Ars Electronica’s outstanding international reputation assures it a place in the limelight during Linz’s term as European Capital of Culture in 2009. The city is now creating an appropriate architectural setting for this starring role by expanding the Ars Electronica Center. The planning is the work of Treusch architecture, Vienna.

The new Ars Electronica Center is a one-of-a-kind facility. Its uniqueness is betokened by its external form. This bold architectural statement is an instant highlight within the Linz cityscape’s ensemble, yet it still sets itself apart at first—none of its edges run parallel, everything appears skewed, elements simultaneously pulling apart and merging together. A structure that’s constantly assuming new forms depending on the perspective from which it’s viewed. And one that withholds revelation of its scope and dimensions until the moment of direct physical encounter.

More than 5000m ² of glass facade covering the new Ars Electronica Center was assembled with 1100 LED light strips (RGBW – Red, Green, Blue and White High Power LED `s) . Each of the approximately 4400 channels (RGBW 4 Channel light bar) is individually adressable and adjustable between 0-100%. Imagery from patterns to homogeneous color surfaces are possible. The result is a holistic entity, a striking highlight of the Linz cityscape, and the architectural counterpart of the Lentos Museum of Modern Art on the opposite bank of the Danube. Overall, this project uses about 40 000 high power LEDs, 1100 pcs LED drivers, about 20km cable, several distributors and controls. By using the latest LED driver technology, the average electricity consumption is up to 10 kWh at night.

via: AEC, ledfassaden.at, Treusch Architektur
Photos: AEC / rubra

Rundle Lantern will be launched at 7.30pm Friday 24 October! Be there as it lights up Adelaide for the first time. Join the celebration with music, entertainment and more.

Constructed around the face of the Rundle Street U-Park, the Rundle Lantern is a digital canvas that uses computer controlled LEDs to illuminate 748 square panels to deliver a unique platform for art. Its purpose is to enrich, invigorate and enliven the intersection of Rundle Street and Pulteney Street.

At 1066 square metres, the Rundle Lantern can be programmed to display simple numbers, letters and geometric shapes as well as an infinite array of lights, colour, morphing designs and patterns.

Rundle Lantern Alternate ColourIllumination is through 17,952 light emitting diodes (LED) configured as 5.984 of each colour – red, green and blue through 1496 units that each contain 12 clusters of red, green and blue LED’s. The LED’s can create any configuration of 16 million colours which are reflected upwards onto 748 aluminium panels of 1.1 m x 1 m.

The Rundle Lantern was designed by Fusion, an Adelaide-based agency for the digital age following a competitive design tender by the Adelaide City Council’s Urban Design team.

The Rundle Lantern was launched at the end of October and operates each night from dusk to midnight, with hours extended for special events.

via: Fusion, cityofadelaide

Concert Hall Aarhus is the setting for an interactive piece that invites the citizens of the city to be part of a shared experience. In contrast to billboards, Aarhus by Light is not driven by commercial interests. Rather it is an alternative staging of the encounter between the citizens of Aarhus and a cultural landmark. It is a blend of architecture, ornament, and interactive entertainment. People experience the facade in a multitude of situations. They may be headed for the Concert Hall or passing by on their way to shopping. Some may cast a quick glance and hurry on, while others will be lured to explore the interactive potentials of the facade.

It has been a challenge to come up with a design that functions with all of these situations in mind. However, we carry out the Aarhus by Light experiment precisely to gain insights into the workings of media facades.

The interactive facade consists of 180 m2 LED displays. The displays are not in the shape of a giant rectangular TV, rather they form an organic shape that becomes part of the architecture.
The facade is interactive. On the path towards the concert hall, a number of sensors capture the movements of passers-by and transform them to silhouettes on the facade. In this way, you can contact and play with the luminous creatures.

via: aarhusbylight.dk, cavi.dk

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).

On October 6, Pleinmuseum visited Paris, as part of the Nuit Blanche. In cooperation with the Institut Néerlandais, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, and the city of Paris, the pavilion stroke down at Place de la Bastille.
Pleinmuseum is a mobile exhibition pavilion that places itself at the hearts of public life, opens as a flower, takes on new appearances every day and travels on after a while. Every evening from sunset Pleinmuseum will present a variety of the 100% digital collection. In each location also new artists are invited to create a new contribution to Pleinmuseum.

Pleinmuseum is a new concept: an open and flexible museum that is approachable and accessible, placed on a square in the city centre, forming a natural part of urban life. During daytime, the pavilion remains closed and as such symbolically refers to the ‘white cube’, the paradigmatic model of the modernist museum. After sunset, the cube opens itself hydraulically and forms a dynamic architectural installation that embraces space. The white walls become projection screens that continually take on new appearances, like the skin of a chameleon. In this manner, Pleinmuseum becomes a temporary stage for visual communication; a platform through which artists and designers can communicate with a broad audience.
The designer of Pleinmuseum, René van Engelenburg, focuses on the relationship between art and public. He intends to develop projects, mostly mobile, temporary and open architectural structures that forge a dynamic relationship with public space, activating this space as the key physical and conceptual parameter for the ideas of the participating designers and artists.

via: pleinmuseum.nl
Photos: Marc Verhille – Stichting Pleinmuseum

The Aquatics Centre in Bejing, commonly known as the Water Cube, will be the home for nearly all of the 2008 Summer Olympics aquatic events. This unusual venue spans some 80,000 square meters, and will have approximately 440,000 LEDs embedded throughout the structure.

The Water Cube integrates the geometry of water bubbles into a rectangular, plastic structure. LED lighting fixtures will illuminate the bubble designs from inside the structure’s translucent walls, allowing the entire building to glow with extraordinary color-changing LED light.

via: beijing2008.com
photos: by Paul Hickman via Flickr

NOVA, a project from the 150-Jahr-Jubilee of the ETH Zurich, is that world-wide first three-dimensional, bivalent color display. The Six tons heavy lightobject can not only display abstract visualizations, but also photographic and cinematic picture sequences. It will hang three years in the Zurich station hall.

NOVA is a right parallelepiped with a surface area of five times five meters and a height of a meter. 25000 individually addressable light balls can light up in more than 16 million colors. Common are two-dimensional displays, which are already present in the main station. Three-dimensional structures with large depth of shade and the characteristic, as two-dimensional displays to likewise function (bivalent displays so mentioned), are still unknown. This three-dimensional structure was selected, because under any circumstances a further wall-like structure in the main station should not be installed. The pictures shown on the display are renewed with a frequency by 25 cycles per second, i.e., dynamic procedures can be shown.

The idea for the object comes from Horao GmbH, a future spin off of the ETH Zurich. The development of the technical overall system as well as the hardware comes from the ETH close Supercomputing System AG, and the software was developed at the computer Graphics Laboratory of the ETH Zurich. Research results from 17 different institutes flowed meanwhile into the project, and the development still continues.

Thanks to Oliver Schürer for the hint!
More Information via: horao.biz

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).

During November 2006 BLIP set up a transparent ten metre LED display in the botanical glasshouse of Sunderland’s Museum and Wintergarden for the National Glass Centre’s Snowdome project. Until early January 2007 an international group of artists including Flunk from the UK, Claire Davies from Germany and China’s 3Gi exhibited works on the display using the internet.

ElementLabs LED curtain was used in a flexible free-hanging installation which allowed display of full motion imagery both from within the glasshouse as well as the public space of the park, where there was also a webcam enabling the building to be viewed online.

BLIP’s Display Manager computer installation, using WiFi links to connect distant cameras and image generation provided secure websites; allowed moving imagery developed in other countries to be loaded on to the installation and viewed immediately. Curators were able to change the program of works remotely from any internet browser. This was the first time that the development and curation of a public installation had been conducted completely over the internet.

Snowdome was funded by Culture10, Sunderland and Newcastle and Gateshead councils and the Arts Council of Great Britain.

The National Library of Belarus, an architectural diamond, is lit at night in stunning fashion by 4646 color-changing RGB LED fixtures.
In 2006, Minsk received a new architectural symbol – a brand new building to house the National Library of Belarus. The twenty-three storey library is designed in the form of a rhombicuboctahedron (diamond) and symbolizes the enormous value of knowledge that mankind has stored in books.

“The authors suggested hiding the light sources behind the glass to create an illusion of a giant color display,” continues Kramarenko. “A total of 4646 color-changing LED fixtures were installed all around the building, effectively creating a monitor with 25×25 meter sides and 62 meters in diameter.
“As a result, spectators are able to observe a fantastic show with incredible dynamic plots from hundreds of meters away. It is an extraordinary creative venue for lighting designers.”

The entire color-changing system was designed and produced by Walter Industries (Minsk, Belarus), a 100% subsidiary of a Canadian lighting manufacturer GVA Lighting, Inc. The system consists of 4646 custom-made RGB light fixtures (STAR), 1349 controllers, 54 splitters, one channel splitter RS485-1/8, one converter USB/RS485-1 and one personal computer. Protocol RS485 was chosen for maximal reliability of the system.

via: gvalighting.com
, walterindustries.com

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).

The Palacio de las Artes Reina Sofia is an extraordinary architectural achievement and cultural landmark in the heart of Valencia. Designed by famed architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava, the performing arts center makes use of cutting-edge technologies that complement its contemporary design.

The building’s lighting design was conceptualized by CA2L Il•luminació, a Barcelona-based lighting design firm, who specified Color Kinetics’ ColorBlast 12 systems to adorn the building with color and movement. A total of 104 systems were installed along the top of the building and addressed in pairs, generating symmetrical effects on either side of the building.

via: www.colorkinetics.com