The organisers of Spark, the content-production programme that runs inside Integrated Systems Europe, have announced that French artist Joanie Lemercier and curator Juliette Bibasse will deliver a keynote at the 2027 edition, taking place 3-4 February in Hall 8 at Fira de Barcelona, Montjuïc. The booking is not a celebrity flourish. It is a statement about what the screen industry now believes it is selling.
From hardware procurement to content production
ISE began as an audiovisual trade show: projectors, displays, mounts, signal chains. Over the past decade its centre of gravity has moved towards what appears on the screen and how it is made. Spark formalises that shift with two stages – Spark Arena for keynotes and long-form conversations, Spark Forum for practical, free-to-attend sessions on tools and approaches – under the 2027 theme “The Art of And”, which is about how disciplines and technologies combine rather than compete.
Booking Lemercier and Bibasse is the clearest expression of that theme available. The pair have collaborated for more than fifteen years on work that uses light, projection and digital technology to transform spaces and challenge perception. Lemercier, born in 1982, has worked with projected light since 2006, co-founded the visual label AntiVJ, and helped establish architectural video mapping as an artistic medium rather than a technical demonstration. Bibasse, born in 1984, moved from a decade as an artist’s producer into curation, working with festivals, institutions and public space projects including STRP Festival in Eindhoven and LLUM Barcelona.
The Casa Batlló proof point
The keynote arrives shortly after a project that demonstrates the argument better than any slide could. On 30 and 31 January 2027, Casa Batlló’s annual mapping returns for its sixth edition, with Lemercier and Bibasse creating a work in collaboration with Catalan singer and composer Maria Arnal, who co-creates the musical composition and performs live. The piece uses light, large-scale projection and original music to reinterpret Gaudí’s building.
Gaudí’s Casa Batlló is a façade with almost no flat surface: undulating stone, glazed ceramics, skeletal balconies. Projecting onto it is a technical problem before it is an artistic one, and the previous editions – which have featured Refik Anadol, Sofia Crespo, Quayola and United Visual Artists – have established a benchmark for what a building-scale canvas can carry. ISE is a principal sponsor of the event, which is free to the public: a marketing investment in the idea that technology, well used, belongs in civic space.
What this means for DOOH buyers and sellers
The commercial implication is sharper than the cultural one. Digital out-of-home has spent a decade arguing about measurement, programmatic access and proof-of-play. Those arguments assume the content on the screen is worth measuring. As more inventory moves to full-motion, high-brightness, large-format screens, the constraint shifts: a network of 4,000 full-motion venue screens is only as valuable as the creative running on it, and most advertisers still supply repurposed 16:9 video.
That gap is why events like Spark matter to media owners. If the supply side of the industry learns to commission work designed for the environment – portrait, silent, three-second, ambient – the medium’s effectiveness improves without any change in measurement methodology. If it does not, better measurement will simply document better-documented irrelevance.
The risk in the art-technology embrace
There is a version of this trend that becomes decorative and expensive: brands commissioning projection spectacles that generate social clips and no commercial effect. The discipline that separates the two is brief-writing. A mapping on a heritage façade has a civic and cultural mandate; a DOOH campaign has a commercial one, and the creative has to survive the same three-second test as a poster, not the same five-minute test as an installation.
Lemercier’s own practice suggests he understands the difference. His recent work has focused on dematerialising the projection surface – transparent materials, water mist – and on reducing the resource footprint of production, including the carbon cost of touring large installations. That is a useful corrective for an industry that has spent years adding brightness and square metres without asking what either costs.
Why it matters, in one line
ISE booking projection artists as keynotes is the screen industry admitting that its next competitive frontier is content authorship, not panel specification – and the media owners who commission work built for the environment will be the ones who benefit.
Source: DailyDOOH, “Joanie Lemercier & Juliette Bibasse To Keynote @SparkExpoShow”, 9 November 2026.
