Thanks to the expertise and experience of Goboservice, for the first time in the modern era, the Doric soul of the cathedral of Syracuse was renewed. The occasion came from the celebrations for the 25 centuries since the foundation of the temple of Athena.
The municipal administration chaired by Francesco Italia accepted the company’s proposal to recreate with a static mapping the original architecture of the building built in 480 BC at the behest of the tyrant Gelone following the victory against the Carthaginians in the battle of Imera.
It was a work with a very high technological content. The columns, still visible on the façade of Piazza Minerva and the other architectural elements of the square, have been mapped through a special grid consisting of a Cartesian plane used to establish the reference points necessary to compose the overall mosaic of the projection.
The project was carried out in collaboration with Ibam-Cnr which, under the scientific responsibility of Francesco Gabellone, collaborated by providing the 3D image of the temple, the relative “rendered” elevations, segmented and resized to allow the projection of the colonnade side and back of the temple.
The graphic processing of the full color gobos was long and laborious to ensure the correct color rendering, the compensation of the uneven volumes of the building and the distortion of the individual projections. All this to make the final image generated by the 26 projectors used to illuminate the two facades and restore life to the Greek temple uniform and coherent.
But this was not enough. The cathedral – according to some scholars the oldest Christian church in Europe – contains two and a half millennia of artistic creativity. The Baroque façade, built on what originally must have been the back of the Magna Graecia temple, has also received its “brushstrokes” of light which have highlighted statues, friezes and architraves with an even more detailed work if possible.
The final result was much appreciated by the citizens of Syracuse who, together with many tourists and representatives of the national media, saw the temple shine as the setting for an artistic performance by the young people of the Academy of Art of Ancient Drama.
The projectors used by Goboservice were the innovative “ Divum “Designed and produced by the company itself. The Divums are particularly suitable for this type of artistic set-up thanks to the light uniformity generated by cob LEDs and a low consumption and high energy level optical system which with 200 W is able to generate 11,000 lm output. It should be added that with the Ip54 certification the compact projectors do not fear adverse weather conditions.
Goboservice – which oversaw the development of the project from the graphic design to the positioning of the projectors – gave yet another demonstration of the great cultural and innovative potential of analog projections capable not only of generating particularly exciting visual experiences but also of giving shape and consistency to treasures buried over time.
