Trippy video, lasers, ball pit dazzle at Intersect fest

Whether one looked straight ahead, up at the sky or down at their feet, dancing lights, dazzling LEDs and phantasmagoric video were on view in massive scale at the inaugural Intersect Festival last weekend.

The festival that sprang from Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent Conference opened the once-private party for its 35,000 attendees to the public for the first time.

In addition to headliners such as Foo Fighters, Beck and Kacey Musgraves, Intersect touted itself as a festival for art and tech.

To that end, the art offerings leaned heavily on technological advances.

The Cube

An untitled immersive activation by Nanotak invited festivalgoers into the perimeter of a pitch black room.

There, they were dwarfed by a behemoth of a cube, built on a grid.

The cube synced with driving electronic music and glowed with LEDs that twinkled with bright white light along the cube’s lines.

Lost and Photon

In Lost and Photon, by artist Mike808, dozens of focused lights moved across the ground.

About two dozen visitors were allowed into the rectangular room at a time.

Lost and Photon started by activating glowing rings along the floor, many of which encircled those who took a break to sit or squat.

Slowly, the lights transformed from circles into waves, then straight lines, then dots. With music, the lights moved back-and-forth across the room, sporadically illuminating the awestruck faces within it.

Video Monolith

Three towering video screens offered peeks into the minds of artists Beeple, Kyttenjanae and Yulia Shur. Their video montages ranged from trippy visuals to curvy animated women to images evocative of Windows XP screensavers.

Mixed Mirrors

An interactive installation by Tigrelab invited attendees to stand in front of an octagonal video wall and have their picture taken. Images were then incorporated in a monochromatic video wall of body parts.

The resulting video collage rotated with close-ups of strangers’ faces, rendered in 8-foot-tall grayscale.

Ball pit

While not an art attraction, the 200,000 balls that made up the ball pit maintained a one-hour line of adults eager to relive their days of childhood.

Visitors climbed up the walls to a bouncy castle and then dove into a sea of white lightweight balls like the ones that used to be found in McDonald’s Playplaces.

After pushing through the 5-foot-deep pool, the only way out was to scale an inflatable staircase and bounce down a slide to the exit.

Intel Drones

Are drones art? It’s hard to say.

On both Friday and Saturday nights, a fleet of drones from Intel blasted off into the night sky above the Las Vegas Festival Grounds and assembled themselves into a medley of shapes and colors.

During Kacey Musgrave’s performance, the drones danced along, arranging themselves into a rainbow smiley face.

On Saturday night, the drones moved in conjunction with a video trailer for season four of the Amazon Original “The Expanse.”

The drones coordinated into symbols from the show, ending in the shape of a rocket ship that then spelled out “Prime Video.”