Light art in the techno temple – Cameo at the new ZOOM Club in Frankfurt

Anyone familiar with Frankfurt, Germany’s club scene knows immediately where they are when they enter the new ZOOM: in the former Cocoon Club, Sven Väth’s techno temple. The membrane walls with the unmistakable honeycomb structure are still there, and characterise the visual imagery of the place. To ensure that ZOOM is nevertheless perceived as an independent club with its own recognition value, the operators of Zoom Frankfurt GmbH and client Ardi Goldman called on the expertise of lighting designer JoJo Tillmann, among others. For the individual areas of ZOOM, he planned for the project with spotlights from the Cameo portfolio.

Cameo Light Installation at ZOOM Club Frankfurt with Cameo ZENIT W300 Wash Light Cameo AZOR B1 Cameo MOVO BEAM Z100 — © JoJo Tillmann

Ardi Goldman and JoJo Tillman had already worked together in the past on the club known as “Fortuna Somewhere”. Tillmann also had plenty of creative leeway with the ZOOM project, and was responsible for the complete lighting design in the building. For Tillmann, working with light in a project like this goes far beyond classic lighting design: “The work involves more than just lighting; it is much more of an artistic installation that plays with the architecture, changing and connecting it. That’s why I give my works individual titles and keep them as independent works in a catalogue raisonné,” he says. The current work at ZOOM is titled “space-encompassing light art installation (rGB zOOM)”.

For the design of the dancefloor, Tillmann combined large numbers of Cameo’s ZENIT W300, AZOR B1, MOVO BEAM Z100 and PixBar 600 Pro spotlights. While the ZENIT W300 Wash Lights wield the broad (effect) brush as area lights and strobes, the AZOR B1 Beam Moving Heads emphasise the room’s geometry at the central, round light rig in the middle of the room. Meanwhile, the MOVO BEAM Z100 Beams and the PixBar 600 Pro LED bars are dedicated to another geometric shape – the triangle. “With the PixBar 600 Pro, we wanted to simulate an effect of a single, long luminaire on the ceiling,” Tillmann continues. In a competitive shootout, the Cameo LED bar won out for the role, thanks to its broad colour spectrum (which includes UV LED) and the geographical proximity to the manufacturer and developer – the Adam Hall Group’s headquarters are located only about 25 km north of Frankfurt.

In the surrounding lounge and gastronomy areas, 127 Cameo H1 FC houselights provide flexible coloured illumination. With its slim, reduced design, the H1 can be seamlessly integrated into a huge variety of different areas and ambiences, and it also wins the hearts of many with its flexible control options: “Via the RJ45 connections, I can send four universes to the luminaire via Cat5 cable and use the dip switches on the back of the housing to determine which universe the H1 listens to,” says Tillmann, who deliberately chose the lighting consoles from Chamsys due to the high number of DMX universes in the ZOOM.

The lighting designer had had the Cameo brand on his radar for many years – but for some reason, it never resulted in a collaboration. This changed when Tillmann studied Light Application at the Technical University of Ilmenau in 2019. There, he met Stefan Czernik, who had already won the Future Talents Project young talent competition in 2017 with his innovative spotlight measurement process and was now working at Cameo as a development engineer.

“Cameo has made a big leap from consumer products to professional fixtures in recent years. I particularly see this with the younger generation of lighting designers, who use Cameo with conviction. At the same time, the price/performance factor still plays a big role in the choice, as well as its growing availability at the major dry hire companies.”
JoJo Tillmann