Signal Festival co-founder in conversation with designboom
Signal Festival reemerges for a weekend of immersive digital art installations that light up the corners and monuments of Prague. Founded by Martin Pošta, alongside producer and curator Jan Rolník and artist Amar Mulabegovič from the art group The Macula, nearly fourteen years ago, the event has grown from a yearly festival to also include a permanent space, open year-round in the Czech capital. Following the opening night of the event’s fourteenth edition, Dream On!, Pošta catches up with designboom in the recently opened Signal Space in Prague’s city center to chat about the event’s history.
The projection-mapping project that started it all
From the beginning of his career, even before Signal Festival, Pošta was interested in creating things people would love to watch. He started out producing films and documentaries, eventually attending film school in Prague and going on to organize a film festival in the Czech Republic. After leaving the television industry, he was asking himself what he would do next when he met up with some friends in a bar. As they were chatting, they got the idea to transform a local church with projection mapping. This was 2010, the nascent days of the technology, which had even Pošta himself asking, ‘what is video-mapping?’
After discussing the project with the deputy mayor at the time, he suggested that they instead work with the Prague Astronomical Clock (Orloj), which at the time was about to celebrate its 600th anniversary. ‘I went to roam around and to check out what’s the vibe amongst the people,’ remembers Pošta of the crowds that gathered for this first project. He recounts seeing an older gentleman looking up at the clock tower in awe, telling his wife that she ‘must come and see the installation.’ ‘And I literally got tears in my eyes,’ Pošta admits. ‘I was touched… it was the moment when I kind of knew that I found my next calling.’ It was from this first project that he’d go on to champion new media projects.
Bringing light art to Prague with Signal Festival
After that event in 2010, Pošta and his team at The Macula created and produced these types of installations around the world. Seeing all the emerging talents in the sector spread across the world, he began to work on an event that would bring them all to one place. ‘I was lucky enough that the guy who was deputy mayor for culture, was still there. He knew what we were doing, so it was easier to explain to where we were heading towards,’ Pošta reflects on the early days of organizing what would become Signal Festival. ‘And then I was lucky to get introduced to the Ministry of Regional Development. And I got the first funding for the festival… honestly, we hardly knew what we were doing, but that’s how it happened. We had the list of the artists that we really wanted. There was no curation back then – we were just like, OK, we love this guy, this guy, that guy.’
Creating art, community, and performance
‘It’s a huge matrix of the stuff that you have to combine,’ says Pošta of bringing the festival to fruition each year. Not only do they invite artists from around the world, but they also commission new, site-specific works. ‘Some of them are super ephemeral, like with the video mapping projections, there are four nights and that’s gone,’ he says of the installations. Nevertheless, with the newly opened Signal Space, a permanent mainstay in the heart of Prague, some of the works can be seen year-round under Old Town Market Hall. Inside the space, the ceilings open up to reveal some of the turquoise metal supports that hold up the historic building.
Over fourteen years, Pošta has built up a team of what he affectionately calls ‘like-minded lunatics,’ who have come together to create ‘a lot of things that would be deemed impossible.’ These are the coordinators, administrative staff, and tech teams that pull together the festival. They also include the artists who realize the installations, some of whom return for subsequent editions.
