Top 5 of our Favorite Things: Interactive Urban Screens
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While brands, advertisers and window (un)dressers are beginning to include dynamic digital displays in their PR strategies, the gritty underworld of cutting-edge creativity is seeing an explosion of interactive projects that invite public participation. Utilizing computer graphics, LED light-walls, motion tracking, and any other new-fangled devices that you care to mention, digital fata morganas are engaging unsuspecting audiences in cities around the world. Here is our pick of five super-smashing ones.
1. Video Painting by Sweatshoppe
Artists Bruno Levy and Blake Shaw spend their free time fabricating guerilla technologies to augment public space. Here we see an uncut video painting which was shot 100% live with 0% special effects. The Sweatshoppe boys aim to fuse pop accessibility with technically advanced geekology – a fusion they feel is missing from the world of experimental media. Amazing stuff!
2. 555 Kubik by Rossa & Rossa
3D precision-beaming means buildings and structures become canvases for endless re-invention. Here we see Hamburg’s Kunsthalle being unshackled from the confines of those rigid, rationalist mores favoured by its stern architect Oswald M Ungers. “How it would be if a house was dreaming”, they say… Breathtaking.
3. Sniff by Karolina Sobecka
Do you ever get the feeling you’re witnessing the beginning of something big? Created with the Unity3d Game Engine, this interactive projection renders the dog visualization in real time, using video tracking to inform its behaviour according to what it “sees” – engaging with the viewer (or rather “participant”), all the while. Imagine what brands might do with this technology– billboards chasing you down the street! You can run but you can’t hide! But for no – magic.
4. Tagtool by OMA international
As an artist (in this case iink & Maki) draws pictures, an animator adds movement with a gamepad, to create live animation in it truest form. A simple set of controls gives way to limitless artistic complexity that can be used as a VJ tool, creative video game, or intuitive animation generator. All the tech is open source, which means you can build your VERY OWN Tagtool too!
5. Blinkenlights by Chaos Computer Club
We love us some helpful hackers! This groundbreaking interactive light installation in Berlin dates way back to 2002. But it is still badass! The organizers invited the public to create content, kindly providing a full set of software tools and animation specs to do so. And for those who like to see their love letters and intimate thoughts plastered in giant, irreversible blinking lights to millions of passers-by, there was also that option! The shape(shift) of things to come we reckon…
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