Prague’s city center glows, buzzes and burns at the Signal Festival
And thanks to a hint in Dan Brown’s new novel, The secret of secretsthis festival has gained more international fame. Just weeks after the release of Brown’s new bestseller set in contemporary Prague, viewers can see for themselves what drew the beloved author to the festival, which is the largest exhibition of Czech and Central European digital art. In one episode, the Signal Festival makes a brief appearance when the novel’s protagonist remembers attending an event in the 2024 version.
“We are happy about this,” said Martin Posta, the director of the festival. “It’s a kind of recognition.” Not that this event needs to be advertised even in one of the most anticipated novels of recent years. Organizers have yet to share the number of visitors to this year’s festival, but the four-day event typically attracts half a million visitors.
On the final day, there was a long queue in front of this historic facility Ascension of Tristan by American video art pioneer Bill Viola before it opened for the night, even though it was a ticketed event. In the Church of St. Salvator at St. Agnes Monastery, visitors could watch a Christ-like figure rise up, gravity-defying streams of water with him, all projected on a large screen.
The first performance of the festival was held on the Vltava River near the Dvorak embankment. Taiwan’s Peppercorns Interactive Media Art presented a design on a cloud of dust called Tzolkin Nur. While the creators of other light installations have to deal with the challenges of buildings – their irregular surfaces, decorative details and inappropriate cornices – projecting on water droplets is a challenge of a different kind, and artists have to relinquish control of the resulting image. The shape and depth of Peppercorns’ work depended on the wind blowing at any given moment, which determined how much of the scene was revealed to the viewer and how much was simply blown away. The prize, however, was an extraordinary pair of 3D glasses that resembled a hologram—something that couldn’t be achieved by projecting video onto stationary, flat buildings.
Another top event was the design on the tower of the Old Town Hall, created for the festival by the Italian studio mammasONica. It transformed the 230-foot structure into a kaleidoscope of blue, green, red, and white surfaces. A little further away, in Republic Square, Peppercorns had another installation. They displayed a work titled on a circular LED installation Between the mountains and the seawhich recounted the history of Taiwan.
