SPOTS MEDIA FACADE

for Hypo Bank Germany

The task

Commissioned by the agency »Café Palermo Pubblicità« Collection Epicentro art, the large scale matrix made up of 1800 conventional fluorescent lights was designed by the architect/ artist office realities:united, Berlin for the client HVB Immobilien AG.

For a period of 18 month media installation SPOTS will convert an office block located at downtown Potsdamer Platz Berlin into one of world´s largest media facades.

SPOTS was a project realized on extremely short notice, commissioned in February and inaugurated in November 2005. As part of an internationally oriented marketing campaign for an untenanted office building on Potsdamer Platz, SPOTS aimed at a temporary, spectacular staging of the rather inconspicuous investor architecture, so that the greatest possible attention of international media would arouse the interest of potential tenants from afar. (resource: reality:united architects)

1,014 ring-shaped and 760 bar-shaped fluorescent light tubes served as pixels, forming a giant low-resolution, grey scale matrix. A central computer individually controlled the brightness of every single light. As a result, movies, graphics, and animation sequences could be displayed on the façade as moving luminous images transforming the building’s shell into a communicative membrane.

Over a period of 18 months, the installation was used to present a series of curated exhibitions with commissioned, site-specific art works from internationally renowned artists like Carsten Nicolai, Jim Campbell, and Rafael Lozano Hemmer, which were shown for a month each.

The architects created also BIX installation at the Kunsthaus Graz wich was the inspiration for SPOTS in Berlin (resource: reality:united architects)