TechnoFrolics' animated, award-winning banners are a fluid, vibrant medium, forming the fabric for diverse displays in artistic, educational, and commercial settings.
Video showing the dancing banners in motion is included our 1.5 minute TechnoFrolics overview video.
High performance servo motors, combined with an extensive choreography environment, enable rich and complex performances — in silence, in accompaniment to a narrative, or dancing to music.
From free-standing models to large ceiling-hung units, the elegant, graceful fabric banners can be flexibly scaled and configured to fit virtually any context.
In Arts, Entertainment,
and Education
In performance the computer-controlled Dancing Banners elements become flowing swirls of hue and pattern, moving with lifelike grace in silent dances or to music.
When still, the banners pose like dancers frozen in mid-step. When partnered or combined in groups of three or more, the banners perform in beautifully choreographed arrangements as couples or a troupe.
Within science museums and other educational contexts, banner installations can be designed to illuminate the principles of wave motion. Within concert settings, the banners can be used as a striking, unforgettable stage element.
The flexible, configurable nature of the system supports its use in diverse contexts. Concepts include:
- Chimes: Banners that exhibit a "steady state" of continuous graceful, silent motions, then on the hour burst into exuberant visual chimes set to music.
- Sunlight Bloomers: Banners whose motions are influenced by the rising and setting of the sun.
- People Watchers: Banners whose motions are influenced by passersby.
- Playable: Banners whose interactive user interface enables visitors to play them like visual instruments.
- Wave Physics: Banners that highlight various visitor-selected wave phenomena, accompanied by explanatory audio narration. Through an interactive interface, visitors generate torsional waves directly.
- Visitor Powered: Banners powered (and in this way "choreographed"), by multiple visitor-cranked generators.
As Signage, Traffic-Builder, and Advertising Medium
Banner fabric can be custom printed with any text and graphics, functioning as a dramatic, memorable method to promote, advertise, alert, and acknowledge. The banners' unexpectedly lifelike and graceful motions stand out in even the busiest and most distracting environments.
Example applications include:
- Tradeshow Booth Display: Cut through the clutter and grab the attention of every passersby with images of company products.
- Advertising Medium: Installed in airports or other high-traffic locations, rent troupes of banners with custom imagery to changing advertisers.
- Donor Recognition: Replace (dare we say stodgy) brass wall plaques with donor name lists that function as beautiful atrium artworks.
- Event List: Elegantly alert visitors to upcoming exhibitions and special events.
Twirling Banners Performance Fabric
Twirling Banners displays are designed for more modest budget projects. They differ from the Dancing Banner technology in that they:
- Cost about half as much.
- Weigh about half as much.
- May be made as small as desired (it is recommended that Dancing Banners elements be no less than 2ft wide x 14ft tall).
- May be installed by the technically-proficient client (unlike Dancing Banners displays which requires trained personnel).
This is made possible because the Twirling Banners elements:
- Use lower strength motors that allow slow, graceful changes in motion, but are unsuited to performing high speed dynamic dances set to music.
- Are mechanized at one end only.
- Have a fixed, client-adjustable twist in each banner (rather than having the twist computer controlled, through which shimmers etc. are affected).
- Typically omit significant custom choreography, being provided instead with predefined movement sequences.
- May optionally be run without synchronization between the banners or absolute alignment (in the North-South sense).
Note: See the article about us in Signs of the Times Magazine.
