A former Paris foundry became a 140-projector art space
The operator documents 140 projectors across 3,300 square metres of a converted 1835 foundry that opened in April 2018.
- Historical event
- April 13, 2018
- Site publication
- September 18, 2026
What the operator documents
According to the venue's own history page, the Chemin-Vert foundry was built in 1835, operated for roughly a century, closed after "the international crisis of 1929," and stood empty from 2000 until Culturespaces discovered it in 2013 and converted it into a digital art centre. The same page states "the Atelier des Lumières opens its doors to the public on April 13" 2018, and that "the inaugural year attracted 1.2 million visitors." That is a dated, operator-stated founding fact rather than a press estimate, and it fixes both the building's age and the exhibition format's public debut in one place.
What creates the image
The venue's technical page states that "140 video projectors and a spatialised sound system in a surface area of 3,300 m²" produce the show, spread across five named spaces: a 1,500 m² main hall, a cistern, a mirrored tower, a children's studio and supporting panels. The mechanism is projection mapping onto raw industrial architecture — columns, uneven walls and the floor itself — rather than onto a single flat screen, so footage must be pre-warped to the room's actual geometry before anything is shown. Viewing needs darkness and, because there are no assigned seats, every visitor shares the same moving image while walking freely through it; the spatialised sound is timed to the same source material as the projection rather than added separately afterwards.
What is and is not established
The operator states projector count and covered area but not individual projector brightness, resolution, or how visible the seams are where adjacent projections overlap on an irregular column. Culturespaces' own site describes itself as running twelve such sites internationally, drawing some five million visitors and thirty-four exhibitions a year, which confirms the venue is one instance of a repeatable operating model rather than a one-off installation — worth noting because a reader comparing two "des Lumières" venues in different cities may be comparing different projector counts under the same branding. Nothing in the fetched pages states how footage is remastered when the exhibition changes roughly once a year, or what maintenance schedule keeps 140 units in alignment.
- How is video content re-mastered for columns and uneven walls rather than for a flat rectangular screen?
- What resolution and brightness does each of the 140 projectors deliver, and are blending seams visible up close?
- How often is the installation recalibrated between exhibition changeovers, and by whom?
The venue is well documented as a scale of engineering — a fixed floor area, a stated projector count, a dated opening — and the category of "immersive art exhibition" it helped popularise is now, by the operator's own account, a network rather than a single room.
Sources & reading trail
States the venue's 140 video projectors and spatialised sound system across 3,300 square metres, distributed across five named spaces.
Source published: Not established · Retrieved: 16 September 2026
Dates the building's 1835 origin as a foundry and the digital art centre's opening on 13 April 2018, with first-year visitor numbers.
Source published: Not established · Retrieved: 16 September 2026
Identifies the operator running Atelier des Lumières as part of a wider international network of immersive exhibition venues.
Source published: Not established · Retrieved: 16 September 2026
Primary documents establish the record; the mechanism reading and the demo questions are Presence Atlas editorial analysis. This retrospective draft does not imply the site published on the event date.
Continue reading
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- Naimark's own record documents an origin case for projection mapping
- A published standard puts a number on projection contrast
- Browse the complete the archive
Sources & reading trail
- Atelier des Lumières — The Experience
Retrieved: September 16, 2026 - Atelier des Lumières — A Place of History
Retrieved: September 16, 2026 - Culturespaces — official site
Retrieved: September 16, 2026
The documents above establish the record. The reading and the questions are this publication’s editorial analysis, written after the fact.
Published September 18, 2026, not on the date of the event described.