Living Walls
Sunday, February 21, 2010 at 1:48PM
itchy i

I really like this concept here. Giving life to the outer surface of a building by projecting computer graphics over it is defnit some I wished I'd see more often. What about turning a whole city for a week into a semi virtual re-invented version of itself? Everything transforms constantly. There are so many boring structures in pretty much every city. Why not turning concrete blocks into living colourful creatures from a different universe?

555 KUBIK | facade projection | from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

 

These guys from urbanscreen have some good ideas. For example this one here where they've turned a building into an interactive flipper video game.

Pinwall | interactive facade pinball | urban screening from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

This reminds me of a at the time ground breaking installation called Blinkenlights by the Chaos Computer Club in 2001 in Berlin. They created a simple dot-matrix on the Haus des Lehrers building right next to the Alexanderplatz. By installing 8 times 18 lamps behind the windows which were connected to a computer they were able to display simple messages, graphics and animations.

But for me the best thing was the possiblity to play Pong - the classic video game - on it too. You had to ring a phone number with your mobile phone which then connected you to their computer. By pressing 2 for up and 8 for down you could play the game standing in front of a 18 storey high screen. I remember being completely blown away by this idea!

If you fancy finding out more about it check out http://metaebene.com/blinkenlights

 

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