Helibot at Dallas Aurora

Presented by Aurora’s founders – in a new partnership with the nonprofit AT&T Performing Arts Center – this immersive, free and public exhibition showcased work by local and international artists, selected by a team of renowned curators.

We were invited by long time collaborators Leo Kuelbs and John Ensor Parker from 3_Search to contribute a piece to be mapped onto the Wyly Theatre.

We created a new animation specifically for the building which was to be projection mapped on two faces of the structure.

From the very beginning of the project we wanted to push the boundaries of storytelling within the medium of projection mapping. Audiences are familiar to overused mapping techniques and stylistic devices so the challenge was to avoid this completely and instead create a traditional narrative driven piece.

We had been producing a series of motion tests that we felt had room to develop into a narrative outline. These motion tests ‘Stupid Robots’ followed a series of badly programmed robots attempting to complete a series of basic tasks.

Over a series of weeks we refined this concept to center around a single robot, Helibot, and his life inside the cube.