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AltCity São Paulo

UK design studio and digital arts visionaries Marshmallow Laser Feast collaborate with 18 emerging artists in a two-week residency venturing into the heart of Latin America's largest city

UK design studio and digital arts pioneers Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) collaborated with 18 emerging Brazilian artists in a two-week residency exploring the hidden corners of São Paulo.  Combining 3D LiDAR scanning and 360 degree story-telling the residency saw the city's extreme contrasts mapped and remixed to create a new Virtual Reality experience and public artwork for the facade of the twenty-five storey landmark SESI-SP building.

Titled Dividing Lines, this building artwork opens on September 30th for six weeks, showcasing the creative talent of this unique cross-cultural collaboration to reach huge audiences everyday on the bustling central arterial road of Paulista.

Sharing their creative practice used for MLF's In The Eyes of the Animal, the London-based studio tutored the team of Brazilian artists in 3D mapping, 360 degree photography and Virtual Reality story-telling to push their practice and develop individual photography and VR projects, as well as collaborating on Dividing Lines.

AltCity is designed to provide creative residency spaces for UK artists to share their creative technology practice with emerging international artists.  Together they explore a given city, apply new technologies in imaginative ways, and produce an artwork or creative project that responds to local issues, stories and citizen perspectives.

SO, WHO ARE MARSHMALLOW LASER FEAST?

MLF’s approach is collaborative and cross-disciplinary. They work alongside technologists, engineers and makers to create bespoke software and hardware systems to realise their creative vision. We think they’re really pushing the envelope on using technology in new ways to produce exceptional experiences for audiences and setting the bench-mark for the UK’s creative technology sector.

"We're really excited to work with a group of artists in São Paulo. Having never visited or worked in Brazil before, this is an incredible opportunity for us to explore new cultural territory and develop our practice with the artistic exchange." -MLF.

THE SESI-SP DIGITAL ART GALLERY

Located in the south of Brazil’s most populous city, the SESI-SP digital art gallery is a visual icon of urban life in São Paulo, playing a famous role in its landscape. Erected in 1979, the Luís Eulálio de Bueno Vidigal Filho pyramidal-shaped building was in 2012 transformed into the first open air gallery among Latin American countries.

Following the pioneering initiative known as Verve Cultural, the outdoor gallery facade was created with the electronic design of 26,000 LED clusters and over four million available colour shades.