Client: Pawtucket Arts Festival

Overview

Compound Camera is an immersive dome comprised on 109 inflatable pinhole cameras that each cast a live projection of the surrounding environment. Together they create a stunning tessellated panorama likened to standing inside the eye of a fly. As visitors touch the textile walls they adjust the focal range of the image just as our eyes relax and contract to focus.

Goals

The Pawtucket Arts Festival celebrates the creative life of the region, inviting residents into the beautiful Blackstone River Valley to build community around the arts. The Compound Camera contributed to this goal, transforming the familiar park grounds by rendering them surprising and even stunning to create a space for open, shared experience.

Process

Pneuhaus developed the material solutions for this project over the course of many months. The collective was inspired by the 2,500 year old technology of the camera obscura which is the predecessor to the film cameras we know. Our studio reworked this ancient idea to engineer the Compound Camera's modular seeing-cells.