Bored by your office’s cold clammy exterior? Then you need to get a hold of the guys at Urbanscreen. This German company uses enormous projectors and a lot of design skill to transform cityscapes into mind blowing art installations. Their latest project in Hamburg adorned an art museum (the Kunsthalle) and had crowds cheering and applauding on the streets. Cheering an art installation? Either Germans are crazier than I thought or Urbanscreen has hit on something big. Watch the video after the break and judge for yourself (cheering not included).
Say goodbye to boring buildings with art installations from Urbanscreen
If this trend catches on, we could see entire cities changed at night into evolving art spaces. With the sagging economy, artists are clamoring for grants and jobs…so why not combine that need with a little urban renewal? The Kunsthalle installation was based on the question: “What would a building dream?” That sounds esoteric, but the project came out very crowd-pleasing. A city-wide project might have the same great combination of artistic merit and public appeal. And it would certainly boost tourism.
But maybe that’s thinking too small. We’ve talked about Total Immersion’s Augmented Reality technology, and how it can combine recorded and synthetic images in real time. Mix AR with building-scale projectors and you could have a city with one foot in virtual reality. The creative potential is staggering. Of course we’ll probably see most buildings turned into billboards, but that might be a small price to pay to live in an interactive urban playground.
As far as I can tell, the technology is pretty basic: mammoth projectors, cameras, and hours upon hours of work on a computer. For all that effort, I’m surprised that the installation only lasted a short time. I might have left the thing up permanently. I should point out that Urbanscreen and the Kunsthalle installation are far from unique. Many artists have projected images onto 3D shapes before. Pablo Valbuena actually did a very similar installation in the Netherlands. As a general trend though, this is pretty cutting edge. And it looks awesome. What more do you want? I look forward to the possibility of traveling down my street and watching the buildings dream.
Tags: art installation, augmented reality, Kunsthalle, projectors, Urbanscreen, virtual reality
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That was amazing footage. I wonder how hard it is to set all the technology in place?
If you want to see a low tech version using just a van, a laptop, and a projector you should check out “laser graffiti”
http://graffitiresearchlab.com/?page_id=76
http://vimeo.com/5756657
Quadrature is a audio/visual performance project by Griduo* in collaboration with Due3* that interacts with the perception of santralistanbul Art and Culture Center’s Main Gallery building located in Istanbul/Turkey. It shows how audio/visual techniques can transform, create, expand, amplify and interpret spaces by using large scale video projections on architecture.
It is a live audio/visual performance composed of animated monochrome geometrical shapes matching the real size and form of the quadrilateral alluminium modules which form the facade of the building. The visual performance is accompanied with a digitally produced soundscape consisting of abstract sounds synchronized to the movement of images re-shaping and transforming the building on which they are projected. The building in turn influences and transforms the projections as well.
*Griduo is formed of Alican Aktürk and Refik Anadol both graduate students and teaching assistants in İstanbul Bilgi University Visual Communication Design. Working in the fields of live video/audio performance and architectural photography, the duo is particularly interested in the relationship between architecture and media.
VVVV Developer; Sebastian Neitsch
@Griduo, GREAT LINK! We appreciate it.
@Aaron – You’ve presumably read Neal Stephenson’s novel Diamond Age? In it, thanks to nanotechnology, every flat (and not flat) surface of buildings are turned into giant screens with built in nanos loud speakers.
Now, imagine if you will every building turned into a projector-billboard (and I imagine with the expense of those huge projectors and all the electric juice it takes to run them, it would be inevitable to pay for them). Imagine them turned into AR billboards. That know where you are, and follow you, shouting, as you try to walk past the building.
No thanks!
But it’s probably inevitable. Especially since we’ve already got flexible OLED screens in the pipe, and flexible,stretchable carbon nanotube loudspeaker fabric, that doesn’t distort sound as it’s stretched/bent.
In Quebec City we have an architectural projection on grain silos that is 600 feet wide by 30 meters high. It’s the biggest projection in the world.
http://lacaserne.net/index2.php/other_projects/
Just saying
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