Todd combined his love of poetry, filmmaking, community engagement, and public art with this 2014 installation, Arrivals and Departures at St. Paul's Union Depot, a block-wide 3D mapped projection onto a historic downtown St. Paul building hung with nine giant 40' screens.
The spectacle featured a looped program of locally-sourced poetry films themed to celebrate a newly-renovated depot on the move, screened for thousands of onlookers on two evenings during the St. Paul Art Crawl.
A top literary experience of 2014
— City Pages
This micro-documentary takes you from the project's inception to its realization.
A collaboration between Pixel Farm Creative and Todd's film company Motionpoems, "Arrivals and Departures at St. Paul's Union Depot" was funded by the Lowertown Future Fund and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It was Todd's first building projection, and served as a VR proof-of-concept for a later project, see MōMōVA: The Moving Museum of Virtual Art.
Seeing those films come together from local talents was almost as exciting as roping those giant screens to the Depot's pillars from the bucket of a lift-jack! I think this project appealed to me primarily because it tested so many physical limitations and allowed me and other artists to think big. I'm grateful to the City of St. Paul and the folks at Union Depot for trusting me with this concept.
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