Corps en lumière at Lausanne Cathedral

Amine Rachad took over a giant medieval church in the heart of Lausanne to perform visually alongside a choir of 150.

A few months ago, Lumen Créations contacted Amine Rachad to execute an architectural mapping project inside Lausanne Cathedral. The show would accompany a classical music concert directed and composed by Céline Grandjean and featuring 150 choir members. Lumen wanted a poetic and grandiose event based around particle looks alluding to space and spirituality.

As Amine began working, he knew he wanted to work with real-time video. He chose Notch for its versatility and ability to make the space both lively and completely immersive. Above all, Notch allowed Amine to create visuals on the spot without any keyframing.

For the twenty-minute performance, Amine created four compositions. He began with colour, selecting each individual hue while keeping continuity between each beat. He then worked on the particles’ movements and reactions, encountering great results when mixing Particle and Field nodes. Once he solidified all tools, he started working on modifiers to connect MIDI instruments for the performance.

The main challenge was to play everything live. Though he had a provisional recording of roughly what the musicians would perform, it still wasn’t possible to get a full feeling of the live experience beforehand. Ultimately, the piece came together and received much attention, as Amine notes, from a wide variety of age groups, many of whom asked specifically about the technology used.