“…If you think of every light in the city, …essentially being a pixel…that is programmable, that is editable, that can transform the experience of the city… that respond to the people moving around in the city and engage in the city… This is a fundamental reformulation of the idea of ….urban lightning…  Now you can embrace every single light source, and think of the entire city as a programmable display.” -William Mitchell*

Since 2008, PhD Candidate from the Smart Cities Group at the MIT Media Lab Susanne Seltinger,  Danny Perry from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and Dawood Rouben from the Architecture department, are working on what they call the “Liberated Pixels” project.

They are experimenting with systems aimed to blur the boundaries between what we conceive as urban lightning and public digital displays. In contrast to typical urban screens, their concept doesn’t restrain pixels to rigid frames. Liberated pixels can be applied to surfaces in any configuration and communicate with each other to enable playful patterns. A second development in progress consists of wireless liberated pixels, what they call Urban pixels. These solar-powered units are programmable and have a distributed interface which brings it flexibility.

More information and a video of the pixels in action can be found at the LabCAST webpage.

*Founder of the Smart Cities Group at the MIT and author of the books “City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn” (1995), “E-topia” (1999) — subtitled  “Urban Life, Jim — but Not as We Know It,”  and “Me ++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City”(2003), among others.

“When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. Process replaces product in importance, just as system supersedes structure.”(Roy Ascott, 1968) (Retrieved 24.10.11 from http://www.i-dat.org/about/)

Katy Connor, Bristol-based artist and associate artist at the research group i-DAT (part of  the Centre for Art, Media and Design Research, Faculty of Art at the University of Plymouth) works in the line between art and technology and her work reflects it by linking her art to, e.g., scientific processes of Atomic Force Microscopy. Her data-visualization piece PURE FLOW, exhibited at the Plymouth Arts Centre, reveals the noise generated between GPS data systems and multiple satellites, 3G networks and Wifi hotspots as a tangible presence in the environment. An App for Ipod and Ipad enables the user to directly touch these signals, creating visual and sonic patterns that respond to their environment and movement in space. You can listen to the artist on BBC Click talking about her work. Specially interesting is the idea of rendering the invisible information that otherwise remains unnoticed by our nude perception.

When confronted to the question What is a screen?, multiple ideas emerge. As a medium, there has to be an input, and an output of information in form of light. The image shown is taken from Bruce Munro’s light installation as seen at the Eden Project in Cornwall frcom November 08 to March 09. It has 6,000 acrylic stems, each of which is run by fibre optic cables, that connect the clear glass spheres. There are 11 external projectors; the stems themselves hold no electric power at all. The installation which also has been placed in other locations covers an area of 1200 squared meters. Could these liberated pixels become alive and interact with the visitors of the field? It would be interesting to see this project become an interactive sound and light installation. An example of such an installation is the work of Daan Roosengaarde, dutch artist and architect, “Dune.“

FLUXe is the name of Canada’s largest interactive LED screen installation which is located at Scotia Plaza at the Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. According to its creative director, Steve di Lorenzo, it celebrates the notion of change as a fundamental reality in Toronto. With more than 30 square meters of surface, it can be used as a canvas to paint with unique digital paintbrushes designed by international artists, including  Zena Holloway, Eduardo Recife, Lorenzo Petrantoni, Eric Chan, Christian Toth, Nanami Cowdroy, Huge Elliot,  Alex Kurina, Janice Kun, and Graham Miller.
Using a tablet, the attendees can collaborate with friends or strangers in creating their unique pieces.

Between the 21st and 30th of September the Led it Up Team from the MediaLab Amsterdam team got a spot at the Nederlands Film Festival. Between 19.00hrs and 21.00hrs people could use their smart phones to play the game Galgje with Dropstuff’s screen placed in Neude Utrecht. Using dutch film database video content, and part of the Culture Vortex and Beeld en Geluid initiative,  they aimed to their movie fans/knowers public. There was great weather and a relaxed ambient making it easy to enjoy a nice time there.

This interesting project  is product of a joint effort between Nordkapp and  Urbanscale. It attempts to build a quite interesting layer in the city for information gathering of ambient data like weather or maps and connecting people to places and/or services.This “operating system” for the city answers three main needs:  Wayshowing / finding a way through the interactive maps, What’s going on right now and where?/ which helps people connect better with the local services or events, and direct feedback to the city such as ambient media.

They are concerned about not adding noise to the urban environment but instead contributing to it by encouraging transparency, interactivity and immediatiteness for the people. “Our vision is to make the city more accessible and enjoyable for both residents and visitors through a situated interactive service. By sharing real-time data and feedback about the city, we aim to create a more efficient, transparent relationship between city administrators and citizens.”  It is also a tool with which citizens can be connected to their local governments: the ability of residents in a specific neighborhood to report if urban furniture or infrastructure such as a street should be repaired is possible through this system.

To read more about it, visit their site.

This year’s PICNIC festival  spanned the theme of Urban Futures. The question on the table was how cities of the future could adapt to deal with a global population set to hit 8 billion by the year 2030. A broad variety of talks, workshops and activities were held in Amsterdam’s northern docklands in a temporary settlement built just for the event.

Urban Screens crew visited the festival, and couldn’t miss a workshop of our special interest: “Urban Screens and the Electric City“.  It took place on the 1st day of the festival, Wednesday September 14th at the Crystal Palace. Different speakers shared their ideas and at the end of the session there was a group activity to creatively propose content for urban screens.

Matt Cottam from Telart presented Soundaffects, an experiential project by Parsons The New School for Design. It takes environmental data, like weather or traffic, or even motion and connectivity,  and transforms it or expresses it with musical sounds. The idea is to let us see and listen to our environment, from a new point of view, a different way to understand our cities. Matt  uploaded some pictures of the results of the quick workshop, you can check them out in his flickr account by clicking on the picture:

Another speaker was Maia Garau from XPlane. Their company focuses on Business Design Thinking. They combine research, collaborative consulting, design thinking, social media technology and visual communication. She made an open invite to everyone to attend their Visual Thinking School, which is open to the public and takes place every 1st Thursday of every month at their offices in Portland and Amsterdam.

Beeker Northam from Dentsu London Strategy Director was also present. Dentsu is a communication agency and they are working on various innovative advertisement projects. An interesting project by their authorship is a video which was produced using Ipad tablets to “paint” with light. You can check the make-off in the following link: Making Future Magic.

Chris Heathcote, Creative Technologist also from Dentsu noted how screens have crept into our cities. He addressed examples like the tube in London, where in a period of 50 seconds you can see 60 screens while going down or up the escalators. He also exposed the fact that there are more than 75,000 screens installed in public in the UK. Some of the characteristics that he can relate to urban screens is that they are normally silent, you can’t turn them off, they might be or not controllable, might be or not aware of you through sensors. Uses and location, he added, are important characteristics to think about, some screens are used in many contexts for many different reasons, from gyms to post offices, there are screens for information, for interaction, advertisement… some of them are even virtually unreadable because of their location, etc.  You can read more of his ideas about urban screens in the following link:  http://anti-mega.com/antimega/2009/09/30/screens-in-context

London-based Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving improvements in human and animal health. This year they celebrate their 75th anniversary, and they hold a special exhibition that introduces visitors to some of the key people behind the Trust’s achievements, including the Human Genome Project; malaria drug discovery; funding of science and art collaborations; and research to understand the human brain.

They have given the seventh in a series of annual design comissions to rAndom International, to welcome their visitors through a façade intervention named “Reflex”. This light Installation will be living at Wellcome Collection building’s windows until April 2012 and it is  located at 215 Euston Road. It now is the habitat of an organism that represents itself in the form of light, which reacts by establishing physical responses between the building and the passers-by. The behavior of the screen is inspired by an algorithm developed to simulate the collective decision making process that animals such as birds flocking, or ants, employ in the natural world. Something different from their indoor-installation “A study of time” is the location. An estimated number of 5,000 people walk past each day. While the first project is designed for an interior space, a choreography, “Reflex” stands between the public and the private, caged inside but in constant dialogue with the street.

The notion of screens is pushed by this work; the inflation and deflation of the bags is like pixels turning on and off. Through the detection of proximity, the screen can not only communicate unilaterally but establish a dialogue with the passers-by.

rAndom International is a London-based collective who are developing projects and installations that have as a goal to re-interpret the ‘cold’ nature of digital work and emphasize on the interaction of the audience with the object.

‘A study of time’ is one of their recent works, which is based on their choreographic design for the dance piece FAR by Wayne McGregor at Random Dance. It was premiered at Design Miami Basel 2011, and takes light as a medium for the representation of the time of day. An algorithm reveals the time through the strong communicating power of light and shadows, reminding us of sundials, surfaces that let us interpret the time by analyzing the shadows the sun casts in them.  Especially interesting about this piece are the transitions and the visual effects that the illuminated points in the “deep grid” achieve.