New York based vintage-car enthusiast filmmaker and photographer Alexander Davidis collaborated with media-effects artist Willyum Delirious to present a projected and animated car-art photo-installation at the kick-off-party for New York’s spring 2005 art season. The wild event was organized by New York painter Julie Harvey at the famous Puck Building in SOHO. It featured a ‘60s Austin Powers GO-GO theme, complete with dozens of costumed dancers and a variety of appropriately themed art displays.

The Davidis-Delirious piece was the featured installation of the event, as it was prominently projected in the Puck Building’s large receiving room. The installation served to greet several hundred guests on a giant 12x20 foot double-screen, showing Davidis’ award winning photos of vintage racecars from famous circuits such as Goodwood, Silverstone and Le Mans. The art featured Aston Martins, Ferraris, Jaguars and Porsches, as well as a host of other beautiful classic automobiles. All shots were cleverly animated by Delirious into moving kaleidoscopic images that transformed the brilliant colour and design details of Davidis' photography into psychedelic visuals fitting with the event’s overall conception.

Davidis: "We took some of my most colourful and exaggerated shots - in keeping with the GOGO Austin Powers theme - and fed them through various kaleidoscope and distortion computer programs such as ‘After Effects’."

Delirious: "The idea was to keep the look along the lines of how optical effects were done in the sixties."

Davidis: "Running two screens side by side gave the viewer the opportunity to recognize from which car shots the complex kaleidoscopic animations derived. Just by the colours and certain graphic details - like an endless visual puzzle. Sometimes one would see the cars sometimes just psychedelic fragments sometimes both. We had a lot of fun. Party-guests stopped for lengthy periods in front of the performance, mesmerized by the pure beauty as the shapes that moved, morphed and pulsated in and out of each other, forwards and backwards."

Davidis: "I did envision creating ‘specific aesthetics’ but only when we where doing the rendering on the computers we realized how perfect the images lent themselves to this kind of animation. It blew us away!" As a potential May exhibition of Davidis’ Car Art Photography in a New York Gallery is approaching, everybody hopes to see the installation again.

Davidis: "It was pretty involved - but we loved it! There is a good chances we’ll repeat it."

Movie samples can be downloaded by clicking HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE or HERE!

For further details contact Alexander Davidis by email; Alexander Davidis.

Text: A.Davidis
Photos: A. Davidis