Prague quadrennial | 2019

The Prague Quadrennial is a competition of the brightest minds in theater technology who meet to explore and showcase the best work from across the world. For the 2019 Prague Quadrennial the University at Buffalo was chosen by USITT to build both the Emerging and National exhibits for the United States. I was chosen as one of nine students of the build team. The student build team was responsible to design, draft, and build both of the United States exhibits. As a member of the student build team I was responsible for touring with the exhibits to the USITT national conference in Louisville, and then to Prague for the final exhibition of the exhibits.

My participation in the Prague Quadrennial consisted of drafting the floor of the National Exhibit, constructing both exhibits, working with curators to create and implement the Emerging and National Exhibit touchscreens, and traveling the with exhibit to load in and load out at each location. In Prague I spent much of his time deploying the touchscreens for use at the competition and completed the conversion from 120v to 220v. Over the course of the competition I ensured that the kiosks worked properly and set up a remote access system into the lighting console.

I enjoyed his time working on the Prague Quadrennial and learning about how work is done outside the United States, he hopes to continue working international as he enters into his professional career.

Prague Quadrennial Exhibits

Both USA exhibits being showcased at the University at Buffalo during the first public premiere.

Interactive Kiosks

My main role on the Prague Quadrennial 2019 was to assist the lead curator (Ian Garret) in creating and maintaining six touch screens which were used to exhibit both the Emerging and National artists artwork. These 42” touchscreens allow the users to immerse themselves into the artwork that is being featured. The interface gives the opportunity for the artists to not only include pre-production documents and production photos but as well as videos and sound clips that you would not be able to get in a traditional exhibition format. My work started from the beginning of the process by specifying what touchscreens would be needed as well as setting up virtual machines on each computer to run the software. The kiosk software runs a Wordpress website that is running locally from a virtual machine. The Wordpress template was designed by Ian Garrett and together we implemented the virtual machine which used Vagrant, a simple virtual machine development platform, and Scotch Box, an open source Vangrant configuration. By using a website to display all of the designers work it allows USITT to quickly transfer all of the data from an offline format to an easily accessible website.

Please find links to the National and Emerging Kiosk websites

National floor section

The National Exhibits floor is broken down into eight pieces. This was done to make transportation and assembly easier in both the national USITT conference and in Prague during the exposition. The floor is fabricated from 1” box steel with a plywood face. The plywood is then covered in pergo (laminate flooring) as per the designers specs. The whole floor is accessible by a ramp around the entirety of the exhibit which is fabricated from 3/4” MDF.

National Floor Layout

The drafting above shows the full layout of the National Exhibits floor. I drafted this along with a full package for the assembly of the floor. The floor is fabricated from 1” box steel with a plywood face. The plywood is then covered in Pergo laminate flooring as per the designers specification. The whole floor is accessible by a ramp around the entirety of the exhibit which is fabricated from 3/4” MDF. Please find below a PDF of the full drawings shown above.