The reporter received a text:
“I can meet you at 3:30 pm. The side door will be open.”
Nailing down this opportunity hadn’t been easy for said reporter, so she knew that it was either get there now, or not at all.
Squeezing through the propped door, and scaling five flights of stairs, two ladders, and one rooftop hatch in an attic full of what the reporter assumes was fiberglass insulation, she is face to face with one of BLINK 2019’s Featured Artists, Scott Budd.
His work was seen on his favorite mural since he was a child, the Cincinnatus mural in downtown Cincinnati, that year. Alone he created a display with a 3D model overlaying the mural, and Cincinnatus came alive with music, movement, graphics, and orbs of light in three months’ time. His work was also seen on the Goebel Park clock tower at Maifest in 2015.
Today, across from the C-FORWARD building, Scott hauled up two 65-pound projectors and a stabilizing rig to produce magic on the front of the building.
Perched atop the roof like a comic book hero overlooking his fair city, the one-man-showman of Cincy Illuminations punches a few keys on his laptop, and the wall across the street springs to life with glowing patterns of light dancing across its facade.
The building they are on the roof of rattles and sways slightly with every bus that races past on Madison Avenue in Covington. The artist works quietly, nodding with every adjustment of the projector, and nuance of the colors. The display starts out with what looks like a test pattern you would see on television at 3 a.m. after the broadcast is signed off (well, back in the day, anyway).
More taps to the keyboard and a full spectrum of greens and purples race across the C-FORWARD building face. Tonight is just set up and testing, and it can take over 1,000 hours of work to create a display like his, let alone fine-tune it once it’s at the installation location.
This display is one of many around Covington that is off the “official map” of BLINK installations, but these off-shoot works are encouraged by BLINK organizers as they add to the event as a whole. All one has to do to find these is keep their eyes to the skies and follow the map; these installations are tucked in between iconic buildings and structures on the route.
On the back side of the building, Alicia and Robby Blum, Jon Bedell, and Brian Bailey are setting up Arcade of Light, an series of interactive video games and displays. Kemper Sauce is billed as “a Cincinnati-based engineering and arts collective with an inventive spirit and a whole list of bad ideas.”
The crew rolls in with a U-HAUL full of equipment, cables, and custom arcade cabinets. It takes six of them to gingerly walk a 10-foot-long “Turbo Tennis” game down the truck’s ramp. Unassembled, the installation looks like the world’s longest arcade machine begging to eat the reporter’s quarters.
When asked how many hours the installation took to put together, Brian, the proclaimed “Brains Behind the Bits” and programmer of the project, replied “I don’t want to talk about it. Too many. More than my day job.”
Alicia gets a little more approximate with the time invested by saying “Oh. Hundreds. And hundreds. And hundreds. We did this in 2019, and since then made so many changes and improvements. So from then to now … a lot.”
Since this is the second time the Arcade of Light will greet visitors at BLINK, Alicia explained that the concept remains the same but with upgrades to the lighting and movement of the playable games themselves.
“The concept was born from an arcade for sure. We custom-programmed each teeny micro board,” she said. “My husband is an artist, and he’s got big dreams. I wasn’t surprised when he came up with this idea. “
Robby, the aforementioned husband and artist explain the technical changes to the installation.
“The LED strips (inside the towers) have an individual diode that’s controllable,” he said. “And we upgraded a lot of it. But we thought ‘Why limit ourselves?’ and we went with more LEDs and more controls.“
The crew stands around all the unloaded pieces with their hands on their hips, surveying what will be a grueling last push to get the project assembled and tested a mere 27 hours before the start of the event.
One points out that an LED is at a lower wattage than the others, and suggests ways to “hack” the lighting to fix it; another suggests reprogramming the software to accommodate the dimmed diode. The reporter restrains herself from suggesting they simply slap a sticker over it, or turn it to a non-facing side. (This is one of the reasons she sticks to writing and photography and doesn’t meddle in electrical wiring.)
One team member suggests a replacement, which brings up the conversation about how the pandemic has played into setting up for this year. Robby shifts his weight and sighs while gesturing to the LED towers.
“Supply chain has been the biggest pain this year,” he said. “We had a limited timeline because of the pandemic and supply chain issues. At one point, one component of all this was no longer on the market. At all. Like all the suppliers just stopped and once I saw it back on Amazon, I probably bought every single one of them.”
Supply chain issues and lack of sleep aside, the team from Kemper Sauce Studios promises an experience to the over 1.3 million visitors of BLINK that make it over to the Kentucky side of the event.
They hope that with their installation, each piece is fun and approachable by anyone willing to walk up and take in the wonder of the scale of the collection, where undiscovered worlds live behind blinking neon lights and a new friend maybe just a quarter drop away. [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”9″ gal_title=”Behind the scenes at BLINK”]