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 okay let's start welcome this evening on the bits and po stage um for our last talk for this day um I'm sure you're all familiar with blinking lights and uh who doesn't love um blinking lights you know that's why we're all here uh in the end so I think I don't have uh much to introduce to do uh just want to say please give a warm welcome to Tim love who will give us a very thorough Insight on the project blink and lights your stage hello hello hello I hope you do not know the project already in uh if with all its inin and outs um but let's make a check so who knows in general what I'm about to talk about that's by far too much um who has seen the first one who has seen the second one uh-huh okay who knows about the third one all right okay so I'm going to talk a bit about the project um so there might be some duplication to your knowledge but uh I think it's worthwhile looking back a bit and I'm trying to have a slightly different um view on on on what happened because it's also about failure and what didn't happen because that's uh you know what comes with every project so project blinking lights where did it all start it was um a crazy idea that popped up in 2001 and uh it was kind of related to the death of w Holland who died in 2001 in uh May 2001 which was a disaster for us because we all expect him to be there when the CCC has its 20th birthday which was you know coming up in the September of that year and he just um you know decided to quit early which uh was quite bad so we had uh to come up with with a new idea and we thought okay so let's do a party somehow and and in a way that's how we found our way to this uh project which was just beginning with the idea of having a party and in the end it all got more and more uh complicated so um here's an overview of what has happened in this uh project so in 2001 we had this first installation in uh Berlin and we didn't really expect anything to happen uh out of this but there were quite some implications it's a b
it bad that the sun is uh shining directly on the screen I hope you can uh somehow see something 2002 we had the second installation in uh Paris and 6 years later on we had another installation of this uh large scale uh type uh in Toronto in Canada and of course we had a tiny presence here at the camp this year that's basically uh what happened so let's look back to the blinking lights project so as I told you it all started with this idea of having a party and the idea was um having a party actually in this building houses leas which at that time was totally empty um it was in use before because uh it was like this crazy concept of Nong in bin so you know they didn't know what really what to do with it so they threw in all those artists who lived there for uh quite some time and uh had their crazy projects and when we came to the empty building and looked if this is a good venue for a party we found out it wasn't because it was stinking of all those parties that have already happened the years before so that was not an option um the new owners of that building also owned the BCC conference uh center next to this building which was also home to the ks communication Congress for many many many years but not at that time time because it was about to be renovated uh in 2001 so they decided why don't you do your party over there it's much nicer and doesn't stink so okay we said okay fine why not and everything got a bit bigger and bigger and bigger because there was lots of space to fill so we had this huge cupula that we had to fill with a party and there was this space around it which we had to fill with something so we came up with well then let's do an exhibition too and uh so on this all happened 5 weeks before the date and um somehow I had this idea of using those windows even for the party already just to write CCC on it with lights you know because it's it's a pixel display why shouldn't you write something on it and um that's one of those moments you know where
 where your life takes a turn somehow because I just dropped this idea uh in a in a group of people and the first response was well then you can start playing Tetris on it right yeah and that was this freeze moment was like hm what if you know and of course 5 weeks later we had this uh project and um as you might already know it was uh quite interactive so we coupled it with the telephone system and it was possible to play Pong on it with a mobile phone which at that point in time was rather uh Innovative there would have been other installations like this actually one year uh earlier there was something in Brussels and there have been some you know some approaches to this to the same idea and the years before so there were always nerds who knew that windows and pixels you know are sort of the same concept um so and that was also our approach so we didn't really think of this as much you know as being very you know special in a way it was more obvious in uh in our uh view so the Innovative part was of course the interactivity and coupling it with the mobile phone was uh you know rather new and um we also wanted to uh Embrace participation so we had this idea of giving out a format description of giving out tools so that people can do their own movies and it was really interesting to see that although the resolu that's what we thought you know we thought oh my God it's just 144 pixels can anybody do something with it and as you will see when we move over to the other project I think it has actually made things easier for people because if you reduce the resolution you also reduce the complexity and then people had to be super super creative in order to make something out of it and I think the blink lights movies of this first installation are still the most creative that that we have ever seen although you can't see it because the sun is shining on the screen I apologize for the sun bad bad evil Day star anyway you know pixels on the screen um and this was also uh a 
simple idea here behind is to have this simple text format I wouldn't choose zeros and ones in the text format if I would redo it uh but these are the decisions you make and then you can never uh change it so that's that's all you need so you just have this and uh with two frames you just have uh an animation already so this is what happens if you are inside the building because it was all built with simple relays and everything was very very uh simple technology and for anybody who was looking at it you know it looks like magic it's like how have you done this you know how does this work people are so amazed about it um which is funny because it's super simple uh here's an explanation by our Russian uh friends who have kind of visualized this uh concept what you have to
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 do so you take the building empty it out put Windows uh lights behind the windows and then it's all about timing you know you have to make sure that the team is well prepared and knows everybody knows what to do when the time comes you know people Press buttons when people press buttons you have to go there is no other option so it was lots of running around and walking the stairs and we did this for 6 months can you imagine it's
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 uh yeah so game over of course that's not how it worked how it worked you can see here from Dust Till Dawn oops no you can't because I pushed the wrong button um oh my God Tim so professional from Dust Till Dawn linoln lights continuously showed a variety of alternating animations on its monochrome Matrix 8 pixels High by 18 across by offering various options for participation the CCC invited everyone to get involved in this interactive installation the name of the work was derived from the hacker jargon for flashing computer consoles blinking
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 lights by dialing the blink and lights computer with a mobile phone passes by and play the classic computer game pong on the giant screen typically players are pitted against the computer but if someone else dials in they get to take over the paddle usually controlled by the computer the game is going on as long as the connection remains established when everybody is hung up link and lights carried on to show its almost endless Archive of specially designed movies until the next person decides to go for another game of pong the installation used the top eight floors of the House of the
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 teacher behind the scenes the pixels were brought to life by 144 flood lights standing directly behind the windows the windows have been painted wi to make them more
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 translucent each light was connected to a simple relay switching the electricity Source from each relay a long control cable span the distance to the control center in the eighth floor toling more than 5 km of cable in the whole building the control center consisted of three computers interconnected via a local area network each system was running self-developed software under the canoe Linux operating system and this is how interaction with blink and lights Works people either send their blink and lights movies by email or directly call the system with their mobile phone the Chaos Control Center computer manages the animation playlist or reacts to incoming calls effectively starting the pong game at that very moment the images to be displayed are constantly transmitted to The Matrix control computer that is attached to the relays and is responsible for actually switching the individual lights on and
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 off this wild setup of cables actually worked flawlessly for 166 days and demonstrated that the Hacker's approach to technology is sometimes pretty
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 unconventional
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 yeah clear cut this just an accept of the whole
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 thanks it's an except of the of the whole full documentation video that's out on YouTube and well I think it shows that we have accomplished something uh in that time and we've been very lucky that while we expected the whole system to blow up after two weeks because you you've seen the cabling you know uh and we didn't really expect lamps and and and and especially the relays to to work for a significant amount of time it actually well worked half a year and we didn't even know that we could use the building for half a year because we were basically waiting for renovation to start but this can take time and it took some time and this enabled us to not only only improve the system and respond to user requests and and and wishes and new ideas that came up um so we could constantly uh adapt with the software to to to new ideas like this um Wish by many people to have their personal movie on screen on demand which we coupled with the pong game so people could call the system pong starts then they entered their code that we have provided to them and then their you know Love Letter movie uh starts playing so which was super enabling because you're standing in the city of the capital and you can just like with a press of a button you can just you know make a building play your movie to whoever you want it to see and that was pretty amazing and it was for us also pretty amazing to see the reaction of the city in the beginning only the city and later on the rest of the world um I will go more into uh this aspect let me uh shed some light on the other projects uh first then I will show you some of the cultural implications this whole project had for us and uh me especially it was a wild ride I can tell you it it was like the the defining moment in my life and since then nothing was like before but then we got a call uh I think it actually it was an email I don't know so somebody asked me well could you imagine doing this again and this was while the original blink lights in
stallation was still running and um well um I said okay uh where yeah in Paris and I said well okay so they had this new art festival that was coming up they had a new mayor and the new mayor wanted to do something awesome and he had this idea of doing a new art festival in Paris which still runs it's called Nu blanch uh I think it started in 2002 and it's still running as far as I know and uh they wanted us kind of as the headliner of this whole festival which was super amazing and I thought well yeah we we could do it but only if you have an interesting building for us yeah and she said well I'm calling you back and she called me back and told me we could you know use the facade of the bibl naal France which was quite something and it was super big um here some Impressions if you can uh spot them so if you don't know the bibl naal France is um a super huge area close to this to Lassen and it's basically four skyscraper buildings L-shaped so it's like books you know it's a library so it's supposed to be like four books that are uh standing next to each other there's a park inside uh but we only got one of the towers was uh well I I I would have taken both but in the end I was quite happy that we didn't do that because it would have killed us because this had already killed us but we called it aad uh so it's a reference of course to the Arad games and but also works as a French word which also very important that you use French words if you're doing something in France uh to get acceptance and we improved on this gaming idea because now we had a larger screen and we would still wanted to retain this interactivity and um we also wanted to work with uh Grays scaling because before the original blink lights was like pure onoff monochrome and nothing else because it was just simple relays and this time we uh improved the technology we use I mean improved the technology we didn't just use Simple relays we just came up with something we built our own boxes and it was stil
l network based and this time we had this huge screen and we had new games like Pikman and breakout and other games um yeah of course using the higher resolution we could experiment with images and and and and movies and that's also where the trouble starts I mean uh looking back I would have chosen at least to have less Grays scaling you might wonder why isn't bigger better isn't more better I disagree we had like um eight did we have eight I think yeah I think we had um eight three bits um eight gray scales and that was probably the maximum we should have used um because if you have too much granularity that all becomes kind of mushy and uh anyway but it was still looking great it all depended on how you design it and what I especially like about it is that you could see it basically from from everywhere I mean you could this this photo is I think taken at least 1 kilometer uh from it away because it stands at the river s and it's had high visibility from uh many many places which was uh gorgeous and then it works much better but also important is that we should always think about these project as architecture projects and not displays although they are displays but they're still architecture so we had all these um funny images and let's uh have a look at how this look like in real real
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 animations
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 load s the heart
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 show
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 I have no idea what's happening here with this video and you can't read the English text because it's covered by the Sun but basically you get the gist of it um this was a um complicated installation but in a sense still you know using standard technology The Twist was that for the first time we developed our own technology so we had this Linux uh customized Linux box that we have built to our specifications which was doing all the dimming because I I mean we we could have taken standard DMX lighting equipment I mean controlling lamps was not new in 2002 I mean this existed but it would have been super super uh expensive on the one hand and wouldn't have been as flexible as we wanted it to be because there's always a tiny twist where you want to optimize something which then you can't do because you know close systems or limitations of the protocol and we wanted to be in control of everything that was the uh general idea so we finished that project in Paris and then things caled down a bit um although we redid the original blinking lights version at the house of the teacher for I I've forgotten like two three times to other occasions for a short period of time I'm not sure it was totally worth it but at least we did it then the the renovation started and there was this construction uh sign and we actually built a replica version as led based inside this construction sign so as long as the building was redone you could still look at this and uh it was always our idea to you know make it permanent in a way I explain bit more about this uh as well but let's move on to the third part stereoscope which was then done in 2008 and again it was a continuation of this new blanch story because the Canadians thought well what Paris is doing is super cool we need to do the same thing so they also started a new blanch and of course they wanted blink lights to be their headliner because that's how it's done you know they learned this from uh Paris and um at that point in time our
 team was also you know not mostly but partly uh dismantled people move on doing other things but uh F and I we decided okay we are going to do this uh even with a smaller team and so we flew into Canada and looked at this building not sure you can uh properly see it but this is the Toronto City Hall which is quite amazing building it's two SK two curved skyscrapers of different size standing more or less opposite to each other open towards the front where there's a big place what's the name of the place again pH Square Phil Nathan Phillips Square so quite iconic very good architecture I liked it and it was basically four screens because there are like Brakes in the middle and two buildings mean meant okay even more windows we had 144 in Berlin we had 520 in Paris and now we are facing 1040 uh if I remember this uh correctly um which is a lot you know because if you're doing these projects you really learn that things can get really messy if you have to multiply everything by 1040 you know if you do if you need something to do on one window that takes a minute it means you have another 1,40 minutes of work that needs to be spread out over people and so on so we uh gathered a small team in uh Germany and we made a plan and we didn't know you know what would uh happen but at least we had a plan and we were kind of like okay we don't have enough people but we're probably going to make it somehow um and we would have failed I guess um but then at the right moment these guys came in here Andrew and uh his friends and Jonathan and Dan would sent me an email and said I don't where did you hear from this project because it wasn't officially I mean announced it was an article all right okay so somebody has told somebody something and you read it and you knew and he knew uh about the original project so we came together and as a new international team we uh we made it it was even more uh technology so our next Focus was actually on the technology because we knew we couldn't d
o it with this dimic technology before and so this time we uh built a wireless dimming system so there was one of these Wireless dimmers attached to the uh lamps and we still had the same concept of putting this um plastic sheets on it which is called dump brm Folia in uh German which is a name you should remember um it's usually worked for used for for construction you put it in in your roof to you know prevent Steam from entering or leaving the house I don't know anyway but it's perfect it's a B1 it's fire approved and uh it's super cheap and it's like the perfect diffuser for for light it it's really amazing we used it here uh as well so that was our Focus new technology and of course again we were sending UDP packets around the building this time it was two building buildings and yeah by Magic we made it work like a day before it it worked it was close it was really really close this time so some uh media Impressions here as well we did a documentation video but it was not as good as this report done by uh Daily Planet on the Discovery Channel so uh let's have a look at this I hope the sun is not ruin it completely or my computer a team of computer hackers commanders Toronto's iconic City Hall and the authorities don't mind calling themselves project blinking lights the Berlin based group turns the building into a giant video display they unveil it during Nei blanch an allight Arts Festival thousands blocked to check it out in fact they get right into it the idea from of thinkinking Lights is to turn the building into a display that can be used by anybody in the normal mode it just displays various animations are there's a playlist of movies and just plays back one after the other but the real funny part is that you can actually play games on the building so you just take your mobile phone call a number and at that moment the display the building shows a game which you can command and control just using the keypad of your telephone I've got 28 each of the 960 Wi
ndows becomes a single Pixel in a giant video screen they call the display the stereoscope because it takes advantage of the two curved Towers unique design it's a huge project five months in the planning and more ambitious than the group's previous efforts in Berlin and Paris project blink and lights is a group of gifted people who are into technology who love technology who love to play around with it and to be a hacker is not a bad thing the term hacker is something very positive for us hacking is about breaking things in order to see how it works it's a very creative process so what other people call hackers should called should be called criminals all the programming originates from a central command station it relays instructions to small computers on each floor they send signals to custom-designed wireless dimmers attached to each light directing them to Glow at one of 16 different intensities and every window has to be rigged individually the first thing you have to do is to put up these cover sheets so now the cover sheets are set up and now we can install the dimmers for the lamps that's all that needs to be done now the dimmer is fully operational back at the control center the team monitors the display via a live video feed and a realtime simulation of what's being played in the windows some animations come from blink and lights members that anyone can download the code and send in a show project blinking lights is all about participation when we created our first installation we didn't consider it to be an art project we wanted it to be a platform a platform for people to get in contribute code contribute animation and contribute new ideas and that's exactly what happened we are focusing on enabling Technologies in order to make everybody participate and even if you don't contribute an animation or play a game you can interact with the stereoscope we have created this nice 3D simulation simulator that also shows the same stuff in real time but where you
 can change the view dynamically and choose from where you want to actually look at the building so the same program exists for the iPhone and that way you can participate worldwide during Nui BL Chris Palmer can't beat out the other 1,200 visitors calling in to play video games but he can change his point of view without going anywhere I downloaded a little program for my iPhone so what's cool is it's giving me a realtime feed of what's up on the building right now and you can kind of pan around and see what's on the other side of it you know zoom in see it up close change the angle that you're getting at see what it looks like from down on the Square all of that it's really exciting to see you know what's possible with this kind of Technology Tim prit love says that the blink and lights team are only artists by accident what they really do is create giant Technologies for people to share with each other project blink I is also about reclaiming public space bringing such a building especially a city hall that's made for the people back to the people in a very literal sense so if when you can play a game yourself on a building or you can even design your own animation and put it up on this huge screen that's something where people really reconnect to the public space kind of pan up see it from up in the air outer space view that is so cool H so cool yeah Dominic and Martin they did this iPhone app which was one of the first iPhone apps in the app store wasn't it it was yeah it was one of the first probably the
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 first okay um I think the sun is now completely ruining my presentation but I try it so what have we learned uh so far uh in this project so first of all it's all about architecture what I really dislike is this trend that has now evolved with buildings completely covered in LED technology I mean if you you've probably seen things like in in China where you have like whole areas many many many skyscrapers being one giant building which is super intrusive and the total opposite of what we try to do also I think you should focus if you work with light you should really focus on what the building itself provides in terms of Windows and and and other structure so it looks much uh better it is an architecture project um yeah and I think we always tried to you know be handson we wanted to develop our own technology to the extent that it makes sense of course we're not designing our own processes for this but anything you know that comes along that uh enables you to uh have cool features that were otherwise not possible that's always worth investing time uh time in I think and with this approach of of trying to provide as many angles and and um ways to participate and to to uh integrate with uh such an installation is always helpful so we had these movie formats the editor with the first project and the second project we had this uh 3D visualization on the phone um which is probably not necessary for this whole thing to work but adds uh more to it you know and then you also need to make sense you need to uh stay simple so that could still be understood and it's not too too weird I've always struggled with artists that have projects where you need to have like tons of text that you are supposed to read through to understand what it's all about and what its meaning is and how to use it actually I think if you do not understand how it works just by you know standing in front of it you have kind of failed so let's do uh small detour on what hasn't worked and um first of all w
e really struggled to somehow extend this original blink and light project what you can't see now here is our idea of how to make the project survive on the renovated building so our idea was to leave the windows alone and use the space in between and light it up but we were too late for this planning has already started and it wasn't clear if we would uh get um funding for this but I think this would have worked uh pretty good although it was only seven lines and no longer eight lines then but you know at least uh we tried something else we tried which didn't work out because of reasons was um okay let me show you what this is you know you see here uh a wooden steel uh structure a mechanic button so this was basically supposed to be a button we built this prototype and it actually worked but it was probably too complicated would have broken I don't know wouldn't have survived but the idea was to have a button that you can jump on a button that you can jump on and that also uh has some back pressure with spirals that you could not only jump on it but you can like constantly hop on it and being propelled into the air and back like a trampoline that was the idea and then of course a switch and this whole thing should be covered with um uh some kind of acrylic uh button which is here which you can't see because the sun is completely ruining my presentation so use your imagination that's what we did we also uh did a small animation which might be visible somehow I don't know to make people understand what we were uh trying to achieve because there wasn't only supposed to be one button of course there should be one button for each window so here's the building with all the blinking uh windows but what we wanted to do is to provide a keyboard to this terminal and then have 144 of these buttons lying on the ground in front of it and then you should just imagine like a group of kids hopping around on these uh buttons to you know make it work maybe that's an uh inspiration f
or other projects we can't do it all and then there were like tons of dreams we got like buildings uh from all over the planet you know it was like everywhere Australia South America Asia uh we were very close to doing other projects in in in Dublin oh God I forgot there was so many I constantly people were sending us email here is a a nice building what do you think and sometimes we even did some 3D rendering so there was a phase for a few years where we were like that close to the next installation and then it all erupted into nothingness because uh reasons because always like building owners didn't agree plans for renovation change money wasn't available or uh other reasons uh yeah it was um maybe it was good because somehow the story was already uh told but we always dreamt of having a a third installation so we were quite happy that we did that with Toronto and then you know it was kind of done so I told you that there were like lots of cultural uh implications um it's very difficult to explain but when you do such a project in the middle of a huge city that is you know crazy and and and and people like love crazy uh stuff we were really in a malstrom of attention in a way with this installation it took a while especially because we started the project on September 11 2001 so we we switched it on you know and then New York happened and nobody took notice of our project for for two weeks but after the dust has settled uh it all went wild and and and then we were like busy on a daily basis for this and blinking lights has found its way in in in many uh many parts of of the culture uh for instance one I have actually forgotten to include in uh in these slides was that there was a remake of the movie uh berin Symphony a bin Symphony of a capital city uh which was done 100 years ago and there was a remake done in exactly 20 2002 so the original movie by valta grman I think was like daily scenes in Berlin standard life so it's like a very interesting movie you should
 uh watch it the original and the Remake um where you could just like watch how people lived in Berlin 100 years ago and now there's a remake uh how people lived in Berlin in 2002 so it shows all kinds of scenes uh around the city and blink L was also included so that's a nice touch but it was especially uh welcomed by technology oriented uh culture for instance there is a replica of the original blinking lights building at minat vand in uh Hamburg which is um if you don't know it it's like a a railroad uh model superlative it's like I don't know how many kilometers of uh trains they're going and rails they're following it's uh super amazing if you haven't been there go there and of course they asked us also if they could include it they have no bin section so it's somehow in in looks like if it's in Hamburg but you know they should have a b section and of course also in this scene there are lots of um replicas that was um at the second Camp I think there was this blinking area Village that kind of took up on the idea and produced all kinds of replicas of the original installation other stuff uh some of them even went uh and and did similar installation on other buildings so um can't really see this is like more or less a tiny chip just with LEDs on it which which looks like the uh other one and this is also very beautiful just believe me yeah um and of course now that we were kind of the official representation of everything that blinks you know uh uh a a perfect storm of information went towards us you know so we got notice of everything that was blinking around the planet uh all the time and also some things happened just at the same time without us knowing and without them knowing so kind of we hit the tone of the time for instance Kylie Mino brought out this uh can't get you out of my head uh hit singer and what did she do her of course she was dancing in front of blinking skyscrapers that look like exactly like our installation that's of course fake you know I
 mean the building is not Kylie Mino but
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 we honored this with Kyo dancing on aada on the in the Paris installation actually but yeah we see more blinking I hear some blinking yeah we should have done this probably too all those dancers but it wasn't in the
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 budget and other artist is also you know took notice so uh now we were like the hip location to do your new music video that was uh the first one was uh Miss kitten which had this um what's it called H ripping kitten whatever so they actually filmed it outside and on the building so the girl is now sitting on the building actually I feel and if you ask yourself like oh there's a blinking window is this the original blinking lights there's always one thing to look for because the windows are not completely covered in light there's this uh one line that's dividing each window come on show me one feet H where is it
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 okay it will
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 come anyway switch to the next one here you can uh we we'll probably see it and then people just use it for their own media appearances took their own videos for instance this is a video that the Han Museum the the The Hemp Museum in uh in Berlin took and of course again they use Blink lights and you can see it's real because you see this dividing line you know that's what I was talking about and also part of our documentation video which is totally fine they didn't ask but we don't care was all out in the open so they sent in this hun Museum uh movie you know as a love letter so they could activate it themselves perfect you know I like this uh very much good music as well okay and to to top it all off uh we got a call uh of the managers of D to hosen and they wanted to do uh as well so they actually filmed the music video inside the building so they were locating one uh room very close to the installation and doing their uh rock and roll I should have started later on takes a while ah it's blinking okay so you know we were in this frenzy of media attention and and and and cultural attention I could have given even more uh examples was like used in the in TV uh advertisements and not everybody asked basically nobody but uh we didn't care because we kind of considered blink lights to be in the open in anyway and what what can you do um there was uh enough to do to just uh make it work and you know we had the appreciation of the uh people when we announced that we have to take it down at the middle of 2002 oh I can tell you people were depressed but it goes further um I hope you can see it it's a bad quality and I have no idea what this is is actually I have no idea but somehow it find its way to me but somehow blinking lights was part of a strange Japanese TV show and if you've ever seen Japanese TV shows they're all strange so I don't know what's going on but usually they come up with some weird story and do a quiz show around it or some kind of participation I hav
e no idea so let's have a look it's called the real mystery so there's some riddle and something is happening can you make it louder so there's a mystery does anybody speak Japanese I've never translated it actually I should have done this so now he needs to go to the toilet obviously he is in Berlin because now there's this white guy that's like how Germans are probably seen something which is probably going on he's super
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 confused I think no Japanese story is complete with some kind of horror or Godzilla like implications I don't know
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 for so it's some kind of mystery detective story and people should come up with answers I
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 guess oh
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 so they giving out hints I guess to solve the real
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 mystery oh foree foree to you n
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 so the whole video is much longer than I remembered I would have cut it a bit I think we getting to the point now hopefully
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 for
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 fore so we go
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 P so this is real Japanese excitement of course I'm moving so they basically took our documentation videos and mixed it all in it's a it's a weird mix of everything but um how how it works all right so that's the look
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 back so some time has passed now and we didn't really do any new projects although we have been talking about many many anymore but in the end uh this project is kind of over but then I went to the first visiting uh event here before this camp and then things happened and so we did a new project which you might have seen here called polychrome and it's actually 640 pixels for you 10 * 8 by 8 and um yeah we called it polychrome why did we call it uh polychrome which you might not know is that polychrome is a real established uh term and it's hidden now behind the sun and it reads it's the practice of decorating architectural elements in a variety of colors perfect match that's what we do so we saw a dead pixel so this area maybe the next uh shows something it's crazy okay you've seen the uh the windows over there and uh they were filled with uh glass braks just recently actually 3 years ago but this has not existed at the last Camp so we came up with the idea of doing something about it and well this um can you see this here this is the the windows from behind that's an area where usually the train Parks so it just goes uh through this uh PA this uh nothing more to see there and we came up with an idea of how to do lights there and of course time has passed 15 years is a long time and when LED technology was totally you know in a different state of affairs when we started the original blinking lights there were only red and green LEDs there were no blue LEDs or at least there were no blue LEDs that you could buy and use you know they were invented but they were not you know ready for uh sale and of course there was no cheap LED and there was uh also no cheap LED that you could do full color with but this time it's possible so we uh looked up our options on Alibama and found this tiny piece which super cool it's actually a a round enclosure you might see this here against the sun with three uh LEDs on one piece and then there are wired uh with three wires uh one afte
r the other as a bus uh technically it's a tm84 bus it's a one wire bus so you got power and uh ground and then you have this uh data cable where you can address all these LEDs it's nothing new you see this here everywhere the only difference between the TM 1814 chip and others that are usually in use is that this supports RGB uh W so it's not only RGB but it also has a white uh pure pixel Warm White which we expected to use because the first idea was let's do monochrome because monochrome is cool and retro and so on in the end we didn't do this at all so we didn't use the W but it's still there um yeah and it's powered by uh 12 volts we use the neopixel bus um library to to address this protocol and it's it's pretty bright and like all LED color LED that you can buy on the market it's not calibrated you will hopefully see this uh what it means I have my doubts here if the Sun is still disturbing this presentation behind oh no it's behind the tree it's getting better I need to slow down later um so you need to control this and in order to control LEDs you need LED controller that comes as a surprise to you um we bought a readymade system called Quin LED which is super cool it's uh an ESP 32 based processor uh we have got one one of these controllers per window and on top of this processor is a stack with an Ethernet shield and also all the Power Electronics you need in order to run the um the LED so it's separate from the power supply for the processor so it's pretty nice it's uh not too expensive works pretty well and on this we have uh our own firmware that does all the light control and also does the color calibration and it also does something that you might not have seen but it is there it's also running an algorithm for after glob because we originally wanted to simulate the original blinking lights um lamps which were Hogan lamps so they had this natural after glow if you switch them off and we wanted to simulate that um although we didn't do this in particul
ar it came in handy because now it's software control so whenever you run an app or running certain animation you can actually Define the Afterglow you want to have and the Afterglow goes through all the colors perfectly so it's not only brightness actually mixing the colors as you go so if you switch from Blue to red and you have an Afterglow of half a second it's a slow steady transition through the color space from one color to the other and that makes for the special impression uh that we have of course to make the system complete of the each of these controllers connected to the um LED chain that it's stuck behind these windows and um they're all interconnected using ethernet and so there's a central computer that's running all the software and we have thrown well we didn't really throw away the old software but we didn't use it um it's a completely new software stack and it's mostly uh written in in alexir which is uh the best programming language you've heard about at this Camp it's really amazing it does Wonder um and apart from the uh firmware and the part that does the audio part of the system of course we had also uh one loudspeaker on top of each uh window everything is written in Alexia and works beautifully so this uh system uh Alexia also comes with the phix web Library where you can do real time web development so um on the right you can't see the original simulator so we had a webbased simulator for this installation months before we had the the system itself uh ready so on the web you could see in real time the same stuff including the Afterglow and everything in a realtime web application it's also all written in Alex here so it was really helpful to develop all the software then of course there's this audio output that I mentioned which we're using the ju library and the controller input which is the the set of buttons on this uh table in front of the installation this system allows for apps small tiny applications that run the games and everythi
ng uh else and has um idea of playlist and scheduling all this uh stuff and everything else runs on a UDP based um communication so basically all those frames are just thrown onto the ethernet bus and then it displays if you want to have a look at the code it's all online at GitHub uh.com blinkin lights polychrome so if you approach this you really need to find an uh approach and of course first we visited our old uh friend the dump bre folio which you have seen in the video uh which is it's so amazing so cheap and um you really need to use it if you do something with light because the light distribution is so perfect although this pixel itself makes more or less A Perfect Circle you can't see it if you put this uh crazy fall on top of it so this was our first pixel that was our second pixel uh which actually contains one of those glass bricks and we used that one to calibrate the uh color and also to calibrate the right distance of the LED towards the glass brakes that's something we need to to uh test how far away must it be be how close can it be what's the uh perfect distance turns out 15 cm was right and uh as we uh wanted to have these glass braks but you had to buy 10 we also did this uh 3x3 object here which we didn't use which you can't see because of the evil Day star yes and then we needed this this in EN closure this uh enclosure for all these lamps so that's basically uh like this shus carton so it's a it's a matrix of uh wood plates and with a cover in the back you see here papon drilling the holes for the LEDs which you just uh plug in in the uh backside and then we mounted this whole thing behind the windows covered with these sheets and stuck to the wall which super easy now that the Sun starts cooperating you can actually see it here is this uh structure that ensures 15 cm uh distance and also Shields each pixel from each other because you don't want to have any light bleeding and I think we succeeded in that pretty well um here's the top view so h
ere's the LED in the middle we uh eventually this is a photo of the Prototype where we thought having uh White Walls is a good idea spoiler it wasn't you know it was too bright our problem wasn't brightness our problem was Darkness we wanted to have um a steady and unnoticeable transition from total darkness to light and if it's too bright even if you put the LEDs on the lowest signal level like one on each RGB you know it's like switching on uh the room and all the Cockroaches are running away it was just too much so we actually left it Brown and added a second layer of this uh dumr Folia and then it was kind of perfect because then if you switch on the light a bit it's just you know almost visible and you could then really make a smooth transition and that's also why on this installation all those transition transitions look so smooth otherwise it would have been really noisy we uh tested that so in the end you put in uh the LEDs and mounted right in here and we had this uh pole that just pressed it onto the window and that's it so basically that's the whole setup so and then we switched it on and we tried color and we s like oh my God this looks so cool we need to do color because this glow was just perfect um also the glass bricks add a lot of structure and and make make it look interesting but that's all the glass bricks do they do no diffusion of any kind that's all done by the dump forio so now that the sun has gone I can hopefully show you what the real uh astonishing thing is if you take these standard LEDs and you switch them on and then you take your image with all the original RGB values that look so perfect on your monitor um it looks like this that's like the generic Super Mario and as you can see there's too much blue all everything is bleeding out it just looked awful and we didn't know what to do and then we played around a bit with curves and and and other things and found out well maybe color calibration is a good way to do it and then uh B took t
he time and actually used this um spider thing thing called the the spider color color calibration tool that you usually use if you're in a professional um Photoshop artist or something like this to calibrate your monitor and put it on this hacked a bit so that we could use it here with our installation and now look what C calibration is doing same information and like magic it just looks great and it not only looks great and because there's less blue in it we now could do colors that you're usually uh impossible to see on any LED installation that's not calibrated so we have brown and dark pink tones and everything so everything is really uh looking the way you expected to be and that enabled us to do much more uh Vivid uh imagery here on on this uh installation yeah and then we had this audio system it's a 10 channel uh sound system which was uh donated uh to us or at least we could rent it for free um by DB audio technique so it's very good loudspeakers and yeah they were just used for action and and and reaction sounds we used this uh juice audio framework to do that and we could have done even more with it and we actually had a lot of more plans uh what to do with it but you know music makes light more interesting because then you can correlate uh much more to to what's uh happening especially for games of course and so on and then we had this uh controller to you know control all the things we are actually to be honest we didn't really have any good idea of how to use it we just knew like 10 buttons is probably a good choice and we also need joysticks that's all the magic uh we had so we bought bought this uh standard arar kit and uh these huge buttons which are uh fun to uh hit on and yeah it kind of worked you know it's um it was uh in a way an experiment while while doing all this so we used it to control the games to um paramet tries uh other apps yeah and then then it's usually you know you start out with something and then you end up with something compl
etely uh different and we have um now a variety of apps and games so we have this interactive apps especially the pixel fun one which we you have uh probably seen you can see there which is super super super super super simple idea it's basically just one function that provides numbers from minus one to+ one and then at random we scale it uh assign colors to those uh values we rotate it we transform it we scale it and and that's what it makes so uh interesting and in the latest iteration we also coupling it with the music so the music is actually triggering this uh function it does interesting uh stuff um so we had the Lemmings you can control there's a Tetris game there's a snake game there's a Super Mario Martin uh did a Super Mario completely in 8 * 8 which is uh amazing and maybe we even have a w today I don't know could be yes so what we wanted to do is also sound to light so that uh is something you can uh watch this night so music will be running and you can see the impact of the music into the stuff uh and to round it all up there was also the option to to import animations by whoever wants to contribute anything uh there the webp uh format is uh perfect and yeah and then we have lots of Unfinished ideas and uh Miss opportunities because uh we were running out of time we have been working on this for four months now I think true yeah kind of so it was really uh a lot of work we've been here like the first on this Campground we're probably going to be the last um yeah but it's like the light installation has been installed here a month ago and um probably take some time to take it down yeah that's it so if you walk there uh tonight you can uh see it working here you see the pixel fun Real Time app running and you can see the impact of the music that it
[Music]
 has so a lot more can be done with the installation unfortunately we only have one uh night left but if you like join us and see what can be done we were trying to bring up all the uh games we already had and uh add one or two new ones that uh hasn't run uh yet throughout the night and then you know and then it's a time to uh say goodbye thanks for listening so any any questions maybe the team uh can send up uh including the Canadians just say hello so that you know who's done it Pap Dominic Jonathan Andrew Dan Alex and one more where's luuka luuka is over there all right so any questions any questions your microphone my microphone not working okay now that question okay I come running with the microphone yes um you said you hacked something with the color collaboration tool what did you hack yeah I can answer that um so basically we used the spider 3 which is like a standard tool use in photography to calibrate your monitors there's open source software for it um we essentially use that um they have a web mode where they display The Wanted colors on a web page we essentially just scrape that and put that into our controllers yeah and that's what we do to did essentially to create the curve so it wasn't just like plain calibrating the single colors like toning down the blue like they were really off with the sizes like the curves are pretty hefty specifically the blue but yes so that's what we did we bur it in the firmware and yeah you saw the result okay there's more question over here here do you still have the archive of the first project of the animations yeah it should all be on GitHub com/ blink lights if it's not kick me um I've recently uh done a deep dive into the old archives I know it's probably not perfect not complete but it all it's still all there the software is there and it's actually running I I I could recompile it after 20 years so it's not all that bad yeah yes um next I'm wondering about uh like this project apparently scales big with workload
 but I'm also thinking about all the money that you get paid by the artist festivals or where are you ah there okay like um going to different countries and filling big buildings with light installations is not something cheap I guess uh no so so actually well the the first one was pure fun and super low cost of everything I mean we used just the like the most basic stuff I think in the end we spent um 10,000 Demar so something like 5,000 in total uh some of it was just paid by somebody else so people came in and said like I'm going to buy the lamps and and stuff like this the remaining stuff what I didn't tell you is we had this pong telephone line it was actually running over a value added telephone line so you know 190 so actually we would have made enough money to cover all the costs but the provider company that was like running the line for us went bankrupt during the pro project so it was all gone but it didn't matter you know it was just something then uh Paris was expensive there this was paid by the Art Festival of course and same in Toronto more or less covered the cost so it was not much to uh earn from it here uh we got um yeah there was a coverage by by the event for like 10% of it and the rest we just pay ourselves because we're idiots all right there's another question over here uh the question is why polychrome needs to be torn down uh isn't there any way you could fit this into the whole museum Concept in uh midb here sure but this T Park is only open in summer uh and closes at 600 and the sun sets at uh nine and so you could do it but nobody would see it any more questions someone over there is this thing on use it um I I just wanted to ask about the col calibration again because the controller the TM 15 something does it have more than uh uh 255 levels or is it no it's just 255 okay so so you have probably a pretty granular resolution at the low end basically yeah yeah so that's what we try to mitigate by making it darker essentially so when we h
ad the initial setup with the White Walls where we essentially tried to bring as much light as possible to the front then we had that exactly that problem like the lowest levels were very bright then we made it artificial darker by making the sides Brown by adding another layer of the famous Dum volum um and that then actually made the calibration possible because we had these lowlevel increases in the light and then yeah it it worked much much better all right over there one more question team from the first project owner of the building what feedback did he or she give to you after you know an increased interest in the building and and word fame well the owner uh is from East Berlin and told me that he spent all his money as a young kid to play Pong at in the wool hiid at the F set and when we put a pong on his new building he was like in heaven more questions we still have a bit of time yep there's one over here and with the other buildings was there also some impact from the you said before you integrated blinking lights basically into the architecture of the building so changed the the people to the building or something like this um yes uh apart from us getting media architecture prices or one which I don't really care about but happened um and I can't really verify this but this is like what people told me later on in Paris before the biblo naal France which was a rather new building in Paris was kind of non accepted in the city it was like super expensive you know when these huge projects uh started I think it was the last project of fris M who really shaped the city with his uh whole style of uh big uh architecture and I was told you know that with this project and its exposure at Nui blanch people looked at the building differently that's something I can't verify it's just like what was related uh to me not sure what uh happened in in uh in Toronto did that have any long lasting impact or reactions or anything can you say something about this anybody come 
on because you are from Toronto and I have no idea it made the front page of all the papers of course at the time and uh people I talked to still remember it sometimes when like when they asked me why why are you going to Berlin for a nerd Festival
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 so yeah uh it's yeah I I I think it was already a really favorite site a favorite building in Toronto everybody liked liked it but uh it's it was a memorable uh a memorable use of the building so more questions I just need to bring the microphone over there um so the first building was empty and unused what about the other buildings in Paris and Toronto and if they were unus how did you deal with people working in the offices and things like that good question the uh bibl naal France was uh especially suited to this kind of use because the way the architecture is built you have the window then there was uh uh yeah a continuous ale behind this this line of windows so you could just walk along all the windows and there were no offices and then there was a I think that you could turn it right yeah yeah it was fixed in some levers and you could turn it like a huge swinging uh wooden door that you know separated the windows from the rest and in the offices you could close and uh open them if you want the light to come in it could also close them so usually they are either open or closed and during that project they were all closed and of because everybody was complaining but because uh the mayor of Paris has said this is about this has to happen it happened and nobody uh complained at least not to us in uh Toronto there was more complaining I think we even tried to uh Comfort the People by applying did we come up with an idea of opening and closing them with bind Eclipse oh yeah yeah so we we had to come up with solution but it's a constant fight so all that worked for us was that there is a date when it was going to be dismantled anyway so people just calm down and it's going to end so yeah it's a problem and some of those projects I mentioned they at least one of them was like we didn't find any solution to this because every office was different you know desks very close to the window everything totally crammed and then yeah so the building needs to have some kind of
 you know needs to be prepared for us that's that's what I would say yeah one question over there the minut people are they using your software uh no they're not we we talked about this but uh I think we were too slow to react I don't remember uh but you know they hack everything themselves they are the real hackers and and uh so they had no problems but they were using our original animations at Le partly yeah I still hope they are opening a Berlin area and redo this and then we I don't know or a Paris area then we could do the other bling lights there too that would be cool hasn't come up yet so anything else yes I think there's a question over here yeah I have the question um like I can admire all the technical details and the beauty of it but tell me some something about the joy of hacker collaboration because I mean at the end this is what this is about right after a million year long pandemic uh it's all about connectedness again and maybe maybe you have an idea of how to share this Joy of hacker collaboration that you obviously experien with polychrome and the other projects yeah sure I mean um yeah we all had like I think projects lined up after the pandemic not able to implement something so it was like um yeah it was welcoming to many people um it was easy and like with this idea with these windows it was easy to cut everyone together and also with this one was specifically interesting because it was so wide area of different things from this woodworking building all these uh things behind the windows um to the hardware like the electronics all of it then the audio engine which is a completely separate separate thing then the next year live view all of these things like was very wide and yeah people from all these different areas working together was actually pretty nice and in a short time yeah we actually made something happen um yeah that worked very well all right I think we have time for one last question over there please uh yes I was just wondering 
when you were developing it um you had to do testing did you worry about the public being confused or calling 911 or something like that down this public no for the previous project oh um good good question there were incidents what what was it wasn't there something in Berlin that well um our major concern was how to deal with the 911 9 911 problem so it was not 911 911 was our problem because it was like as I said you know we we switched it on in the night from the 10th to the 11th September 2001 and we're like ready to rumble yeah it's like yeah it works now everybody's going to see it it's been going to be so cool and then you know everybody everybody's attention was somewhere else and everybody was totally um um how would you describe this feeling that that this event had I mean okay but some people thought like okay now the explosion is coming to my uh home City but I think it was uh a situation where everybody experienced some kind of fear and nervousness and anxiety and and there we were like in the middle of the city with a huge building and we could have sent everything any kind of annoying message you know that brings people to the edge it was totally in our control to make everybody having a bad day and we have also opened this Editor to the public and of course it took like a few hours and we had animations with planes flying into skyscrapers and stuff you know it was all there who was sitting there like if we do this we are you know they will fry us so we uh didn't uh any of these animations and I think for a few days we decided just to only have the blinking heart like for a couple of nights just had this blinking heart that's why it's the logo of the project as well and when everybody calmed down we kind of got more humorous and and had like more uh stuff and and that worked pretty well and lots of people turned to us and said like oh yeah everybody was confused I was just at the airport like everybody was out of their mind and then I came to Alexand
er plat and saw the building and life was going on again so okay that was a very personal story might have been a different experience for somebody else but the emotional attachment to This Light installation was really amazing I mean people um reacted to it uh in a very peculiar way especially binas you know who also always think that Belin is like the coolest place and they somehow adopted this uh project immediately so when we had to tell people that's going to be dment they were Furious it's like no you can't take it away from us you know it's Berlin who am I to argue with that but you know we had no choice to do that so in the end we did a party and it was like the party of bin at that days like all the other clubs had to suffer for a day all right all right thank you very much let's have it again for Tim and his team for and the rest of the
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 team