Good Thinking

Ghost ship projected onto Amsterdam canal

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Ghost Ship is an installation at the Amsterdam Light Festival (Photo: Janus van den Eijnden)
Ghost Ship is an installation at the Amsterdam Light Festival (Photo: Janus van den Eijnden)
Ghost Ship is an installation at the Amsterdam Light Festival (Photo: Janus van den Eijnden)
Ghost Ship uses four pontoon-mounted water pumps to created two intersecting perpendicular screens of water (Photo: Janus van den Eijnden)
Ghost Ship's intersecting screens allow for the creation of a rudimentary 3D image (Photo: Janus van den Eijnden)
The images are projected from the dockside (Photo: Janus van den Eijnden)
The water screens measure 24 m (79 ft) and 6 m (20 ft) across (Photo: Janus van den Eijnden)
The installation is about 9 m (30 ft) high (Photo: Janus van den Eijnden)
The image wavers and flutters in the wind (Photo: Janus van den Eijnden)
The image is created using using Robert Juliat Heloise 2,500-watt MSR followspots with gobos (Photo: Janus van den Eijnden)
Ghost Ship is on display in Amsterdam until January 18th 2015 (Photo: Janus van den Eijnden)
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Visitors to Amsterdam at the moment better have nerves of steel. A ghost ship has been spotted moored on one of the city's famous canals. There's no need to be scared, though. The spooky apparition has been created with some clever visual trickery, as part of the Amsterdam Light Festival.

Ghost Ship, as is its perfunctory title, is located off the island of Oosterdok in front of the Amsterdam Center for Architecture (ARCAM) and the National Maritime Museum. Produced by Romanian collective Visual Skin, the illusion is created by projecting an image onto two intersecting perpendicular screens of water. The ethereal installation will not be setting sail anywhere, but wavers and flutters eerily in the wind.

In order to create the phantom ship, four water pumps were each mounted onto a pontoon and floated out into the dock. Two were positioned facing each other at a distance of about 24 m (79 ft) and the other two positioned facing each other at a distance of about 6 m (20 ft) across the center of the first two.

Ghost Ship's intersecting screens allow for the creation of a rudimentary 3D image (Photo: Janus van den Eijnden)

When activated, the water pumps create two screens of water up to 9 m (30 ft) in height that intersect through the middle of each other at 90 degrees. This formation allows for a rudimentary 3D image to be created by projecting the lengthways and sideways images of the ship onto the screens. This is done using two Robert Juliat Heloise 2,500-watt MSR followspots with gobos located on the dockside.

The video below is the documentation of a test run that Visual Skin carried out in Austria during October. Ghost Ship is on display in Amsterdam until January 18th.

Source: Visual Skin, Amsterdam Light Festival

View gallery - 10 images
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1 comment
Edwin Austin
All they need is to put "The Pirate Bay" in this to make it perfect!