Arcade

Paris, September 25th - October 6th, 2002

Arcade was the second major light installation of Project Blinkenlights. Following up on the original Blinkenlights installation in Berlin, Arcade marked a new step in interactive light installations in public space.

In the context of the Nuit Blanche art festival in Paris, the team transformed the Tower T2 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France into a huge computer screen. With a matrix of 20 x 26 windows (resulting in 520 directly addressable pixels) and a size of 3370m2, the Arcade installation was at the time the world's biggest computer screen ever.

Eleven Nights

The installation started on September 25th, 2002 and ran for eleven nights until the official Nuit Blanche happening on October 5th/6th. During this time span, the installation presented an ever-changing kaleidoscope of animations and interactive applications.

Arcade brought a new series of classic computer games to the building, allowing everybody to play games on the building with their mobile phone. Among others, the all-time favorite pixel puzzle game Tetris could be played using nothing but a mobile phone.

With its newly designed light control technology, the Blinkenlights team was able to smoothly dim the brightness of each pixel. This allowed for sophisticated, large-scale animations glowing into the Paris night life.

The Dress Rehearsal in the Woods

We developed that technology specifically for Arcade — but it passed its first field test the summer before. In July 2002 it drove 48 flood lights in a forest at Bushfire, an experimental installation at the Nation of Gondwana open air festival, turning the woods into a huge bushfire in time with the music. It was there that we first dimmed lamps in small steps instead of merely switching them on and off. What worked in the forest went onto the facade in Paris a good two months later.

Public Participation

Using the newly created ArcadePaint program - running on Mac OS and Windows operating systems - everybody could create their own pictures and animations. The resulting files were sent to us by e-mail and became part of the ever-growing playlist of animations displayed during the lifespan of Arcade.

Programmers could also create animations directly by writing the simple, XML-based file format, which is a natural evolution of the original Blinkenlights Movies file format.

C experts interested in creating interactive games and applications for Arcade could use the Blinkenlights Library (blib). The programming was comparably simple.

Documentation Video

Our documentation video tells the story of Arcade in 14 minutes from the crew's point of view, with plenty of interviews and beautiful footage. A high-resolution copy is available for download from our video page.

Arcade Gallery