ultra-crisp 8K-resolution designs that interplay with background structures. His 2024 tableau, his third BLINK opus, is an icon of its own: Music Hall. His previous two designs projected onto walls with existing murals: the Coffee Emporium roastery in OTR in 2018 and the Findlay Market Deeper Roots in 2022.
“Projection mapping allows you to play the façade, warp the structure, work with light through windows and any geometric shapes or textures that help you define and activate details,” Chaske said. “Studying the intricate details makes conceptualizing fun and challenging.
His approximately five-minute program will be one of four rotating animations that will continually broadcast through the festival. Play Audio Agency, a local creative audio agency and studio, will again collaborate to develop the soundtrack that will mesh with Chaske’s imagery.
During
Rocky, the fighter’s trainer, Mick, bellows, “To fight 45 minutes, you gotta train for 45,000 minutes!” A similar focus is required to craft the perfect animation.
“It’s a lot of ground to cover, creating every second from scratch,” he said. “BLINK animations are more of a journey and experience than a film you merely consume. I started engaging with the production in March and April. It’s important that I’m methodical and block in the components and keep working through every piece to make sure the color and scale hit viewers in the right way. I think of it like being a craftsman, applying layers of lacquer and polish to build the right finished product.”
One of Chaske’s favorite aspects of embarking upon BLINK projects is the broad creative latitude: “By and large, we enjoy a lot of creative freedom, which is incredible. I’m grateful that they trust artists to follow their own vision.”
For this year’s festival, Chaske’s overarching concept remains fluid, with the working title, “Still Searching….” He said, “I want these pieces to be moving experiences that provide impactful scenes and moments. I don’t start by saying my theme is x, finding imagery to support the concept. Instead, I want to create a harmonious, immersive experience that breaks the fourth wall and meshes with the music. I think of it as a visual journey, and in the end, I think there’s a reward in leaving it open to interpretation.”
Like every artist, Chaske is cognizant and mindful of AI and its impact. In his animation realm, the paradigm has shifted towards graphics-cards, incorporating tools such as gaming engines and embracing new real-time technology.
“I’m discovering how to incorporate new tools with my professional background,” he said. “It’s cool to find new ways to bring new mediums together. AI-assisted graphics are a nuanced conversation. Tools like Dall-E and Midjourney have made a lot of artists resentful because some are just letting the tool do the work.”
He continued, “I’m trying to find the best parts to use the tool to my advantage, making sure it’s following my instructions and following my vision to do some of the heavy lifting. Objectively, some of its outputs are beyond what humans can create.”
From the 30,000-ft. perspective of BLINK’s impact on Cincinnati’s creative community, Chaske said, “Willing or not, it touches everyone and creates a blast radius of excitement and awareness and a magnetic quality that brings people together. It sends a clear message to the region and the nation that this city will work hard to support its artists.”
Gee Horton
A Louisville native, Gee Horton made a courageous bet on himself in June 2020, during the bowels of the pandemic. He left behind his role as an executive recruiter to pursue a full-time artistic career. He wasn’t vacating a plane without a parachute; he served as an ArtWorks board member at the time, and he’d already begun a stint as artist-in-residence at the Mercantile Library, which was highlighted by the portrait he painted of African American abolitionist and writer Peter H. Clark. So, his talents were known locally.
Given this substantial launchpad, Gee has embarked on a multifaceted career that’s included an auspicious beginning. He was tapped to contribute to the creation of the Black Lives Matter mural in front of City Hall. Horton was assigned designing the “L” in “Lives,” and he was appreciative of the opportunity for creativity and connection.
“Every letter’s creation was a team effort,” he said. “Over 100 people ended up collaborating on the Black Lives Matter mural. It was challenging to develop the concept at home and in the studio. I drew inspiration from the spirituality in the poem of Langston Hughes,
I, Too, Sing America, which is featured in what we painted.”
He subsequently collaborated with Wild Style Signs’ Danny Babcock to develop Wheat Paste, which was completed in October 2021, depicts a young African American couple at 1542 Pleasant Street, which adjoins Liberty St. in OTR, to promote his exhibit at the Alice F. and Henry K. Weston Gallery (it’s since been painted over). Even if it’s awe-inspiring to see his vision rendered large, his approach doesn’t vary from an intimate portrait.
“Whatever the scale of your work, it all comes down to simple considering the composition, thinking like an artist and deciding what story can be told,” he said.
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Horton’s new concept highlights the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Chroma Projects will render his vision on the multistory wall.For his BLINK collaboration, Horton will team with Chroma Projects. Matt Dayler, whose portfolio includes the Love Wins mural partnerships with ArtWorks that adorns Queen City Radio, is the project leader. Horton previously collaborated with Chroma to produce the mural that adorns the Court St. Kroger downtown.
The project will render three Vine St. murals, two on buildings north of Liberty and one to its south. Their composition will depict a young man’s journey coming of age from adolescence through adulthood. The murals’ protagonist reprises the Wheat Paste male figure, a strong, strident figure clad in face paint bravely facing and trying to make sense of a turbulent, fractured world, with various props that reinforce the narrative.
“Each wall measures over 40 or 50 ft. tall, so we’re hoping to engage the viewer to want to learn and understand the characters’ story,” Horton said. “I describe my work as a form of photorealism, and I think of it as a conversation with the viewer. I start with photographs as my source, and I work in various 3-D objects to provoke interest and curiosity.
This will be Horton’s first BLINK project. He’s hopeful that the interaction of light projections with the murals, will elicit feelings: “Whether someone is four or 84 years old, I want them to be drawn into the work, considering it, and feeling it. Whoever you are and wherever you come from, you’re invited to the conversation.”
Kemper Sauce Studios
Kemper Sauce Studios melds the talents of various lighting, construction and animation professionals who apply their day-job skills to creating impactful BLINK installations. “We were inspired by attending the first BLINK and thought, ‘Hey, we can give this a shot’,”co-founder Robby Blum said.
Producing BLINK installations since 2019, its team includes Blum, who is an architectural designer who’s an electronics hobbyist; Alicia Blum an electrical engineer who also has construction-management experience; Jon Bedell and Brian Bailey are software developers who work at GE Aerospace and Kinetic Vision, a local design firm, respectively.
Kemper Sauce’s prior installation encapsulated the energy of video-game arcades, which are enjoying a renaissance in many cities, with Arcade of Light, which creates a series of interactive games that the team programmed from scratch with cabinets that mimic the iconic hardware that branded vintage arcade games.
“We submitted vague proposals that gave us room to organically develop our programs, and they evolved from hitting pixels back and forth and growing complexity from there,” Blum said. “There were a lot of happy accidents along the way, and what started out as a program glitch that became a game feature that enriched the user experience.”
Subsequent years brought improvements, such as installing diffusing film layers to remove the glare and hotspots of bare LEDs for a smoother look and streamlining hardware and connectors to facilitate smoother installations. Overengineering is standard procedure for public installations; Blum said thousands played the games, but they were built withstand contact with “millions.”
For this year’s BLINK installation, Kemper Sauce is unveiling a new concept: Serenade of Light, which will create a synthesis of sight and sound by pairing the sound of wind chimes with motion sensors. Kemper Sauce built light tubes which are each embedded with its own chip that provides auditory feedback. As with a real wind chime, how the user touches the tubes impacts the sound created, thanks to embedded high-performance microcontrollers.
Serenade of Light has been in development for several months, with the Breath of Light installation at the Cincy Nature Center providing a reference point for how to perfect the BLINK animation, though designing for a natural backdrop creates different parameters than the festival’s urban setting.
“In a natural setting, you’re clearly going to create an ambient natural soundscape,” Bedell said. “For BLINK, we’re creating a diverse array of edgier sounds, recording shattering bottles and odd random sounds, and creating flashier animations that will make it fun for the viewer.”
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BLINK attendees enjoy Arcade of Light. This year, it will live on as an unofficial installation at Mellotone, site of the former Taft’s Ale House, at 1429 Race St.Blum said one ingredient of Kemper’s “secret sauce” is developing its own software and customizing the microchips installed, which enables creating code that look and react differently than most touch-generated animations. Upgrading from 5V to 12V LED system will ensure consistent voltage that will improve image consistency, and from 3D to 6D accelerometer chips that will create more intricate animations and better track motion and create richer, better modulated sounds in response to user contact.
No artistic installation proceeds without hurdles. Beyond the typical roadblocks of making schedules work and the supply-chain snags that have mucked up commerce in the post-COVID world, Blum mentioned manufacturing challenges such as receiving batches of LEDs with mismatched color progressions.
At press time, the location wasn’t officially disclosed, but Alicia said it was likely to be on the south end of Washington Park near the cannon. Though not an official BLINK installation, a portion of the Arcade of Light will be installed in the new Mellotone Beer Project at 1429 Race in the old Taft’s Ale House site.
Blum described the Kemper Sauce collaboration as a passion project that is demanding and exacting in requiring precision and adaptive solutions but noted that it was well worth the effort because of the connection the project forges both within his team and through the coalescing of the city and its artistic community in support of BLINK’s success.