 EXHIBITOR @ EXPO 2010:
DAY SIX |
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| Large-scale projection turned this tunnel-like space into a wildly immersive environment inside the Spain Pavilion. The second half of the video features a haunting flamenco presentation that takes place beneath a canopy of bones. |
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| Meet Miguelin, a 21-foot-tall robot baby that blows bubbles. Well, actually his mouth moves while bubbles descend from the ceiling. But it’s still a pretty cool — albeit creepy — highlight of attendees’ visit to the Spain Pavilion. |
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| This interactive use of augmented reality inside the South Korea Pavilion shows how the country revitalized one of its cities through a series of urban-development projects. Attendees move a flatscreen monitor, which controls a similarly sized rectangle inside the projection area on the wall in front of them. While the projection features images of the city before the urban-development projects took place, the area inside the rectangle shows the revitalized city of today. |
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| The South Korea Pavilion featured a Disney-like presentation inside its pavilion, starring some of Korea’s most famous tween pop stars. Mixing live action footage with animation, the presentation tells the story of a young ballerina who is confined to a wheelchair following a tragic accident. The finale features a live dancer who performs as the wall behind her raises, revealing a portal through which attendees pass to move into the next segment of the pavilion. |
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| This video showcases the three presentation areas inside the United Arab Emirates’ Pavilion. The first is a pretty basic movie that tells the story of the UAE. The second incorporates rear projection, turning columns and cubes into talking Emiratis. And the third uses Pepper’s Ghost techniques to create holographic children who dance and interact with the video screen above them. |
Today was a long day. With temperatures hovering above 90 degrees and humidity to match, the usual nine to ten miles of walking was even more taxing. We did make our way to the Spain pavilion today, where we met the 21-foot-tall robot baby named Miguelin. Soap bubbles float from the wicker roof made of 8,500 handmade panels as if Miguelin is blowing bubbles through his animatronic mouth. The flamenco show under a roof of bones in the pavilion’s ancient-cave setting harked back to Neolithic times.
The Louis Vuitton exhibit in France used layered projections that mixed static and moving images in something that could only be called art, which fit in well with its showing of Rodin's "The Age of bronze"(which had appeared at the 1889 expo in Paris), Jean-Francois Millet's The Angelus, Edward Manet's The Balcony, Paul Cezanne's Woman with Coffee Pot, Van Gogh's The Dance Hall in Arles, and Gauguin's The Bananas.
The walls in South Korea sense your shadow then draw trees around it. Serbia was bizarre, in that old-lady-hoarding-cats kind of way. Set in a building whose design was based on an ancient rug-weaving technique called Priot, the message the country wanted to deliver inside was that it made a calendar in 1923 that was just 2 seconds off, so we're hoping the world junks the Gregorian calendar and uses this one. An entire exhibit was devoted to that damn clock! For what it was, I guess it was successful, but it left us wondering if that’s really the most exciting thing that’s happened in Serbia in the last 87 years.
If Serbia was surreal, Turkey was stunning, in an eerily lit room where relics from 10,000BC were placed amid giant Venus figurines. A soundtrack that was like listening to the sweet melancholy music of long-dead civilizations added to the experience, which was topped off with one of the strangest hits of the fair that's drawing Chinese by the thousands — Turkish “sticky” ice cream . The Chinese aren't big on sweets the same way we are (last night's dinner had a subtly sweet pineapple-like pastry, and the Mooncakes we ate to celebrate the Moon Festival had a similar, almost delicate sweetness unlike the sugar-loaded desserts we’re used to in the states). But Maras ice cream from the Turkish town of that same name is attracting the Chinese in droves. It's as thick as custard and has only a hint of sweetness, but after a couple bites it becomes as addictive as that other great Turkish import, opium.
Earlier in the day we took a tour of the United Arab Emirate pavilion, where, in a structure built to resemble a sand dune, we sat on thick black cushions watching two "real" children appear on stage then morph into animations — it's a new updating of an old British stage magician's trick called "Pepper's Ghost" from the 19th century.
We finished with dinner at the Czech Republic Pavilion where we had a bowl of a comfort-food soup called Kulajda, made with sour cream, potatoes, dill, and quail egg. And now to bed: Tomorrow we'll see the 200-foot-tall Chinese pavilion that's built in the shape of the emperor's crown! Stay tuned!
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