The Sixth Sense Festival came alive with Christie projectors across more than 200,000 square feet of industrial architecture in Bengaluru.
Envisioned by Swordfish, The Sixth Sense is designed as a non-linear journey through art, technology, and natural intelligence. The event brought digital installations, spatial sound performances, interactive environments and workshops across the hangers, silo and planted forest of a 60 year old factory in Alembic City.
Synergy Technologies was commissioned to deliver a projection mapping experience across three zones: the immersive room, the silo, and the live performance arena.
Chirag Patel, founder, Synergy Technologies, explains: “Swordfish are true visionaries. Their ideas were bold, genre-bending and uncompromising in scale. India has not witnessed anything of this magnitude in immersive art before. And for us at Synergy, it was not simply about executing a technical brief; it was about enabling a cultural milestone that could redefine how world-class immersive experiences are perceived, produced and experienced.”
The planning stage stretched over several months, with the Synergy team collaborating with the organisers from the earliest conceptual stages. As the festival approached, Synergy was given only 72 hours to deploy an intricate network of visual systems across the sprawling campus.
Each piece of equipment had to be transported from Mumbai to Bengaluru, which required intensive coordination and contingency planning. The Synergy team carried additional projectors, bespoke lenses, media servers and signal distribution systems to ensure operational resilience in the field.
The venue itself also posed a challenge, with uneven surfaces complicating the installation process. Before even one item of equipment could be moved in, the environment had to be rendered workable for the Synergy team to carry out the installation.
Synergy worked in advance with each artist’s management team to understand their technical rider specifications as different artists required distinctive signal workflows, broadly divided between HDMI over fibre optic transmission and SDI infrastructure. This allowed for seamless integration on the ground before the rehearsals had even commenced.
Across all three zones Christie projectors were chosen for reliability and visual fidelity. Chirag adds: “Every space demanded its own philosophy of projection. Brightness, pixel density, throw distance, ambient light interference, architectural geometry, each of these factors dictated a different solution. Our job was to balance artistic intention with optical physics.”
In the immersive room, a 2,500 square foot enclosure saw vivid projections envelop the walls and floor. Synergy deployed 14 Christie Jazz series DWU2400-JS projectors, each one securely truss-mounted for improved stability.
The low ceiling height allowed for barely 12 feet of clearance from lens to floor for downward projectors, requiring four projectors to be retrofitted with imported ultra-short throw lenses for distortion-free floor projection within the tight vertical envelope of the space.
The remaining 10 units were used to map the standing walls within the room, featuring customised lenses selected to preserve uniform brightness, accurate colour grading and accurate pixel ratios across irregular surfaces.
Control of the mapping workflow was handled by Dataton media servers running Watchout 7 multi-display production and playback systems, supported by Lightware HDMI20-OPTJ-Tx/Rx90 optical extenders for near-zero latency transmission and signal integrity.
Chirag adds: “The Christie Jazz Series gave us exceptional brightness relative to its footprint, which was critical in the confined environment that we had. Our decision to specially import the customised ultra-short throw lenses proved to be a game-changer in this situation, as it allowed us to maintain geometry without compromising resolution and impact. Meanwhile, Lightware’s fibre extenders ensured signal stability over distance without introducing latency. When you’re projecting across every surface, even microseconds matter.”
The silo’s circular façade presented a curved projection surface, with the building surrounded by dense trees and outcrop. As projection access was limited strictly to the front of the building, the site’s integrity had to be maintained. Synergy developed a methodical solution whereby projection within the space was achieved through narrow gaps between trees, with the team ensuring that projector placements were calibrated to millimetric accuracy.
Synergy supplied six units of Christie D20WU-HS laser projectors alongside a Christie Griffyn 4K50-RGB pure laser projector for 50,000 lumens of native 4K output. Each unit was retrofitted with imported lenses to maintain sharpness, accurate coverage and vivid colour reproduction across the curved façade. The mapping workflow was driven by Resolume Arena media servers, enabling dynamic control over the silo’s complex architectural surfaces.
Chirag adds: “In addition to all the environment challenges with the projector placement, which team Synergy handled with great finesse; the curvature of the structure meant we had to account for geometric distortion across multiple axes. The Griffyn 4K50-RGB gave us extraordinary colour volume and brightness headroom, essential for outdoor projection against residual ambient light. Combined with the D20WU-HS units, we achieved a layered visual narrative that respected the building’s architecture while transforming it entirely.”
The live performance arena immersed audiences in a panoramic 180-degree visual expanse, where stage backdrop and side walls act as a canvas. A transparent mesh screen is suspended between performers and audience, introducing a two-layer projection design that culminates in ‘holographic’ visuals for immersive storytelling.
To achieve this unique effect, four Christie DWU23-HS laser projectors were deployed, with one unit energising the holographic mesh with luminous depth and another illuminates the stage backdrop. Two projectors map the lateral walls to create an enveloping environment that responds to performances.
Chirag continues: “The HS Series projectors provided the robustness and colour integrity required for extended live sets. The holographic mesh element required exact brightness calibration; too little and the illusion fails, too much and the transparency collapses. Precision was everything.”