Prague’s City Center Sparkles, Buzzes, and Burns at the Signal Festival

And acknowledgment to a notation successful Dan Brown’s caller novel, The Secret of Secrets, the festival has gained adjacent much planetary recognition. Just a fewer weeks aft the merchandise of Brown’s caller bestseller acceptable successful modern Prague, viewers were capable to spot for themselves what drew the fashionable writer to the festival, which is the largest Czech and Central European showcase of integer art. In 1 passage, the Signal Festival has a cameo quality erstwhile the novel’s protagonist recalls attending an lawsuit astatine the 2024 edition.

“We’re blessed astir it,” festival manager Martin Pošta says astir the mention. “It’s a benignant of recognition.” Not that the lawsuit needed promotion, adjacent successful 1 of the astir anticipated novels of caller years. The organizers person yet to stock the fig of visitors to the festival this year, but the four-day lawsuit typically attracts fractional a cardinal visitors.

On the last day, determination was a agelong queue successful beforehand of the monumental installation Tristan’s Ascension by American video creation pioneer Bill Viola earlier it opened for the evening, adjacent though it was a ticketed event. In the Church of St. Salvator successful the Convent of St. Agnes, visitors could ticker a Christ-like fig emergence upwards, streams of h2o defying gravity on with him, each projected connected a immense screen.

The festival premiere took spot connected the Vltava River adjacent the Dvořák Embankment. Taiwan’s Peppercorns Interactive Media Art presented a projection connected a unreality of mist called Tzolk’in Light. While creators of different airy installations person to woody with the challenges of buildings—their irregular surfaces, decorative details, and awkward cornices—projecting onto h2o droplets is simply a situation of a antithetic benignant with artists having to springiness up power implicit the resulting image. The signifier and extent of the Peppercorns’ enactment depended connected the upwind astatine immoderate fixed moment, which determined however overmuch of the country was revealed to viewers and however overmuch simply blown away. The reward, however, was an bonzer 3D spectacle reminiscent of a hologram—something that can’t beryllium achieved with video projections connected static and level buildings.

Another premiere lawsuit was a projection connected the operation of the Old Town Hall, created for the festival by the Italian workplace mammasONica. It transformed the 230-foot operation into a kaleidoscope of blue, green, red, and achromatic surfaces. A abbreviated region away, connected Republic Square, Peppercorns had different installation. On a circular LED installation, they projected a enactment entitled Between Mountains and Seas, which recounted the past of Taiwan.