Snow serves as canvas for artistry gone viral

Watch it on Youtube

We New Mexicans don’t know snow.

Most of us, anyway. Those of us who live in our state’s most populated centers barely know what to do when, say, a quarter-inch of it manages to make its way to our parched streets and brown earth.

We shout: Snow day! Close the roads! Shut down the city!

	It’s snow time “Projector Snow” video by Brian Maffitt: http://youtu.be/1TxcMRBQ-hA< Photographs of Projector Snow: www.flickr.com/photos/brianmaffitt/

But then: Never mind. Snow’s over. Nothing to see here.

Last Monday, a winter weather advisory was issued, sending children of Albuquerque and surrounding communities to bed that night with dreams of two-hour delays and snowballs dancing in their heads.

Then, Tuesday morning, nothing. At all. We could have worn shorts.

Snow eludes us, befuddles us, its beauty and brutality lost to us again.

Not so for those Northeasterners in the path of last weekend’s blizzard. Those chilly souls were buried under as much as 3 feet of snow. Perhaps some still are.

They must have thought it all beautiful, but maybe just until the power went out and cabin fever sank in. Then, it got ugly.

But there was one New Yorker who forever captured the beauty of snow in a most curious way. Brian Maffitt discovered a fractal fantasy of color and movement far removed from snow’s weathered white.

The video of his experiment – called “Projector Snow” because it employs snow and, yes, a movie projector – quickly went viral and was featured by numerous media from Slate to the London Daily Mail and across hundreds of Facebook pages, including mine.

Full disclosure: Maffitt is my brother-in-law. He’s also a frequent visitor to Albuquerque, along with his wife, my New Mexico-born and -bred sister, Denise Krueger Maffitt, so he knows about our state’s uneasy relationship with snow.

Maffitt, of Chestnut Ridge, N.Y., is one of those creative geeky types with a knack for combining technology with artistry. He is described in his LinkedIn account as an “internationally recognized guru in the field of desktop computer graphics and special effects.”

So it should come as no surprise that when Maffitt looks at snow, he sees not flakes but scientific aesthetics. Snow is something to create with. It’s a canvas, mobile and mercurial and magical, perhaps more magical than even he imagined.

Last Friday night, as the snow fell and the winds howled, Maffitt grabbed his camera, turned on an old Optoma DLP projector aimed to the outside from his bedroom window and played a video of “The Lorax.”

(Animated children’s films use a heavily saturated color palette perfect to project onto snow, hence “The Lorax.”)

The resulting effort was, well, chaotic and muddled.

“I kind of dismissed it,” he said. “It was too hard to watch.”

And then he thought to slow the shutter speed of the camera from 60 frames per second to 24. The result, he said, was a “happy surprise.”

What he had captured was a moving melange of bright color whips, dazzling jewels, brilliant ribbons of blue, red and green popping, snapping, swirling, curling and totally, utterly mesmerizing.

“All of a sudden, it became just beautiful,” he said.

Maffitt slapped on a stock music clip and posted the nearly two-minute video onto YouTube and Reddit, an online news and entertainment site.

By the time he hit the bed, it was the most popular video on the site.

Bloggers the next day picked up the video. Then came The Atlantic. Then Wired. Then Yahoo. And on it went.

“It started to freak me out,” he said. “I’ve never seen something I put out there resonate with so many people.”

Maffitt thinks “Projector Snow” strikes a chord because the rhythmical movements and interplay of color are organic, like waves washing up upon a beach or flames dancing in a fireplace.

“It has a calming, soothing, familiar vibe to it that our brains connect to,” he said.

Some of the comments about his snow project, posted now on dozens of Internet and social media sites, have moved him to tears, he said.

“Both my kids are deaf and amazed by colors,” one parent wrote. “And they absolutely love this.”

And then there is this from a soldier far from home: “I am deployed to Afghanistan, one place where most of the colors are nothing more than shades of tan. This has brightened my entire week, thank you.”

We New Mexicans know tan.

And now, thanks to a geeky artist in New York, we can know snow in a way that warms us.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Joline at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal