RISD’s Movement Lab Spurs Students to Create Site-Specific Projections

Since RISD launched the Movement Lab in 2022, visiting fellows have been designing and teaching Wintersession courses exploring the role of movement in animation, filmmaking, immersive arts, performance, dance, puppetry, robotics and more. This winter, current Movement Lab Fellow Kameron Neal—whose own practice combines video, installation and performance—introduced students to the role of movement in public projections that breathe new life into the built environment.

“Working in the lineage of street art and guerrilla performance, we explored the relationship between art, public space and the communities we inhabit,” Neal explains. “We investigated projection as a tool of public communication and considered how light and movement can reshape architecture and human behavior.”

Offered through the Film/Animation/Video department, Neal’s course challenged students to create site-specific, projection-based installations using a variety of technical tools, including MadMapper, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects. By engaging critically at the intersection of art and technology, students were able to view their own creative practices and thought processes through a new lens.

For their first assignment, students created public art pieces that activated a window using projection and video. They were asked to craft an experience for an unassuming audience that disrupts the status quo, blurs the line between interior and exterior and/or reveals something unexpected about the window.

Sophomores Suheyla Acar 27 PT and Sanjna Moola 27 PH collaborated on a project incorporating the window of their friend’s Jeep. They projected video of Acar driving the Jeep against a backdrop of overtly masculine and hyper-patriotic ads from the past incorporating phrases like king of the hill, a reflection of the man who drives it and an American rebel. The goal, they explain, was to offer viewers insights into advertising history and its infiltration into our collective consciousness.

As the term progressed, the class studied projection work by such artists as Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Glenn Ligon and RISD alum Jenny Holzer MFA 77 PT and scouted locations around campus to present their final projects. Neal advised them to seek out environments that related to the content of their work.

Sophomore Jay Cho 27 IL, who also participated in a Movement Lab puppeteering class as a first-year student, planned to create a life-sized human puppet and project onto its face. He originally intended to have the puppet tell stories from Greek mythology alongside the Providence River but was encouraged by Neal and his classmates to make the performance more Providence-specific. “I decided to do a short biography of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams instead,” he says.

Senior Tony Hou 25 IL and junior Kris Alexis Lacsamana 26 PT co-created Reinvented, an installation that transformed RISD’s former library in the College Building into an immersive, rave-like space. They engaged local DJ Xandi Pink to play a 30-minute set that corresponded with audio-reactive visuals created in TouchDesigner that responded to movement captured by Lacsamana’s laptop camera.

Acar also tapped into iconic RISD real estate for her final project, a piece exploring the makeup industry that she projected on the main outdoor staircase alongside the Chace Center (see top photo). “In my painting practice, I take inspiration from editorial fashion and makeup photography as it relates to my own racial/ethnic identity,” she explains. She projected videos she made of her friends modeling different makeup looks using both a camcorder and a DSLR camera to achieve different video qualities.

“I’m really proud of the work the class did this Wintersession,” Neal says. “They created thoughtful, relevant pieces and got hands-on experience making work in public space while developing their technical and research skills along the way.”

Top photo: the staircase alongside the Chace Center comes alive with a projection referencing the makeup industry by sophomore Suheyla Acar.

Simone Solondz / photos courtesy of the artists
March 3, 2025