Blinkenlights

Berlin, September 11th, 2001 - February 25th, 2002

Celebrating its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club made a special present to itself and the city of Berlin. From September 11th, 2001 to February 25th, 2002, the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz was turned into the world's biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights (a term defined by the Jargon File).

This first project gave rise to the group Project Blinkenlights, which went on to create the installations Arcade (Paris 2002), Stereoscope (Toronto 2008) and Polychrome (since 2023).

The idea came about in mid-August 2001 on the way back from HAL2001 (Hackers At Large) in Enschede, the Netherlands. Four weeks passed between the first thought and the first movie on the facade. The installation was also meant as a remembrance of Wau Holland, the founder of the Chaos Computer Club, who had died on July 29th, 2001.

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 first went into successful operation in the night from September 10th to 11th, 2001, at around 1 am. It was switched off on the morning of February 25th, 2002, after 23 weeks and 6 days; the farewell had been celebrated two days earlier at the Bye Bye Blinkenlights party. During that period, we constantly improved its feature set. The software was released as Free Software under GPL. Our documentation video shows all aspects of the project in 11 minutes:

A high-resolution copy is available for download from our video page. For the friends of Blinkenlights we also prepared a little trailer movie [MPEG-4 H.264, 2,8 MB]. The soundtrack of the trailer can be found here.

The Return

That was not quite the end of it. While the building was being renovated from March 2002 to January 2004, Blinkenlights carried on en miniature: on the construction sign in front of the site, built from LEDs and, for the first time, capable of greyscales. Over the 2003 holidays we brought the matrix back to the real facade for two more weeks as Blinkenlights Reloaded.

After that the building blinked twice more. On October 2nd and 3rd, 2004, we put a pulsing heart over Alexanderplatz at short notice under the name Blinken-Lite. And from October 13th, 2005 the full installation ran for about two weeks on all 144 windows again for the first Berlin Festival of Lights — with Pong on the phone and movies to submit.

Overview

Using your mobile phone you could play Pong with Blinkenlights or your friend. The program Blinkenpaint enabled you to create your own animations and 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 animations. A look behind the scenes reveals some technical details of our system.

A list of press reports about Blinkenlights and a couple of interesting links to other projects complete the overview.

Gallery

What ran on the building is not lost: our gallery collects more than 160 movies made for Blinkenlights, painted by many different people with BlinkenPaint. Each movie plays on a replica of the Haus des Lehrers facade, just as it could be seen at Alexanderplatz back then. Every entry names its author and the tool it was made with, and you can download it as a BLM file or take it along as an animated GIF.