They say that good art moves you, but in some cases, great art literally moves. And one of those cases can be found in the dynamic duo of Ygor Marotta and Ceci Soloaga, artists based in São Paulo, Brazil. In a brilliantly whimsical move, the two have created animated street art by riding through the streets of cities across the world with projectors attached to their tricycles. But these are no ordinary tricycles — rather, they’re turned into machines of pure imagination when outfitted with a projector, batteries, speaker, and computer.
By pedaling through different towns and taking advantage of their natural (and manmade) surroundings, Marotta and Soloaga are able to create interactive, larger than life narratives in which cats walk on walls and whole building facades are transformed into a vortex of colors. Titled “Suaveciclos,” It’s an interesting juxtaposition of the imaginary with reality — while the settings of these art projects are made of brick and mortar (or leaf and branch, etc. etc.) the projected characters turn even the most familiar places into living and breathing storybooks.
This project, the artists note on their website, allows them to “communicate with people through drawings, animations and poetry.” A team since 2009, the two have since created four short movies: Trip (2013) La cena (2012), Homeless (2011), and Run (2011). Starting with their hand-drawn artwork, these pieces were then “transformed into digital animation, then using project techniques,” allowed to “fly and run across the urban landscape, fusing an animated story with real life.”
“Using Tagtool app for drawing and animating live, together with 20,000 lumens projectors,” the team explains on their website, “We do video mapping [mixed] with live drawings, and create a colorful canvas in big scale walls.”
Thus far, citizens of Russia, Luxemburg, Slovakia, Germany, and Brazil have had the distinct pleasure of seeing these performances, all of which are necessarily performed live and in real time.
Of course, if you haven’t had the opportunity to see Marotta and Soloaga’s work, you can check out one of their many videos and experience the magic secondhand. But this seems like one art exhibit worth making the trek to see.
Ygor Marotta and Ceci Soloaga designed audiovisual tricycles that project animations… (Vine by @nowthisnews) https://t.co/5wLceFdLJs
— Kishau Smith Rogers (@kishau) October 13, 2015
