Buffalo Rising Online

May 24th 2008, 10:25am By West Coast Perspective

While Buffalo struggles to find viable long-term uses for abandoned grain elevators, why not an interim use? Look no further than Quebec City where the community is using an elevator complex as a giant video screen. To celebrate Quebec’s 400th anniversary, the City is creating The Image Mill, the largest outside architectural projection ever mounted. The Image Mill is a forty-minute visual and audio production that will be projected against the Bunge grain silos in the Port of Québec. This concrete structure will become a narrator that tells the tale of Québec City’s 400 years of history.

Details from the MyQuebec2008 website:

It will consist in a sort of animated mosaic that, moving from engravings to paintings and from photos to videos, creates an impressionistic portrait of the city over time. The work will consist of four movements corresponding to the city’s four centuries of history: waterways, the age of exploration and discovery; road building, clearing and developing the land; the railroad and industrial expansion; and finally, the age of air travel and the development of communications.

These 81 silos measure 600 metres long by 30 metres high. Twenty-seven video projectors, 20,000 lumens each, will project millions of pixels onto Bunge’s south and west façades. With 238 spotlights, 203 of which are DEL, and 329 speakers in place, the audience will be able to see the show from several viewpoints: from the Château Frontenac to the Marie-Guyard building, from the ramparts to the Louise Basin piers, Espace 400e and the south shore of the St. Lawrence River.

The soundtrack for this unique sensorial experience was composed by René Lussier and can be heard in different ways depending on the location of the audience. The entire south shore of the Louise Basin will be wired for sound. The public will be able to listen to the original composition in the section adjacent to Rue du Quai St-André from the Pointe-à-Carcy to the west end of the basin.Outside this zone, the public can tune into 88.3 (CKIA-FM) on the radio for a simulcast of the soundtrack.

The free event will run every evening for 40 days beginning June 20.

Thanks to BfloRox for the news. Main image by Lacasse