Automated Lighting, 3rd Edition

Chapter 21

Media Servers and Pixel Mapping

Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called technology. And art was simply called techne. —Martin Heidegger, German philosopher

For automated lighting, 1999 was a watershed year. At the LDI trade show in November of that year Light & Sound Design (now part of Production Resource Group, or PRG) displayed the first digital light, called the Icon M. It was a moving yoke fixture that projected “soft gobos”—gobos that could be created with software, like Photoshop or Illustrator, rather than hardware—and animation using a digital projector under the control of a microprocessor. This was probably the first time stage lighting and video projection had been combined ...