CCCWall and its communicative "mirror effects": halfway between projective and video art  

The work of art to be projected at night on the “CCCWall” installation created for Casalgrande Padana by Kengo Kuma during the 2010 Salone del Mobile stands out as a challenging experience of a complex, experimental and innovative joint effort among various players: Kengo Kuma and his staff for the set-up phase, Studio Visuale for the digital project and Mario Nanni for the lighting design.
The blend of visual creativity and state-of-the-art technology competence was targeted at the very suggestive idea of portraying the solid white ceramic “diaphragm-wall” of the original structure through an “immaterial” vision, both vivid and dynamic, reproduced on a light and fluctuating super-organza surface selected by Kengo Kuma himself. The work, “Casalgrande Ceramic Cloud” is coming to its completion phase at the Casalgrande Padana headquarters in Reggio Emilia. Thus the architectural work of art met in Milan its first impalpable transposition to figurative immateriality.
The projective layout for the installation was pre-designed by Studio Visuale (from the assembled ceramic slab structure for the actual work through the technical timelapse technique) in the time given to set up cortile de’ Bagni at Milan’s University. Then the activity moved up to the technology application phase to test the unprecedented technical and lighting solutions on the changing support material (super-organza adapted to act as a screen), integrate the work with the variables of the location, and control the unpredictable effect of images, colours, reflections on the vertical surfaces by adjusting them rhythmically with the dynamic of the lighting effects of the cobblestone and the ceramic fragments scattered in the courtyard.
The accomplished result was most unexpected and suggestive.
Cortile de' Bagni, quiet and stable for daytime visitors thanks to the archivolts, during the night turns into a living and beating central stage for magic to happen in the shape of the allusive and dynamic “CCC” of Casalgrande Padana in its immaterial pure light transposition.
So far we have considered the innovation content in Kengo Kuma’s setup and Studio Visuale’s projective-lighting effort.
Finally, the communication project; devised and coordinated by the Material design laboratory the ceramic CCCWall and its Milanese immaterial transposition continues and spreads further into the Web by means of a new video edited by Studio Visuale.
The video tells about the intense (yet temporary and local) Milanese experience by means of a synthetic multimedia format made of dynamic images and flowing sound, by reverberating in the web the image of the architectural work together with that of the Milanese set-up. All this took place in wait of the completion of the actual ceramic CCCWall at Casalgrande Padana, the symbolic gateway to the Sassuolo ceramic cluster, meant as a gift and a commitment to social responsibility of the Company towards a quality of the Italian contemporary landscape.

Casalgrande Padana – Press Office
www.casalgrandepadana.com
www.studiovisuale.it
www.materialdesign.it