Media Architecture Institute

Leerstandmelder is an online map that allows city inhabitants to report vacant spaces in their surroundings. The map highlights in this way some of the inequalities created in the city by long-term vacant spaces, as such could be inhabited or used by people in need for them. According to a report released by The guardian many of the empty spaces in Europe are bought just as investment and some have never been used.

The phenomenon has already reached an alarming scale, as approximately 11 million houses remain vacant in Europe. It doesn’t matter if they are old or new, living or industrial spaces, if they are in the centre or the periphery, or if they are public or private. They directly affect people who struggle to find affordable flats and work spaces in their cities.

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LowRes is an interactive installation that used color spotlights to turn the facade of a decaying building into a media facade. It used a simple technical solution to turn the windows into pixels and create interactions with the spectators. The installation was created by SENSORY-MINDS for the Luminale 2014. For the realization of the project the team found a building that was at risk of collapsing and thus vacant. The building, located at Offenbach am main, offered the perfect conditions for the realization of such installation, as the evenly distributed windows could be turned easily into huge pixels. This particular characteristic was used by the team to create a low-resolution media facade that could be controlled interactively by the spectators. (more…)

“In the air, tonight” is a reactive installation for the facade of the Ryerson School of Image and the Ryerson Image Centre. The installation, created by the artists Patricio Davila and David Colangelo, transforms the building into a glowing signal that raises awareness about homelessness. After its premiere in February 2014 the installation will be re-staged on Mai 23th from sundown until midnight as as part of the Subtle Technologies Festival.

The blue, waving animations shown at the building, are programmed by the artists to react to local weather conditions like wind speed and direction. These animations will change their dynamics and their color when the twitter hashtag #homelessness accumulates a number messages. Thus, anyone with a twitter account can interact with the animations through the account @itat2014 or by creating and re-twitting messages that include the mentioned hashtag. The website of the project intheairtonight.org also shows the interactions through a dynamic background that mimics the animations of the facade.

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Orchestrating the depth of light is an installation that uses LED i.e. light emitting diodes to create an interactive experience in the city. Placed at the Roßmarkt in Frankfurt’s downtown, the installation integrates interactive technologies and architecture in a historical and commercial context.

The name of the installation explains its interactive concept. If a person triggers a camera flash in front of the installation, the LED lights will start to blink across the structure. The blinking starts close to the point where the flash was triggered and wander slowly away. This set-up mimics the natural reflexions of the light, i.e. orchestrates the depth of light.

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Created in 2011 by Timo Santala, Olli Sirén and Antti Tuomola the Restaurant day encourages common people to open their own restaurants, cafés and bars for a single day. The initial restaurant day was the result of the founders’ frustration with bureaucratic hurdles and regulations that made impossible to create pop-up eateries in Finland. They discovered, however, that the Finnish laws allowed to open a restaurant without permits if was only for a single day. Then they came with the idea of promoting a bit of civil disobedience by organizing the restaurant day, an event that turns the city into a carnival that promotes and celebrates food culture, only for a day.

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dotvot.es is an interactive installation placed on the facade of the Northeastern University’s Ryder Hall. Dotvot.es was opened on the 24th of April and is working on the evening hours. The installation comprises two large LED matrices mounted on a corner window of the building. The matrices are placed perpendicular to each other, creating a 3 dimensional effect that resembles a cube matrix.

To control the dotvot.es installation the students developed an online application that collects, aggregates and delivers data generated by the users. The online application asks the visitors about their current feelings showing them the following options: anxious, relieved, determined, exited, or exhausted. The votes gathered are processed and then displayed in the media facade.

With dotvot.es the creators want to show how interactive media architecture contributes to the everyday life in a meaningful way, by visualizing the mood of the people inside and outside of the university campus.

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The Civil Debate Wall allows students, teachers and citizens to share their positions regarding a broad range of national issues such as income distribution, civil rights, and environmental policies, among others. The debates are made possible by a system that by mixes large touch screens with a website and a texting service to connect the opinions and create constructive dialogues across different platforms. The elements of the system are synchronized to deliver a single experience to all the participants and enable the following of a particular discussion.

The Wall is installed at University of Florida’s Pugh Hall. It comprises 5 large touch screens that show the current question, an answer to this question an a picture of the answer’s author. The users can engage by touching the screen and creating an answer to the main question or by giving a reply to another user’s answer. After posting their comment, they can decide whether they want to follow the conversation through text messages.

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