A R T E .:. V I V A

Celebrating its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club has made a special present to itself and the city of Berlin. From September 12th, 2001 to February 23rd, 2002, the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz has been enhanced to become world's biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights (a term defined by the Jargon File).

The upper eight floors of the building were transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 lamps behind the building's front windows. A computer controlled each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels.
During the night, a constantly growing number of animations could be seen. But there was an interactive component as well: you were able to play the old arcade classic Pong on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own loveletters on the screen as well.

Blinkenlights was up and running at until February 23rd, 2002, running 23 weeks and 5 days in total. During that period, we constantly improved its feature set. Even now, work on Blinkenlights is not completed. The software has been released as Free Software under GPL. Our documentation video shows all aspects of the project in 11 minutes.

For the friends of Blinkenlights we have prepared a little trailer movie [QuickTime 5 Format, 3,2 MB] [MPEG-1 Format, 3 MB]. If you want the soundtrack of the trailer have a look here.

Overview

Using your mobile phone you could play Pong with Blinkenlights or your friend. The program Blinkenpaint enables you to create your own animations allowing you to take part in our contest.

For the nerds there is a description of the Blinkenlights Movie format and a couple of nice tools to display and convert your animations. A look behind the scenes reveals some technical details of our system.

A list of press reports about Blinkenlights und a couple of interesting links to other projects complete the overview. Get a regular update on what is going on with the project on our News page.

Spectropolis: Mobile Media, Art and the City is a three-day event (October 1-3, 2004) in Lower Manhattan that highlights the diverse ways artists, technical innovators and activists are using communication technologies to generate urban experiences and public voice. The increasing presence of mobile communication technologies is transforming the ways we live, construct and move through our built environment. The participants of Spectropolis make obvious or play with this shift, creating new urban perceptions and social interactions with cell phones, laptops, wireless internet, PDAs and radio. In addition to twelve projects presented in City Hall Park, there will be several free hands-on workshops and three panels available to the public. http://www.spectropolis.info/

Don't forget to bring your Wi-Fi enabled laptop or PDA!
Map of City Hall Park (Spectropolis Headquarters) and Larger MTA Map (pdf)

ETHNO-TECHNO PERFORMANCE ART/BORDER CULTURE/LATINO/ CHICANO EXPERIMENTAL/ARTIVISM/ANTROPOLOCURA DIGITAL &....

Dear international colleagues:
La Pocha Nostra Website has been thoroughly refurbished, updated, expanded! It's pinche fantastic! The author is cyber-queen Suzanne Stephanac (one of the pioneers of interactive TV). If you wish to check out our current international projects (some of which have been censored in the US, neta), our new photo galleries, the Pocha news and lots of very unique (and politicized) cyber-art /performance projects, go to www.pochanostra.com
Aviéntense! The website has been called "the most original contemporary Latino arts site around."