An installation named 'Blueprints for Romans' created by VJ Bopa and the german VJ-duo Bruno Tait was displayed at the Tate Britain's 'Late at Tate' event in April. Bopa and Bruno Tait was asked by the VJ-agency Ne1co to produce a site-specific installation for this event. The Duveen gallery had at the time a show of Neoclassical sculptures which were light sensitive and prohibited to project upon. The artists literally had to work around them and focus on the emty space behind the sculptures. A series of slides were created which with using graphic elements created building facades and architectural features, reminiscent of blueprints. These architectural blueprints of light feature traditional shapes and lines from Roman architecture, alongside the modern graphic design more familiar from their VJ work. A visual bridge between the Neoclassical sculptures and the arched architecture of the Victorian gallery building was created.

As with a real blueprint, their architecture sits between imagination and reality. The architectural slide projections are running down from the ceiling to wrap right around the statues without touching them, building a new environment around them. 'For me it's a kind of homage to Romanesque architecture,' Dirk Rauscher from Bruno Tait elaborates, 'it's a challenge to integrate the elements of the environment, the room, statues, lights, projection.' 'The slides don't really tell a story, but try to impress the audience in a sensitive way, as Roman architecture in the past often did.'
The team incorporated also video into this huge installation, with the help of the VMS video moving system. The versatility of the VMS system allows Kjell Rijntijes, from Bruno Tait to project a masked-off video clip seamlessly into one shape on the blueprint slide. This integration of video brings movement to this immersive environment, and with it brings a tension between the stillness of the statues and the new moving architectures.

Source: Lara Houston

Bruno Tait