Sharing Ideas in the Largest Buildings You Can Find

Travis Threlkel, the projection artist who use the largest building as his canvas. In the early 1990s, he was playing in a teenage rock band and started developing his talent simply by setting up multiple movie projectors behind his band that created immersive sensory pictures. These innocent amusements led to the launching of his company, Obscura Digital, which puts on wide-scale live events applying innovative light projections.

The artist calls himself a “scale person,” which means Threlkel usually imagines his projects at the overwhelming size. With a highly-qualified team of sixty-plus designers, engineers, architects, machinists, coders, animators and musicians, Obscura’s projections have lighted up the Sydney Opera House, the Empire State Building, the Guggenheim Museum and the United Nations. The artist is firm that extensive scale shows people that someone is trying to tell something. So, he wants to turn adults into curious kids who are constantly asking “How did they do that? What did they want to say?”

Threlkel’s dream is motivating people to look up and see beyond these tiny screens we carry in our hands. Naturally, humans have an instinctive habit to block out anything in peripheral vision. So, to capture an attention of people passing by, an artist should think big and produce something that they haven’t seen before.

Indeed, Travis Threlkel knows that, in spite of the fact that thousands of people looked up at the Empire State Building in real life, many millions saw images of this projection on the small screens via social media. Nevertheless, the concept of “how huge it was”, still gets attention. “Many people weren’t there, but it didn’t deemphasize the significance of them saying how big the projection was,” the artist says.

Whether you’re an activist or artist, you desire to create something that has a powerful meaning. The central meaning of his works is to reconnect people with our planet. Threlkel emphasizes: “When you have a look at hungry children and burning fossil fuels, you are acting disassociated from reality.”

So, in 2016, an artist is going to create a really giant nature-focused project that could cover 3 miles of farm area in Northern California. To put his artwork into life, Threlkel decided to plant numerous digital flowers that will blossom in the spring, revealing a massive picture that can be seen from the air. He hopes, when people see his work from planes, they will feel the pride of humanity and think “We can do great things together.”