Painting With Light workshop at UCLA

Alex May led a Painting With Light video-mapping workshop at the University of California, Los Angeles on 2 February 2016, introducing students to his custom software through a practical session built around projection, objects, and moving image. The surviving post is brief, but it makes clear that the workshop centred on student experimentation and resulted in a strong set of visual outcomes documented in a small group of photographs.

As with other Painting With Light workshops, the emphasis was not on treating video mapping as a polished effect added at the end of a process. May used the software as an open artistic tool, letting participants test how projected image changes when it meets surfaces, structures, and improvised arrangements in space. That approach turns projection into something contingent and performative rather than fixed.

For May, the UCLA workshop sits firmly within the wider practice as a teaching context in which the underlying ideas of Painting With Light become shareable. Instead of presenting a finished performance, he opened up the system itself, allowing students to explore how digital image, physical form, and spatial decision-making can work together as a live method of making.