Rock The Riverfront festival announces next year’s interactive art attraction

The Loop is part music box, part old style movie player. Take a look.

CHATTANOOGA (WDEF) – The River City Company announces the new art installation that will be the center of next year’s Rock the Riverfront event.

Over the last two years, we have had the giant, lighted see-saws and the giant spinning tops.

Next year, the riverfront festival will invite you to take a seat in a lighted circle.

The project is called The Loop by Ekumen.

It’s part music box and movie projector, all powered by pumping on a bar inside the loop.

is an interactive Loop that plays short flipbook-style movies.

“Jonathan returned from a trip to Berlin, where he’d visited the Technology Museum. He saw all kinds of mechanical inventions there, including the zoetrope, a device, from before movies were invented, that animates a series of images when you spin its cylinder. Then, thinking of hamster wheels, we decided to build a vertical zoetrope. So we combined three mechanical elements: the railway push-car (like the ones made famous by Bugs Bunny cartoons), the music box and the zoetrope. We came up with the idea and sketched out the project just one week before the deadline for submitting proposals,” said Oliver Girouard, composer and the director of the Ekumen Studio. Loop, by EKUMEN, is a co-production of Quartier des spectacles Partnership and Ekumen, and is distributed by QDSinternational.

River City officials say that more than 70,000 people attended the month long festival this last spring at Ross’s Landing.

It returns for a third year in March and April of 2024, to coincide with spring break at schools.