Thanks this morning to sponsor Stuart & Branigin for support to help make this edition of the Based in Lafayette reporting project possible.
Well, that was pretty cool.
Saturday night’s Taste of Tippecanoe, perfect temperatures and all, ended with a light show on two sides of the Tippecanoe County Courthouse that’s worth revisiting here.
I picked up about 15 minutes of the show – minus the soundtrack; sorry about that – as seen from the Fourth Street side of the courthouse.
Enjoy.
For more on what you’re seeing here, here’s the backstory about the project, published June 16 in the Based in Lafayette reporting project:
A TASTE OF THE LIGHT SHOW YOU’LL SEE AT THE TASTE
The Taste of Tippecanoe, traditionally among the biggest of Lafayette’s summer festivals, won’t have fireworks over downtown on Saturday. But it will have plenty of lights.
A team of animators, many of them Purdue students, were putting the finishing touches this week on shows that will be projected on two sides of the Tippecanoe County Courthouse, starting at sunset, during The Art Federation’s annual celebration of food and art.
“The idea was to make it a journey – a spectacle of color and optical illusions and ideas,” said Esteban Garcia Bravo, one of the lead artists in the project, along with Aaron Zernack and Max Carlson.
The team also will have a series of light sculptures – each one about four to five feet tall – in the Chase Building plaza, near Second and Main streets, and on Fifth Street, near the Lahr, that will serve as centerpieces for a collaboration with the members of the Greater Lafayette Dance Collective.
Garcia Bravo, Zernack and Carlson were part of a 2016 project, the Geode Interactive Sculpture, that had light-and-sound performances on the John T. Myers Pedestrian Bridge and the Tippecanoe County Amphitheater, followed by another in 2017 at Purdue.
“What we’re doing at the Taste kind of grew out of that, just bigger,” Garcia Bravo said.
Garcia Bravo, an assistant professor of computer graphics technology at Purdue, said the artists recruited a dozen students in March to design 30-second pieces of animation. The students – from a mix of programs including art and design, computer graphics and computer science – created a 3D computer image of the Main and Fourth streets sides of the courthouse. They used that to base work that put the columns, dome and other architectural features of the 19th century courthouse as the backdrop.
Those clips were edited into 22-minute presentations. A pair of 30,000-lumen projectors, set up in buildings across Main and Fourth streets, will put the light show against the courthouse, backed by a musical score from Zernack.
“I think we did what we were hoping to do,” Garcia Bravo said. “My hope is it’s something that is amazing to see – that it brings some joy, brings some smiles.”
Thanks, again, to sponsor Stuart & Branigin for helping make this edition of the Based in Lafayette reporting project happen.
Tips or story ideas? I’m at davebangert1@gmail.com. Also on Twitter and Instagram.
Taste replay: If you missed the light show on the courthouse …