It can now be revealed that PIXERA, AV Stumpfl’s media server system, powered the futuristic video set-ups for Sonne/Luft, the latest work by Nobel Prize-winning playwright Elfriede Jelinek. The PIXERA set-up transformed the stage at the Schauspielhaus Graz (Graz National Theatre), Austria, into the gleaming interior of a spaceship.
Jelinek’s new play, which was in performance until the end of March this year, imagines the remnants of humanity, crowded aboard a spacecraft and monitored by a mysterious, ever-present AI. In partnership with director Emre Akal and hip hop-inspired visual artists Mehmet & Kazim, Jelinek has created a digital sci-fi world.
The play made its Austrian premiere at the Schauspielhaus theatre in Graz, Austria’s second city, where media technician Gerald Rotter relied on PIXERA to simplify and manage Sonne/Luft’s complex AVL requirements and bring its unsettling dystopian future to life.
Rotter used PIXERA to manage inputs and outputs (four each), in combination with Blackmagic video matrices (two Videohub 20×20), two Panasonic projectors (installed on lighting towers either side of the stage), and a grandMA2 lighting console.
He deployed PIXERA’s Videohub software for routing and Companion for the Videohubs, as well as Panasonic’s Geometry Manager for projector set-up, and PIXERA’s interface to control the projectors.
Rotter said Sonne/Luft was a project that allowed him to experiment, but posed technical challenges due to the ambitious set-up.
He explained: “To create the spaceship cockpit, we combined front projection and multiple screens with the a physical rotating stage, as well as separately projecting video content onto the stage backdrop. The projection mapping was a bit tricky and had to be redone for each performance, since the set-up was never 100 percent the same.”
Rotter’s favourite PIXERA feature, he said, was the control tab, which he used liberally for the Sonne/Luft show. He said: “Initially, I focused entirely on compositing, and then control brought everything to life. PIXERA’s control is brilliantly developed. For this show, I was able to use everything I had imagined. I created several timelines to simplify the workflow, and also let control manage the projectors and sound.”
