NYC Artist Brings Above-Ground View Into MTA Subway Cars In Guerilla Projection Mapping Effort

August 26, 2021 by Dave Haynes

Via DesignBoom, Hat Tip David Title

Suppose you could sit in a subway car, look up at the ceiling, and view the passing scenes at street level.

That’s the core idea behind a very clever art project done on a subway car’s ceiling on the New York system, using projection mapping to blast motion images on the ceiling that show what it looks like above the tunnel and looking up from the street.

The project, reports DesignBoom, used four projectors mounted in a working subway car, with video driven by Raspberry Pis and location and speed data from a cellphone. The whole thing runs on batteries, and artist Ian Callender did them as what are referenced as interventions.

In other words, without permission.

The artist would clamp two pairs of projector/Pi set-ups to subway car poles in the middle section of a car, and point the image output up. at the ceiling. I assume after a little practice he had a good sense of how to get it all set and lined up quickly.

Very clever stuff, and just like the concepts out there to replace airline windows with projections of the real-time view outside, this would seem like an intriguing thing to have in subway cars. It beats looking at injury accident lawyer and career college ads over the windows.