If you have seen the 3D animated backdrops for the ACT Louisville performance of “The Wizard of Oz” at the Iroquois Amphitheater, or The Womb of Creation installation in the exhibition “The Commonwealth: Divided We Fall” at the Frazier History Museum, or light shows during After Hours at the Speed Art Museum, you have seen the work of Mimic Visuals. Founded by David Jester, Mimic Visuals uses projection mapping to project digital images and animations — not only onto screens on stages across Louisville but also onto surfaces like buildings and bridges.
While still a student in the music technology program at Bellarmine University, Jester started making electronic dance music for raves. He soon became interested in video projection and other visual features of the rave experience.
“I’ve always liked that aspect of raves, and I got into it,” Jester said in an exclusive interview with LEO. “That was around 2012, and I did that on and off exclusively at dance events until about five years ago, when I started getting into the festival circuit.” Mimic Visuals has since created visuals for festivals including the Big Stomp and Bourbon and Beyond in Louisville, as well as for performances at Ultra Miami.
Jester uses a combination of Unreal Engine, a 3D computer graphics game engine; TouchDesigner, a node-based visual programming language for interactive multimedia content; and Resolume Arena software for live video mixing and projection mapping. “Some of my pieces are interactive, and some are data driven,” he said.
His curated suite of software allows him to design a kaleidoscopic array of visuals. At the Iroquois Amphitheater, Jester created scenery for “The Wizard of Oz” from scratch. At the Frazier History Museum, Jester programmed interactive water ripples and projection mapped them on the floor and around the central tree, functioning seamlessly with the work of Stivan Widick of dreaMachine transmissions, who created marine animal animations and reactivity with assistance from Chris Fischer of Think Brothers. For the house music DJ Whistleface, Mimic Visuals created a sound-reactive animation that moves with the beat.
At private parties and in public spaces, Mimic Visuals comes to life with a Panasonic high-lumen projector. Jester uses two lenses, depending on the project: a short-throw lens — from which the curve of the lens allows light to be spread quickly to cover a larger image area across a shorter distance — and a long throw lens for long-distance projections. “It’s not a consumer projector,” Jester said. “It’s professional grade, what they would call a large venue projector or a festival projector.”
Mimic Visuals has been commissioned by and collaborated with a broad spectrum of arts organizations, entertainment platforms, and independent creators. During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Mimic Visuals (with friends proJECT Truth) projected messages of solidarity all over Louisville .
Later that year, Mimic Visuals contributed to the production of “A Change Is Gonna Come” with vocalist Chase Dean, instrumentalist Ben Sollee, and former City Councillor Jecorey Arthur, among others. The performance was recorded and mixed at La La Land for Kentucky Performing Arts. The video was filmed by Stivan Widick of Reference Frame and edited by Widick and Mimic Visuals, and ultimately broadcast at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
In 2023, Mimic Visuals developed the interactive art installation “Love Is A Current,” commissioned by the interfaith event The Festival of Faiths. In 2025, the outdoor SPARK sculpture, commissioned by Louisville Visual Art and created by Seattle-based artists Haddad | Drugan, was illuminated by Mimic Visuals. And most recently, a guerrilla marketing campaign for ÅNGEL 004 projected images of the musical artist onto walls around the city.
Jester’s inspirations are as varied as his disciplines. “One of my inspirations for the protest projection is The Illuminator,” he said. The Illuminator is a New York-based art-activist collective that stages projection-interventions in public spaces that transform urban environments into sites of engagement and dialogue.
One of Jester’s digital art inspirations is Refik Anadol. A pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence, Anadol creates large-scale sculptures that use data to drive the parameters of video projections. “So if there’s a bunch of people in the space and it’s reading the people, it takes the value higher,” Jester said. “So maybe it makes it more chaotic or less chaotic.”
Jester also finds inspiration in the work of the motion design and film production studio IMMANENT, a multidisciplinary team that creates onstage visuals for touring artists, as well as in the psychedelic colors and textures of Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Jen Stark.
Jester’s future plans for Mimic Visuals content are to feature varied themes in a unified visual style. “The reason that you haven’t seen more of my stuff around town is because there’s no gallery that has digital capabilities,” Jester said. In the past, for Mimic Visuals to install a projection, Jester would have to leave his equipment and tools in the space, limiting the work he could create elsewhere for the duration of the exhibit. MaybeItsFate (1425 Story Ave.)—a gallery in Butchertown founded by Rebecca Norton and Charley Miller — is about to change that. “Rebecca has been the one to step up and really ask me what I needed and then make it happen. So I feel very grateful to her.”
Mimic Visuals will contribute to the opening reception of “Black Swan Unfolding, Hollow Pressure” and “Absurd Entanglements” at MaybeItsFate on Thursday, May 1. The title of the piece is “False Spring,” for which Jester has created a surreal 3D animation of flowers. “We have had a lot of false spring here in Louisville, and we’ve had a false spring in society. I feel like we had this chance to reset after COVID and do the right thing, and … it’s like we’re moving in the right direction — just kidding! We’re getting fucked.”
Jester will begin on a screen inside the gallery and then projection map the exterior of the building beginning at sunset. “I’m just going to do a lot of flowers since it’s spring and just keep it really pretty and lighthearted. I just want it to be pretty. It doesn’t need to be anything serious,” he said. “I’m just trying to be weird as fuck.”
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This article appears in Apr 11-24, 2025.