We're in Singapore, and loving it (again). Staying at the same hotel as last year's tour, the Madras Hotel in Little India. It's noisy, but also endearingly retro and it has air-con and wifi, so what more could we want? Little India with it's grime and bustling stalls feels a world away from the generic tourist-consumer horror of Orchard St.
Our first day out, we stumbled into the National Museum of Singapore. Like many attractions, it's half price for SIA Boarding-Pass holders - and probably the best $5 or so an AV-person could spend.
Sure, Museums all over the world are coolifying over recent years, but this one is something else. Video projection and screens were everywhere, but integrated into the installations in ways that made them so much more than just video.
There were signs everywhere that seemed to say no video and no cameras, but we asked twice and were told just 'no flash'. Honest, officer! So, we can happily bring you a sense of the exhibit although these pics certainly don't do it justice.
The first, jaw-dropping installation was a cylindrical, 2-storey high video projection with a walkway through the middle.
The theme of the video was contemporary Singapore - very VJ-ish scenes of everyday life, people moving to work, transport, construction. It's ENORMOUS and had a wonderful orchestral score with a choral "Singapore..." which gave the experience an almost church-like feel.
Jasper, as always, was looking for 'how it's done' - how many projectors (12, apparently), where they were hung, whether the work was already composited into the two halves at super-high resolution or whether the matrix- switching was being done in hardware. It moved between many small images and two very large ones.
The content was very much in the tradition of koyaanisqatsi and other such movies, but beautifully done. It really gave a sense of how Singaporeans see themselves - hardworking, tech-savvy, on the move.
When you first entered the exhibition, you crossed the walkway at the top, then you followed a spiral ramp around the outside and came out down the bottom. We spent quite a bit of time in both places, it really was very awe-inspiring.
In the central lobby area of the new part of the building is a huge mono-LED wall, which features images of the old museum with it's wooden cabinets and giant skeletons. While it's a bit sad that these old-style museum exhibits are no more, at least they've tried to integrate aspects and images of them where possible. It felt a bit like we were looking at the ghost of the old museum on that very modern, subtle and slick LED wall.
This cinema inside the exhibition was a full 180 degrees. The seats were all rotating stools, so I guess you were supposed to pan around to see what was going on. Luckily there wasn't a lot of movement/action, or I think the effect could have been quite disorientating. A lot of it was textures and reasonably static tableaux of people in costumes (albeit video, with the wind fluttering their costumes etc).
For those technically inclined, Jasper counted 5 projectors. Our guess is that they use a software/hardware system something like that used at Melbourne's Horse Bazaar. The compositing lines between the sections of video were pretty well hidden, although it had me thinking that with the new Red cameras, perhaps interesting formats like this will be possible without having to comp together multiple videos - a crop could be taken this shape at reasonable resolution for an installation of this size.
Sideways LCD screens - we've seen them with ads in fancy shops and they certainly do work well for showing off clothes. I thought this layout of how to tie a sari video, showing all the different styles of sari-wearing worked very well.
This large photomontage of the fires that burned much of Singapore was accentuated with pulsing lights - yep, the kind that DJs use. It made the installation seem more dynamic than a basic photowall. Excellent use of lighting throughout the exhibition was soemthing we really noticed, as well as textures on walls and other subtle touches that really added to the immersive character of the whole exhibition.
All in all, if you're interested in AV it's worth stopping over in Singapore just to visit the National Museum of Singapore. Sadly, the day we went the Museum was nearly empty, and yet on the way back to our hotel in Little India we passed Orchard Rd shopping district that was PACKED with tourists - so I guess that the average tourist is more interested in shopping than seeing history and culutre :(
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