Awards

LED Frieze

Switzerland, Basel

The facade of the new building for the Kunstmuseum Basel produces its effect through the symbiosis of stone and light: a three-metre-high frieze encircles the building at a height of twelve metres. Its narrow horizontal joints create a fine relief and are cast in shadow by the incident daylight. The light frieze uses this for artistic effect. White LEDs are set into the joints so they cannot be seen from the street yet precisely illuminate the specially formed grooves. Reflection on the light-coloured bricks of the frieze creates an indirect, diffused light that can be used to display both text and graphics.

The subtle way the frieze is enlivened by light allows the facade to change its character, seeming sometimes more and sometimes less transparent, and suggests diverse interactions between the building's interior and the surrounding urban space. During the day, the brightness of the illuminated joints corresponds to that of the ambient light outside. For the viewer, a powerfully poetic play of light and shadow emerges, which is fleeting and yet seems to be as solid as the masonry itself. As daylight fades, the frieze adapts to the new environmental conditions, becoming more radiant. It creates the illusion that the masonry is porous, as if it would enable someone outside to view into the building.

The light frieze was designed by Christ & Gantenbein in collaboration with iart to be an integral part of the architecture. It takes the stylistic element of a frieze, which has been used since antiquity to decorate and give order to buildings, and brings it into the digital age by translating it technologically and aesthetically. In this way, archaic power and urban networking come together to create a new kind of media facade.

Photo credits: Derek Li Wan Po, Stefano Graziani and Christ & Gantenbein

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Train station Falkenberg

Germany, Falkenberg/Elster

We decided to work with the lit insisde-space of the building and also with the cantilevered outside-roofs on both main facades. The construction of theses roofs that is visible from below consists of huge members of laminated timber. The spaces between this wooden members received a folded wooden cladding optimized to reflect the hidden fluorescent lights. We choose fluorescent lights because of the special light ambiance that is obtained when fluorescents wash over rough wooden surfaces. The inside ceiling light fixtures as well as the one on the outside are equipped with dimmable electronic ballasts controlled by Dali. After sunset the lights under both roofs – but not the lights inside – automatically start their program.

The Dali-functions inside are programmed in such manner that the fixtures can be managed by standard wall-switches during service hours (ticket office and restaurant) according to the normal requirements of the user. When leaving the building the users simply turn the main switch and the ceiling fixtures immediately become part of the light moves that already have started on the outside roofs.

The light programs consist of slow random patterns that were developed and work well together with the spatial condition of the architecture. They do not convey “information” in a classical meaning they rather inform the architectural environment - by light. Then eventually two digits (minutes of the hour) are displayed on the roof: It's not a clock – it is more like a building that tries to get in contact with the persons waiting under its roof waiting for their next train to come. Individual perception of time makes time appear stretched or sometimes contracted – especially when one is in the state of “waiting”. Therefore this characters sometimes appear three times per minute or they do not appear probably for an quarter of an hour. Like your mum reminding you at unpredictable intervalls to to watch the time ... when you were little.

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KLUBHAUS St. Pauli

Germany, Hamburg

The Klubhaus St. Pauli is a six storey-building housing music clubs, theaters and offices on approx. 5.000 m2 right in the middle of Hamburg‘s Reeperbahn district. Opened in September 2015, its media facade is a unique approach to the increasingly relevant phenomenon of media architecture. 177m2 of high res media mesh, 265 m2 of RGB-panels and 50 m2 of high res glass displays in the elevator area were combined to form a media facade that constitutes an integral part of the building’s identity rather than merely functioning as a screen. The concept for the architectural design, the media layer and the basic media content were developed simultaneously, involving experts from different fields.

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LAX - Tom Bradley International Terminal

United States, Los Angeles

Daktronics delivered and installed over $20 million of cutting-edge architecturally integrated indoor video displays at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). The customized Daktronics integrated environmental media system is architecturally integrated with the building and original content was developed for the displays to engage, entertain and inform passengers as they move through the airport’s new Tom Bradley International Terminal (TBIT).

Building upon the thematic elements of travel, the content shown on these high-resolution displays helped fulfill the airport’s goal of “transforming the traveler experience.” While promoting the LAX host brand as the creative capitol of the world, the integrated display content also includes the opportunity for sponsor messages as part of the creative content display.

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Morgan Stanley - Times Square Headquarters

United States, New York

In 1995, Daktronics helped Morgan Stanley install their original and iconic Poulin-Morris designed displays. At the time the LED technology was state-of-the-art. Over the next 20 years, the company’s trademark tri-color and monochrome LED tickers became a Times Square fixture and was recognized as one of the Society of Experimental Graphic Design’s “40 Greatest Moments in Environmental Graphic Design.”

Now, two decades later, Morgan Stanley again reached out to Daktronics wanting to transform and modernize their iconic building’s digital displays to better fit the Times Square video technology of today.

Through visionary design and creative content, the new super LED video system has modernized the financial services corporation’s appearance without any actual building renovation. The displays vibrantly transform the site, bringing a new energy and refreshing look to the location while also opening up new, innovative options for Morgan Stanley branding and promotion.

With more than 6 million pixels, 12 million LEDs and 281 trillion colors, the digital canvas of displays broadcast exciting content, featuring Morgan Stanley’s people, insights and data visualization snapshots presenting what’s happening in financial markets throughout the world.

Morgan Stanley’s new Times Square spectacular serves as a testament of what maintaining decades of customer satisfaction and confidence can truly achieve. And proves how a visually stimulating design can be realized when technology and content are carefully and thoughtfully combined.

Our LED video engineers routinely work in partnership with industry colleagues to produce display solutions that transform environments all over the world. This landmark project was a culmination of years spent in a close, hands-on collaboration between Morgan Stanley and Daktronics.

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In The Air, Tonight

Canada, Toronto

In The Air, Tonight used a programmable low-resolution architectural façade in Toronto, the Ryerson Image Arts Centre, to display a blue wave representing local wind speed and dierection and a red pulse triggered by the ongoing conversation around #homelessness on Twitter. The installation also glows white when a donation is made to the STAR learning centre, an organization that helps people with lived experience of homelessness transition into meaningful employment and stable housing. This installation uses data visualization, media architecture, and the city to dramatize an important conversation around this pressing issue. Experiencing key traces of information at an architectural scale can help to create emotional and embodied connections in citizens to common causes and concerns expressed by that information.

In The Air, Tonight on Vimeo

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The Sentiment Cocoon

UK, London

The Sentiment Cocoon is a site specific interactive installation designed by architect Moritz Behrens and lighting designer Konstantinos Mavromichalis for Arup’s headquarters in London. The artwork seeks to capture and express human sentiment through the medium of light. These interactions are then transformed into pulses of light that travel throughout the cocoon. The cocoon generates a striking visual display of light that has been informed by people’s feelings.

The intent was to design a continuous and organic cocoon-like lightweight structure that would wind itself up the atrium and connect all seven floors. The focus is on the exploration of architectural form through digital fabrication, with translucent materials and responsive lighting to facilitate social interaction. The visualisations are designed to encourage individual interactions and collective observations.

When a user swipes her smart card and thus submits her sentiment, a white flash of light instantly illuminates the cocoon. This white flash of light is intended to mirror the participant’s presence and to make her feel like they have actually transformed their presence and sentiment into a pulse of light. The purpose of the visceral lighting response is to playfully reward participation with a moment of instant gratification, which in turn encourages further interactions with the artwork or with bystanders.

The system architecture of the artwork allows for the tracking and displaying of several behaviours. Individual swipe cards such as the London Oyster card enable participants to express how they feel based upon three categories related to workplace wellbeing. These parameters are encoded into lighting patterns that suggest the collective mood of participants. The sentiments are encoded in different colours and movement. Colour gradients, velocity and movement are represented through patterns. Over time, the patterns become recognisable as the overriding sentiment of the day.

The Sentiment Cocoon on Vimeo

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Le Circuit de Bachelard

Canada, Montreal

Le Circuit de Bachelard is a collective and interactive artwork designed for the 40th anniversary of École de technologie supérieure, Université du Québec. It is installed in a 24-meter-long tunnel linking the two main buildings of this engineering school. It was designed by a multidisciplinary team including professors in media arts and engineering, and students.

From the very beginning, the idea was to represent the duality between reason and imagination, an important factor in the creative process in engineering. This duality is symbolized in various ways in the artwork. For example, it was meant to show that technical building hardware could be arranged in an esthetical manner. As such, the design team restricted themselves to the same components – pipes, anchors, electrical boxes – typically used by the university construction department, complementing these components with LEDs and smart control for a vibrant lighting of this otherwise drab concrete space.

RGB LED stripes are integrated to translucent acrylic tubes. These 2827 LEDs are individually controlled using DMX from a PC running Madrix software. The animation of lighting creates routes of running light blobs through the tunnel. Since the lighted tubes share the space with actual electrical and HVAC pipes, the lighting dynamics gives the impression of flow of useful elements (electricity, network data, air) in the building.

A microphone is hidden in an electrical box at the center of the tunnel to allow interactive control. When users blow in an opening in this electrical box, the flow of light is accelerated, a symbol of the contribution of engineers in such technical systems. The artwork was designed as an innovation platform, for students to add elements to the installation in the future, allowing increased interactivity. This platform was successfully tested in 2015 by a team who created a luminous tug of war game in the tunnel, with players using their mobile phones as a controlling device.

Le Circuit de Bachelard on YouTube

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STAR

Malaysia, Butterworth, Penang

The “Star” is a five-storey lighting installation by architect-artist Jun Ong as part of Urban Xchange Festival in Butterworth, Penang, Malaysia. Inspired by the notion of “glitch,” a dodecahedron - a 12-sided star-shaped installation appears almost as an error or a temporary irregularity, suddenly finding itself lodged within the concrete superstructure of an unfinished building by the street of Raja Uda.

The term “glitch” was used to describe a spike or change in voltage in an electric current, first recorded in a space program. It is a manifestation of the sterile conditions of Butterworth, a once thriving industrial port and significant terminal between the mainland and island. The odd juxtaposition of “Star” with its “host” creates new relationships, tangible and intangible. It is an accumulation of digital and analogue irregularities, becoming a transient portal to a new dimension.

Comprised of five hundred metres of steel cables and LED strips, the “Star” abstracts kitsch street decorations with electrical cables and transposing them into a formal, recognizable entity. The cables are anchored to ground, slabs, cantilever beams and adjacent buildings to form the overall shape. As one steps closer, the installation segregates itself into several floors, each becoming its own spatial experience. The form breaks down into glowing lines, each fragment holding its own electrical and structural characteristic.

The spatial installation is a speculation for the future of Butterworth, connecting various existing dimensions on familiar terrains to unearth new relationships. Once the festival is over, the space has been used to host various community activities, events and public parks. It is perhaps the utopian dream – the birth of a star.

The project was curated by Eeyan Chuah and Gabija Grusaite from art centre - Hin Bus Depot. Filmmaker Ronaldas Buozis shot a short film premiering the new project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_L4F7Q9z9A

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Waterlicht

The Netherlands, Amsterdam

WATERLICHT is the dream landscape about the power and poetry of water. As a virtual flood, it shows how high the water could reach without human intervention.

Innovation is a natural part of the DNA of the Dutch landscape through its dikes and creative thinking, yet we almost seem to have forgotten this. WATERLICHT is a powerful and poetic experience to remember.

WATERLICHT consists of wavy lines of light made with the latest LED technology, software and lenses. Originally created for the Dutch District Water Board Rijn & IJssel, the artwork has now travelled to the Museumplein in Amsterdam, with more than 60,000 visitors in 1 night.

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Field of Light

Field of Light on Vimeo

Field of Light, Uluru, Bruce Munro 2016
Photo by: Mark Pickthall

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City Lights Orchestra

France, Strasbourg, Orléans, Mulhouse, Reims, etc..

City Lights Orchestra is a participative visual symphony for the windows of houses and buildings of a city.

City ensemble
Visual and totally silent but musical in essence, the symphony is a rhythmic, highly polyphonic, algorithmic and generative visual composition for potentially thousands of windows that blink, fade in and out, flicker, shiver, pulsate, etc.. all synchronously and across the whole city. Each window score is unique, but they are all in sync with each other, with patterns being developed across all the windows, and global events happening simultaneously everywhere.

Participative
Anybody with an internet connection can join the symphony at any time by just displaying the citylightsorchestra.net web page in their browser. This page immediately plays the visual score, by blinking black and white, etc... By turning their browser full screen and turning off the lights of the room, the screen of the computer illuminates the curtains, walls and ceiling and it is seen from outside through the window, which becomes a giant pixel. Anyone can join in and leave at anytime : the score is composed to be open to any number of interprets. Composition The composition is also open in time, as it is written through a generative algorithm that creates new movements and forms forever, following an initial musical DNA. The dynamics of the beats and blinks originate both in musical structures and in organic rhythms.

Timeframe
The symphony is designed to be played during specific large public events, like Nuits Blanches or festivals, which can gather a large number of participants thanks to a strong communication. Experience By letting everyone be part of the global composition, city lights orchestra creates a strong sense of belonging and empathy among the inhabitants. It is also very playful, while still questioning each and everyone on his or her place in the great system of the city.

City Lights Orchestra on Vimeo

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Spaxels

Spaxels on Vimeo

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FLUIDIC

Italy, Milan

FLUIDIC combines 8 high-speed laser projectors, a physical point cloud formed by 12,000 spheres and the interactions of its visitors to transform Hyundai's design philosophy "Fluidic Sculpture" into a vivid art experience.

A liquid surface. Rising vapor forming a cloud. Seemingly random particles form a larger organized structure like the atoms of a molecule. Shaped by user interaction, molecules of light begin to swarm and aggregate. They are constantly in motion, reacting to the people who seek to engage. Ever-changing dynamic light sculptures are created, conveying the essence of Hyundai’s design language, the inspirational role played by nature and its ability to continuously adapt and evolve.

The suspended point cloud particle’s positions are calculated with a help of a complex computer algorithm from the viewpoints of the laser projectors and create an impression of random arrangement. This allows the laser beams to reach all spheres without occlusion even deep inside the array. The laser lit spheres form three-dimensional graphics without any sweet or blind spots.

Keeping the same density and intensity the FLUIDIC graphics enable their viewers to observe and interact simultaneously from every point of view. To analyze the positions of the visitors, their posture and gestures the installation incorporates multiple 3D camera tracking systems.

FLUIDIC presents a form that is both flexible and solid, a flow with both a distinctive profile and dynamic motion.

FLUIDIC was designed and produced by WHITEvoid as an interactive light art installation for Hyundai's solo exhibition in the Temporary Museum of New Design at the Milan Design Week 2013.

Fluidic on Vimeo

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