Sky Projectors, Portapaks, and Projection Bombing: The Rise of a Portable Projection Medium

In 1889 Michel Verne, son of French science fiction author, Jules Verne, published a short story titled "In the Year 2889." The vignette, which was penned primarily by Michel, with some probable additions by his father, narrates a day in the life of a certain Mr. Fritz Napoleon Smith one thousand years in the future. Smith is a newspaper tycoon and the inventor of "telephonic journalism," which allows listeners across the world to tune into daily news through a phonographic system that boasts 80,000,000 subscribers. As part of his company's advertising campaign, Smith pioneers the use of gargantuan public light projections to globally advertise his Earth Chronicle newspaper. His technicians appropriate the sky as a billboard and turn an army of projectors onto the blank surface of passing clouds during the daytime. The projections are so large and bright that they can be collectively viewed on a national scale. Added to this incredible convenience, Smith further orders his team of scientists to set to work creating artificial clouds after their gray cover dissipates on a sunny day. He exclaims, "It will never do for us to be always thus at the mercy of cloudless skies!"

Even if Fritz Napoleon Smith's enterprise of "atmospheric advertising" is the perfect sci-fi caricature of American industrial hubris as it might have been envisioned by skeptical Europeans in the late nineteenth century, there is certainly something of Michel Verne's humorous forecast that rings uncannily true for dwellers of the present moment. Notwithstanding the fact that clouds are not yet in mass production today,¹ most of us are familiar with the ever-increasing scale of outdoor advertisements and also the rapid spread of new media techniques in advertising, such as interactive LEDs, HD digital screens, and urban projections of various sorts. In recent years the equipment for environmental projections has become practical, inexpensive, and powerful enough to actually allow for the kind of proliferation needed to identify a substantial arc of related projection activity. Although "image saturation" and "advert pollution" have been achieved by the wide gamut of viral advertisement strategies—from the eye-level barrage of street spam to mobile video cubes, to the jumbotron digital billboards in Times Square, and so on—projection technologies have the potential to become much more pervasive than these popular publicity methods as technology further improves in coming years. Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, and a handful of other cities have featured similar building-sized billboards for years now, and other urban centers across the globe are likewise developing proximate cityscapes.

The arrival of a full-blown projection medium in both an art and a PR context foregrounds how surfaces—public and private, animate and inanimate—become either willing or unwilling screens or fields for imposition (Susik). What cultural factors might have contributed to the rise of such a distinct projection medium? How can this development be situated in a broader context with the history of other types of projection media, including that of video art over the last century?

Figure 1.

"Il voit que les mécaniciens se croisent les bras . . ." Illustration by George Roux from "La journée d'un journaliste américain en 2889" by Jules Verne. Published in the compilation of Verne stories Hier et demain, contes et nouvelles (Hetzel, 1910, 232).

Extra-cinematic public environmental projection has long been a concerted interest of commercial entities, civic bodies, and artists, even if the means by which such projections could be achieved were not readily available until roughly the 1970s. Fritz Napoleon Smith employed 1,000 projectors to create a fictional diurnal projection. In the late 1920s, British inventor Harry Grindell Matthews, pioneer of sound film and wireless communication, invented a sky projector—much like the imagined Gotham City Bat-Signal in Bob Kane and Bill Finger's famous comic Batman. Highly effective at propelling crisp images onto distant clouds, Matthews's oversized projector had to be transported like a wartime cannon on the back of an industrial truck. The projector's beam covered...