GreenPix – Zero Energy Media Wall – is a groundbreaking project applying sustainable and digital mediatechnology to the curtain wall of Xicui entertainment complex in Beijing, near the site of the 2008 Olympics.Featuring the largest color LED display worldwide and the first photovoltaic system integrated into a glass curtain wall in China, the building performs as a self-sufficient organic system, harvesting solar energy by day and using it to illuminate the screen after dark, mirroring a day’s climatic cycle.The Media Wall will provide the city of Beijing with its first venue dedicated to digital media art, while offering the most radical example of sustainable technology applied to an entire building’s envelope to date. The building will open to the public in May 2008, with a specially commissioned program of video installations and live performances by artists from China, Europe and the US.The project was designed and implemented by Simone Giostra & Partners, a New York-based office with a solid reputation for its innovative curtain walls in Europe and the US, with lighting design and façade engineering by Arup in London and Beijing. Content manager Luisa Gui will coordinate the opening program with software development by New York-based media artist Jeremy Rotsztain.

Greenpix behaves like an organic system, absorbing solar energy during the day and then generating light from the same power that evening. The project promotes the uncompromised integration of sustainable technology in new Chinese architecture, responding to the aggressive and unregulated economic development currently undertaken by the industry, often at the expense of the environment.With the support of leading German manufacturers Schueco and SunWays, the architect Simone Giostra with Arup developed a new technology for laminating photovoltaic cells in a glass curtain wall and oversaw the production of the first glass solar panels by Chinese manufacturer SunTech. The polycrystalline photovoltaic cells are laminated within the glass of the curtain wall and placed with changing density on the entire building’s skin.The density pattern increases building’s performance, allowing natural light when required by interior program, while reducing heat gain and transforming excessive solar radiation into energy for the media wall.

GreenPix is a large-scale display comprising of 2,292 color (RGB) LED’s light points comparable to a 24,000 sq. ft. (2.200 m2) monitor screen for dynamic content display. The very large scale and the characteristic low resolution of the screen enhances the abstract visual qualities of the medium, providing an art-specific communication form in contrast to commercial applications of high resolution screens in conventional media façades.

via: greenpix.org

This project has been shown at the Media Facades Exhbition Berlin 2008 and was published in the Exhibition Companion
(download the Catalogue Pdf – 7 Mb).

JetBlue knows its customers, thanks to an innovative traveling exhibit designed to capture its passengers’ innermost thoughts.

Known as “The Story Booth,” the interactive exhibit encouraged visitors to share their favorite JetBlue stories, which were filmed for use on the airline’s website and in its advertising campaigns. In order to attract visitors to the exhibit during its 10-city tour, the exterior had to be dynamic and eye catching. Color Kinetics’ LED lighting technology proved to be just the right tool.

The booth measured 16 feet long by 10.5 feet high, enclosing a simple automated audio/video recording system to capture visitors’ stories. To animate the booth’s exterior, 10,000 nodes of iColor Flex® SL were mounted behind translucent panels installed on a steel frame on one side of the booth. Additionally, 700 larger nodes of iColor Flex SLX were installed on the two adjoining sides of the booth, essentially wrapping it with points of dynamic light. The nodes are individually addressable, which allows them to act as pixels for low-resolution video displays.

Because the booth was built to travel, durability and simplicity were paramount. The low power draw of the iColor Flex SL and iColor Flex SLX nodes allowed for easy set-up in each city without complex electrical requirements. “We had a whole video wall that used less than four 20-amp circuits of power, which is very low considering the scale of 10,700 nodes,” said Lazer. The booth was transported from city-to-city by flatbed truck with the entire Color Kinetics installation remaining intact.

via: colorkinetics.com

In 2002, Ned Kahn worked with the staff of Technorama, the major science center in Switzerland, and their architects, Durig and Rami, to create a facade for the building which is composed of thousands of aluminum panels that move in the air currents and reveal the complex patterns of turbulence in the wind. The facade is visible from the large urban plaza in front of the museum.

via: nedkahn.com

Troika has been commissioned by Artwise Curators to create ‘All the time in the world’, a 22m long electroluminescent wall that marks the entrance to the First and Concorde Galleries lounges in the new Heathrow Terminal 5. ‘All the time in the World’ extends the conventional notion of a world clock, which commonly concentrates on capital cities in different time zones, by linking real time to places with exciting and romantic associations.

For ‘All the time in the world’ we developed a new typology of electroluminescent displays, called ‘Firefly’, which relies on a custom-designed segmented typeface (patent pending.) Apart form its incredible thinness (less than a millimeter), our display boosts high aesthetic impact and an extreme versatility in the characters displayed (up to five different fonts can be shown in our arrangement). This modular approached also allowed us to animate the letters as if they were hand written onto the display, a feature that was at the very origin of our research.

The resulting display has unique properties: it doesn’t cast light and disturbing shadow on its surrounding, it can be curved, and is extremely competitive compared to other display technologies such as LED if text only is required. Based on a vectorial design, its advantages are all the more noticeable in large scale (like here) or very small. The technique is transferable to other emerging technology such as OLED, PLED or E-paper. This is the first time that a display system of this kind has been implemented worldwide.

via: troika.uk.com