The city of Barcelona has designated 2026 as Gaudí year, in celebration of the work of its' famous son, the architect and designer Antoni Gaudí. The official motto for the hundredth anniversary of his death is Gaudí, the invisible order, because beneath the over-the-top decorative designs for his buildings and furnishings, was an extraordinary focus on nature and science. As part of the celebrations, British artist and founder of United Visual Artists, Matt Clark, mapped the façade of Casa Batlló, which was designed by Gaudí in the center of Barcelona.
In his keynote at ISE 2026, Behind the façade: building a performance-led mapping at casa batllo from concept to implementation, Clark described the inspiration and challenges behind the event, which took place at night on January 31 and February 1, and the accompanying exhibit inside the house. The structure has previously been mapped by Sofia Crespo, Refik Anadol and Quayola.
Matt Clark and designer Jon Skerritt started the presentation with a brief recap of how their work had changed since the turn of the century. How in 2003, for a Massive Attack tour, they illustrated some of the challenges of living in the information age--even before the advent of smart phones and endless social media--by creating patterns and content with random statistics about how many stars are born or how often people went to the toilet. Revisiting the theme for a 20th anniversary show in 2023 the same approach produced and overwhelming assault on the senses, highlighting how we are all bombarded with data and opinions and information at all times.
In addition to concert tours, UVA's work has also appeared in galleries, on video, and on buildings, although none quite as involved as Casa Batlló ,which has eight main balconies or "masks" which mirror human eyes.
Clark's approach to the work began with a dancer. He said, "Our work sits at the intersection of several disciplines but our roots are in performance design." He collaborated with dancer and choreographer Fukiko Takase, recording her dancing using motion capture technology in London and then integrating treated versions of those movements onto the façade of the building and as a silhouetter behind windows on a balcony, as if the dancer was reacting with the lights around her.
The human element was important to Clark in creating the piece. "My impression of Casa Batlló was of a body, with a spine and elements that reference skin. Different artists see different things and Gaudí does not explicitly explain what his forms are. There are no hard corners, like a body, and inside the building feels like a body with organs, the light coming in through the windows is like lungs filling the air. I tried to reflect this feeling rather than analyzing or trying to decode his intention.
Gaudí said, "The straight line belongs to man, the curved line to God" and he believed that nature followed these divine geometric principles. I was interested in these underlying systems and I thought it would be interesting to treat this like a performance or choreography rather than a mapping. I met Fuki who is an amazing dancer and the composer Daniel Thibeaux we discussed these repeating patterns like scales and cells in nature."
The challenges for hosting this type of work on the Casa Batlló are clear, not only is the surface intricately broken up creating shadows and distortion, but the building is very thin and has a challenging aspect ratio. Clark says, "I also really wanted to do this project to feel like theatre, with light coming from inside, like the heartbeat of the building."
The designers were also prepared to make changes onsite. Jon Skerritt says, "At UVA we create our own tools but on this project we committed to TouchDesigner because we didn't want to render the show and have to redo everything onsite." The team also used lasers to map the façade, and the show was sequenced in Ableton. Once onsite the team realized there was a lot of ambient light, the building is on a major thoroughfare, and topography of the façade was distorting some of the more detailed parts of the design. Matt Clark, "The show changed from Thursday night to Friday night. We had series of white dots which were hard to match up but we also realized that the colors were like a heat sensor/depth map which was interesting." The first night of the show ended up looking a little different from the second.
Clark wanted the narrative to be open to interpretation, like the building itself, but the show had four movements, emergence, where the dancer is revealed, bloom as the lighting and shapes unfold, chaos and destruction where everything falls apart, and transcendence, the cycle renews.