How to Build a Party Out of Nothing

I'm standing at the center of a large congregation hall. It sits a few hundred yards down the hill from a sandy volleyball court, a rope swings course, and a gravel path that runs under a wooden gate reading “Camp Lakota.” It's something like 4:30AM and I am surrounded by 400 dancers decked out in holographic sunglasses, leather harnesses, war paint, and various shamanic accessories. They are jacking and wiggling and shuffling to icy, hypnotic techno loops that seem to wrap themselves around your body; over in the darkened corners a few of them have splayed out on foam mats or stray gymnastics gear, recharging before the next dance or just making out.

The cavernous hall and everything in it his bathed in the alien glow of a giant, color-changing LED installation, leaving only the silhouette of a tall, willowy DJ on an elevated platform. Without stopping to squint through the thick clouds of neon fog to peer up at the wooden beams and crafty decorations lining the walls, you might mistake this for a Berlin nightclub—and not a children's sleepaway camp in the Catskills. Tucked away in the back of the dancefloor, wrapped in unspooled yards of multicolor cables, is Michael Potvin, aka Nitemind. He is barricaded in behind a folding table with a couple of antique PC laptops, some retrofitted MIDI controllers, with one hand on the knob of an analogue video mixer, and he's the mastermind behind this techno transformation.

This scene, a snapshot from the Sustain-Release techno festival that took place in the foothills of Wurtsboro, New York last month, is more or less an average Saturday morning for Potvin, who has made a career out of turning boring, empty spaces into cyberpunk rainforests or dystopian pleasure jails. He's built towering video walls, LED arrays, laser systems, and immersive, environmental installations for everyone from Alexander Wang to School of Seven Bells and Art Basel engagements in Miami. He's headed up environmental design for the roving warehouse party, SHADE. (At their “Detropia”-themed event, he built fluorescent lights and fog machines into smashed-up junkyard cars.)

There's been no shortage of work recently, thanks to his ingenuity in imbuing otherwise unspectacular spaces with awe and wonder. The way he sees it, creating an unforgettable environment isn't just about pretty lights and colors, but about telling a story. “Being able to make the evening feel like a journey is really important,” he said over the phone earlier this week. “It may be a loose story we're telling, but we're try to create a dynamic over the entire course of the evening.” His ability to Macgyver a high-concept installation out of whatever's immediately at hand also means his projects tend to stay within budget, so local promoters can enlist his services without needing a Budweiser sponsorship to bolster the budget.

On numerous occasions I have quietly lurked in awe watching Nitemind juggle remote controls and plug commands into homemade contraptions built out of eBay steals, yard sale finds, and ancient computer parts. So for the good of party animals and future lighting specialists everywhere, I asked him to give us a crash course on this rare and esoteric craft, with hopes that perhaps you too can someday build an otherworldly party space out of nothing.

“My first lighting job was building a piece for School of Seven Bells to tour with back in 2008. A friend of mine got the call through some random connection to the band, and he knew I had some engineering background so he came to me and said, 'Can you do this?' I had no clue, but I looked online and found this very active community of people making their own open source code and sharing it. So I found some parts, found the code, and called him back a couple hours later and said, 'Yeah we can do it.' I mean, there are nerds out there who have done a lot of this stuff for you already. Now I use open source for everything, like the Processing environment or the Arduino environment—which are both ways to write code for interactive stuff.”

“For Sustain-Release we brought a box truck worth of gear—pretty much everything I own: four computers, two DMX boards, a modular video synth, the Nitemind LED video wall, an RGB laser, an LED sign, strobe lights, mirrors, strand lights, 25 laser pointers, and several types of moving head lights. Then there's the FX lights, and off-the-shelf LED par cans, as well as mounting, rigging gear, and tools for everything. I brought all the fog machines I had, and we burned out three of them over the weekend.”

“My favorite place to buy gear is a distributor called Adafruit, straight out of New York. They sell stuff and they help you learn how to use it. It's run by this woman Ada; she's the one that came up with the x0xb0x—a clone of the Roland TB-303, the best one—years ago at MIT, and now she's got this electronic parts distributor and community based out of New York. I don't get everything from her because you can get it cheaper from China. But it helps being here in New York. You order it and shows up the next day or the day after, and you certainly don't get that from China. So Adafruit's big in terms of LED stuff when you're first getting started.”

“Our piece for School of Seven Bells got fried halfway through the tour. I got a call at 4AM on the West Coast and they were like, 'It broke! It got fried at the club!' I went on Facebook and posted, 'Do I know anybody in Portland who can fix this thing?' I got led down this rabbit hole of phone numbers, and by the fourth or fifth phone call, I found a guy in town to repair it for them the next day. To this day I don't know who the guy was, and to his credit, he never event sent me an invoice. So who knows who he was—a savior.”

“Working with Aurora Halal at Sustain-Release, we were just doing what we could with what we had. It's like, 'Oh, you've got this skill, I've got that skill, we have no sponsors and we don't have a built-in crowd of 1,000 people that are just gonna show up because we're famous,' so we make it happen. It doesn't have to look shitty, you know? You don't need to have a lot but you can still make it look really cool.”

“Fluorescent lights are dangerous. We made a bunch of our own light fixtures for the Shade party, and we put them inside of cars with fog machines under the hood for a broken-down kind of look. The lights ended up catching one of the cars on fire during the party. It was sparking, and next thing I know there's a little flame right there. Thankfully I happened to be there so I just turned it off and put everything away and it was OK, but that same lighting fixture gave quite a shock as well in the studio when we were building it. Be careful with fluorescent lights. That's a word to the wise.”

“Everything breaks, eventually, so it helps to keep spare parts around. Last weekend we showed up to a gig and one of the club lasers, the big computer-controlled one, was broken. Luckily I had the exact necessary part at my studio. I had bought it back in 2009 because I was going to build my own laser system, but never got around to it. So I came back to my studio at midnight and by about 1AM I had the thing fixed, then headed back to the gig and we were all set. Thankfully it went until 6AM.”

“Being a lighting guy, making things dark is one of my big things that I do. It's funny to hear me say it, but a lot of lights are really bright and people just want to turn everything on and go crazy. Darkness—negative space—is really important. That's why video projection isn't my thing when it comes to the club. I'd rather fog it out, make it dark; a projector becomes like a big source of white light in a sea of fog. And if you fog out a place you won't even see the projections.”

“To buy a controller for club lighting, it starts at $500 just for the little box. Then it goes into the thousands of dollars to control these things. So I literally bought a $70 box that does nothing and I wrote my own computer software, and now it runs off a little MIDI controller. It runs three different kinds of moving heads; it'll run spot lights; it'll run the strobe lights that we have; it'll run this moving animated LED bar installation that I have. It runs off of a PC laptop that I got for $80. The whole system is $200 for a control system that rivals much bigger systems. And maybe it doesn't have the flexibility but it does what I need it to do. And when you turn it on, you see that it's me. It's us. It's Nitemind.”

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