Header: Courtesy of Expolight
Georgia’s Innovation and Technology Agency (GITA) is opening a new technology hub in Kutaisi, in a glass-and-concrete building topped by a large ovoid dome. The Ukrainian lighting design and media art studio Expolight has fitted it with a permanent media-lighting system, working under the creative direction of Mykola Kabluka. Anyone standing outside can scan a QR code and, from a web page on their phone, choose what is projected onto the building or draw across it.
A building with history
The building was completed in 2012 by the Spanish engineering and architecture firm CMD Ingenieros, following a design by the architect Alberto Domingo Cabo. It was the seat of Georgia’s Parliament until the legislature moved back to Tbilisi in 2019, having sat unused for years afterwards.
It is an oval glass-and-steel dome, 150 metres long and 100 metres wide, with a concrete structure curving across it like a roof. Expolight’s projectors throw images onto that concrete, which effectively works as the screen. The steelwork inside the dome is lit at the same time and shows through the glass, and both systems change together.
“Working with a building of this scale comes with a real sense of responsibility. We were not simply creating a projection for its façade; we were developing a visual language through which the building could communicate with the city.”
Mykola Kabluka, founder and creative director of Expolight
The media installation
The media content was developed around the future identity of the Kutaisi Technology Hub, built around the work GITA does inside the building: technology, research and the exchange of knowledge between the people who use it. Instead of functioning as decoration, the system expresses the building’s new role as a public centre for technology and learning.
The system combines 3D mapping, architectural lighting, sound and real-time interaction, and it runs in three modes:
- Everyday mode. National symbols, images marking public commemorations, patterns drawn from technology and abstract artwork made for the project appear across the building. A separate sequence runs every day at sunset, timed to the light fading.
- Milestones of Progress. At weekends, the building is dressed in a show of light, sound and projection that moves through moments in human development, from the discovery of fire to the technologies still being built.
- Interactive mode. Anyone outside can scan a QR code and open a web page on their phone, then change what appears on the building as it happens. They can pick one of several short scenes or draw across the concrete with a digital brush whose colours come from the aurora.
The technology making this possible
The images come from Epson laser projectors fitted with custom lenses, each of them putting out more than 20,000 lumens. Between them they cover over 85% of the 10,600 m² concrete structure, and where the projected images overlap, they are simply blended together. Four sculptural towers, each 29 metres high and designed by Expolight’s own research and development centre, hold the large projectors.
Where the projectors do not reach, narrow-beam fixtures fill in, mixing red, green, blue and white light. Their 2-4° lenses throw a beam tight enough to keep the light on the building and off everything around it. A second system, synchronised with the first, lights roughly 8,000 m² of the glass dome and the steel frame inside it, using fixtures made for the job with asymmetric lenses.
Projection, lighting and sound are synchronised with one another through media servers and software Expolight created. The team can check the equipment and load new content from anywhere through a cloud system, so the installation can keep changing as the hub does.
“Every lighting sequence, media artwork and sculptural element contributes to the same idea: bringing together technology, innovation and cultural identity to create a new visual symbol for Kutaisi.”
Mykola Kabluka
With its new interactive media lighting, the Kutaisi Technology Hub emerges as a visible example of what Georgia wants its technology sector to become. Combining permanent 3D mapping, architectural lighting and real-time interaction, it is the largest permanent media-lighting installation in the South Caucasus.
