Stage of lost souls. Outline installation 2024
The P.MOTION team won the open-call of Outline 2024 and created its multimedia installation in one of the abandoned buildings. Outline is a unique electronic music and art festival that originated in 2014-2015 in the depths of Moscow industrial zones. In 2023, it was revived and settled in a permanent location in 90 kilometers from Moscow, on the banks of the Dubna River. The new space allowed the organizers to combine several formats in one event: a rave in nature, a multi-day club non-stop event, a large-scale music festival and multimedia exhibitions.
Outline annually attracts more than a hundred artists from Russia, Europe, North and South America.
Our installation was located on the top floor of one of the buildings, in a 2-minute walk from the MAIN stage. For five days itwas attracting the attention of thousands of viewers. Many have tried to find the entrance to the stage, but this stage is not for mortals.
Legend
There is a theory that during the dance you can force your consciousness and a part of your soul to come out, to be outside your body. But what happens to these souls after?
Some parts of the souls remain outside the boundaries of the outline. Having found no place for themselves either outside the territory or on the sites, they formed their own secret stage, on which there is no place for living, “whole” people. They hide their scene in the forest, and only someone who went wandering through the forest, looking for he does not know what, can find it. Perhaps, he’s looking for a lost piece of his soul.
Only indefatigable seekers of new experiences could find the installation. In the center of the room is a dance floor, on which silhouettes are visible, as if dancing in the otherworld.
We have always been impressed by the idea of creating parallel realities. This installation is one of those that allows you to look into one of them.
—Eugenia Sobol, curator of OUTLINE.
Location
The installation “Stage of lost souls” was installed in one of the abandoned buildings on the territory of the festival
The restored buildings of the former children’s health camp ‘Salyut’. The brutalist complex itself was built in the late 1960s by architects Loveyko and Gaigarov.
Filming
Real people, professional dancers Sveta Kambur and Ilya Belyakov performed as live graphics for the “Stage of lost souls”
Sveta and Ilya were not just dancers: their performance was similar to acting, at times the guys brought the entire film crew to goosebumps with their emotions and unnatural, otherworldly body movements.
The shooting took place in the pavilion and had its own peculiarities, since the footage was not shot at 16:9. It was a long, elongated frame that was supposed to cover the entire projection surface on three sides of the building.
When developing the concept, we wanted to put the installation in the context of the festival so that it would be associated with music and architecture. The very name OUTLINE suggests something borderline and otherworldly. So we came up with the idea that during the dance the soul leaves the body and lives separately from it.
— Denis Levchenko, Creative Director of P.MOTION
Creating generative graphics for installation
The project was created using audio-interactive technologies and real-time generation. As a solution for the installation, we took the generation of video footage in TouchDesigner. Through processing, the video image was ’broken’, digital glitches were created, and it reacted to music.
Each new scene had its own unique character, both calm and melodic, and super accelerating, with a strobing picture that is hard to look at.
Music and sound design
Eight musicians created 12 compositions. Bold techno, sound design, and even analog noise recordings all combined into one hour-long loop that was broadcast non-stop, turning “Stage of lost souls” into an endless rave.
Reverse projection on 3 walls
As a projection surface, we used grids that were stretched along the perimeter of the floor of an abandoned building. An inverse projection from three projectors was mapped onto the grids.
The SILA SVETA studio team helped us with the construction and equipment, for which we express our special gratitude to them.
The rave with lost souls lasted for 4 nights, each time fading at dawn and inflaming with the arrival of darkness.
P.MOTION 2024
Music
Hrust Mangusta
Abibok
Daniil Peregudov
Alexey Boyko
Artem Kulygin
Philipp Gerasimov
Andrey Obydennikov
Dmitry Antonov
ETOYAMURAD
Egor Goleshev
Dancers — Ilya Belyakov, Svetlana Kambur
Art Director — Denis Levchenko
Graphics — Semion Levchenko
Concept design — Anna Osintseva, Lilia Idilia
PM — Nika Zhusueva
Copywriting — Elina Iudina
Producer, director of photography — Kirill Galushko
Director of Photography — Sergey Nikolaev
Assistant cameraman — Vladislav Maslov
Grimmer — Olga Budashova
Every trip to any festival is a thrill and emotions for life. We lived in tents, walked a lot, listened to music and of course danced. This time, we even managed to take
chill ride in a wooden skate park from friends of WRKN.
It’s really cool that we get to go to festivals as a team. Both as spectators and as participants. Every studio should try to take part in fests — it is expensive, but the exhaust from participation is invaluable: experience, acquaintances, new projects, team rapprochement. Working on a new non-profit project, we feel the strong growth of each participant, we see burning eyes and maximum return. It creates a pleasant feeling that we earn money from commerce in order to give ourselves free rein and do something really creative and experimental.