Media Architecture Institute

Walk around the place du Molard in Geneva, Switzerland, and you’ll be walking on stars. Two thousand LED light sources equipped with 10 000 white Power TOPLEDs have been set into the paving stones. As the sun begins to set, the LEDs begin to shine, giving the square a magical aura. When the Place du Molard was renovated, it was paved with cobble stones, identical to those which one already finds in the city center. Two thousand resin paving stones have been set in between, covering half a percent of the surface of the place. At nightfall the LED illuminated paving stones begin to shine, reproducing the shine and the silver-colored reflections of the Lake Geneva. The illuminated paving stones accumulate when approaching the lake and remind at the twinkling water, which penetrated up to this place in former times.

Inspired by the theme “The Green Man” architecture students Manuel Kretzer and Hans Sachs designed “The Cone”, an accessible dynamic structure. At night 700 LEDs from OSRAM Opto Semiconductors turned “The Cone” into a shining, rotating sculpture, visible from almost every point of the festival. The sculpture was built with two cones made of PVC-tubes, which were set on top of each other with the outer cone designed to rotate to create energy. The 8 meters high interior cone was mounted stationary on the platform and the 9 meters high exterior cone was fastened to the interior cone. Through the use of wind energy and human force the rotating sculpture produced energy for the nocturnal illumination.

The sculpture was illuminated by 700 green 5mm LEDs emitting light into the PVC-tubes. Reflectors were used to achieve the required narrow radiation. At night visitors to the interior of the sculpture could admire the fascinating effect of the overlap of the rod structures and the resulting continuous dance of shadow plays and light.

Twelve shimmering metal shafts rise at surprising angles from a grassy hill. They hang over the landscape, creating a graceful curve that appears to unfold for passing motorists. The shafts are part of Solar Collector, a sculpture created by artists Matt Gorbet, Rob Gorbet, and Susan LK Gorbet as a commission for the Region of Waterloo. Set in front of the Regional Operations Centre in Cambridge, Ontario, the sculpture is solar-powered and interactive, inviting the community to choreograph its nightly performance via the web.

fLUX, binary waves is an urban and cybernetic installation based on the measuring of infrastructural ( passengers, cars…) and communicational ( electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones, radio…) flows and their transposition into luminous, sonic and kinetic rules. This relation between the installation and the urban activity happens in real time and sets each person as an element of the installation, as a centre of the public realm.

This is an example of an ephemeral 3D Media Architecture only existing for a blink of time – on the occasion of the opening of the new Palm Jumeirah in Dubai; fits perfectly as a start into the new year: We wish a glamorous 2009 to all our readers and friends!

A great example by Gramazio & Kohler how christmas lights could look in future; Here’s a short description by the architects themselves:

” ‘Distinctive, generous, unique’—these were some of the qualities expected of the Christmas illuminations in Zurich’s internationally renowned shopping street. ….We designed a continuous band of lights, 1.1 km long, using 275 tubes of light, which we called “The World’s Largest Timepiece”.

In terms of urban planning, the installation connects the railway station to the lake. Its simple, linear course turns the band of light into the visual backbone of the city, accentuating the appearance of the Bahnhofstrasse and its two slight yet distinct changes in direction. …

View at Paradeplatz; Photo by Roman Keller

Urban Alliance´s mission is to integrate modern communication technologies in the built environment in order to create interactive public spaces and objects. Urban Alliance combines expertise in design, content production, engineering and construction. This way UA is a one-stop-shop for tun-key mediatecture solutions. Urban Alliance works for developers, governments, advisers and architects on projects indoors and outdoors for purposes as city marketing, social safety and arts.

• MegaPhone is Phonecall-Controlled, Real-Time, Multi-Player Collaborative Gaming Platform for Big Screens in Public Spaces, but we already said that. What we mean is, it’s a game you control with a phone call.
• MegaPhone is NOT a downloadable application that runs on your phone, and it’s NOT a wireless network, like Wifi or Bluetooth.
• There are two ways to send input to the display: keypad and voice. The keypad can be used much like a video game controller, and the volume and pitch of the phone’s microphone can also become input in the game.
• MegaPhone updates the game state on a shared screen, and can send custom audio and text messages back to each user. MegaPhone uses this mobile channel back to the caller to close the loop on out of home media advertising.

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.

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.