When visual artist Ricardo Rivera looks up, he doesn't see just a building facade or piney forest. He sees a canvas onto which projected creatures crawl, artful textures twirl, and seasons change in the wink of an eye.
Rivera makes all that happen as principal/creative director of Klip Collective, a savvy, Philadelphia-based production team of 20 that specializes in computer-generated, video-projected animation, light and sound installations. Most are outdoors, large in scale, and whimsically wrought. Nothing like those ponderous light shows of yore (cue to Independence Hall's dim "Lights of Liberty.")
Klip is "actually better known and more regularly employed everywhere else in the world besides Philly," Rivera said with a smile.
The team has thrown transformative animations onto the facades of buildings from Park City, Utah (Sundance Film Festival), to Moscow, and delighted clients such as Nike and Target with clever spectacles.
Locally, Klip has staged "a few" offbeat light and sound events at places such as RiverRink, Bartram Gardens, and Fels Planetarium, all ripe for perusal at www.klip.tv.
This week, Klip is looking to make a smashing impression on the region's (and world's) psyche with "Nightscape: A Light and Sound Experience." This daring mash-up of art and nature at Longwood Gardens will open July 1 at the Kennett Square landmark and continue Wednesday to Saturday nights until Oct. 31.
"Honestly, you could make a very good indie movie on the seven-figure budget we had," Rivera said. "This is the biggest, most ambitious project we've ever done, our first multistage journey. For a participant, we see it as a chance to escape into your dreams, your imagination, to see something unexpected."
The "Nightscape" canvas claims nine of Longwood's meticulous outdoor garden environments and indoor conservatory grow/exhibit zones. The journey can take two hours to traverse.
At a recent all-night tech rehearsal, we got to watch the production team fire up some impressive a/v gear - including finely tuned sound systems playing original ambient and symph pop music, and movie theater-grade digital video projectors in air-conditioned chambers floating atop "tree-trunk" styled posts.
The first things the team "put up" for projector testing were geometric light patterns, running at diagonal angles across the lawns, ponds, and flora. All that for precise aligning of the natural environments with the soon-to-be-overlaid, "computer mapped" dancing sparklies and animated content.
Throwing images onto breeze-blown greenery is much harder than projecting onto a building facade, Rivera said. Light bends and lies differently on leaves. On the bright side (hah), projections illuminate nature's texture and flux, "making you appreciate it all in dramatic new ways."
At Large Lake, animated images of fish and dragonflies soared out of the water and scurried up tree trunks - the branches assuming the character of the creatures' skeletal structures. Spooky.
In the Topiary Garden, the fancifully sculpted yews took on the personas of "living" musical instruments - akin to the wiftiest scenes in Disney's classic Fantasia.
Wilder still were undulating patterns splattered onto flowers and succulents in the East Conservatory's Silver Garden and the normally monochromatic Palm House. The images aren't far removed from the trippy light show impressions that Rivera likes to lay on ravers at Electronic Dance Music parties hosted by his friends at Making Time and Simian Mobile Disco.
Such sensory bombardment, plus a few Longwood-Victory Brewing signature drafts downed in the facility's new beer garden, could get a spectator's buzz on, sparking some "Longwoodians Gone Wild" moments, we joked with executive director Paul Redman. Is Longwood ready for a younger, rowdier crowd?
Connecting young people with plants "in the most meaningful and creative ways possible" looms large on his mission list. And it helps explain how Redman has upped Longwood's annual attendance by 10 percent (to a million visitors annually) during his nine-year tenure.
The sensory mashup also speaks to "the passion our benefactor Pierre S. du Pont had for both horticulture and music," Redman said.
Events such as "Nightscape" (plus Longwood concert, theater, and dance events) "have definitely been moving our demographic needle to the younger cultural carnivores who are looking for a unique, authentic experience and will drive a distance for it."
But a rowdy bunch? No way.
"Walking into our gates is like going into another realm," he said. "People start to whisper. It's almost like walking into a church. And at night, with this amazing light and sound creation, the experience should really be mesmerizing."