When People Are Pixel-Size

Dávid Pusztai is a fourth year graphic designer at the Faculty of Music and Visual Arts of UP. The design of the light carpet submitted for the 2021 Festival of Light competition was projected on the asphalt and the wall of Janus Pannonius Street in Pécs, all night long on 2 October. The number of spectators and people walking through the light carpet was estimated at up to 10,000. The interview was conducted while walking through the crowd on the carpet of lights.

Here we are, walking all over your work. What does that experience feel like?

Very surreal. I have seen it on the small screen of my laptop, of course, but now in its full size, I can barely take it in!

It is magnificent, compared to seeing it on a laptop-screen, it is really street scale.

Yes, yes, there is a huge difference! And it is very nice to see it all coming together, the image is sharp, the colours are vibrant.

You have used the contrasts very well, and also the surface texture of the asphalt, which looks particularly velvety and soft. This is a modern, a bit surreal, but figurative piece of work. What was your starting point?

When this call for applications was launched, an online introductory course was held through Zoom. They explained the dimensions of the image projected onto a long street. My imagination was immediately sparked. A totem, or a totem pole, sprang to mind and how good it would look. Not necessarily just with tribal motifs, but based on patterns from several cultures: some of Chinese, some of African origin. Strong colours and mask effects. Or there is the dragon on the wall, it is a Chinese custom to hide behind the mask, and several people move it together, to celebrate the Chinese New Year.

Going back to the dimensions, how could you design such a creation of this size?

Well, it is about 50 metres, but I have to fill those 50 metres four times with images, because they are projected onto the wall and the roof, not just the road. I started by scaling it up to roughly the size of a real person, so I could imagine what it would look like, as far as the small screen would show. And so a person is barely visible, almost a pixel, or just slightly more. Because it is the human scale that you have to compare it to. I had numerous questions for the organizers of course, to figure out how it should be put together, because I was completely confused for a long time. However, I finally got it.

The crowd swirling on the carpet of light can be up to a thousand people.

The fact is that there is a crowd, even if it is only five hundred, not a thousand, it is definitely inspiring. It is Saturday, a real weekend, and when I got here for the start of the screening I could already see that there were a lot of people, which is quite different from the atmosphere of an exhibition. It is a huge honour to be part of the Festival with a light carpet, and to be walking around here now, I almost cannot believe it.

Your parents, friends, what did they say?

They are just as amazed as I am, by the way, we were just going through with them, and they did not even know where to look because the projected picture is so big. They were asking me questions about my concepts, my methods, but the main thing was that they were happy with me and very proud.

by: Robert Balogh, UnivPécs