Arcade Home

Paris, September 25th - October 6th, 2002

Arcade is the brand new light installation of Project Blinkenlights. Following up on the original Blinkenlights installation in Berlin, Arcade marks a new step in interactive light installations in public space.

In the context of the Nuit Blanche art festival in Paris, the team transforms 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 is positioned to be world's biggest computer screen ever.

Eleven Nights

The installation starts on September 25th, 2002 running eleven nights until the official Nuit Blanche happening at October 5th/6th. During this time span, the installation will present an ever-changing kaleidoscope of animations and interactive applications.

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

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

Public Participation

Using the newly created ArcadePaint program - running on Mac OS and Windows operating systems - everybody can start creating his own pictures and animations immediately. The resulting files can be sent to us by e-mail to become part of the ever-growing playlist of animations to be displayed during the lifespan of Arcade.

Programmers might check out opportunities to create animations directly by creating 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 might want to check out the Blinkenlights Library (blib). The programming is comparably simple. If you have any results, send them to us (see below).

Contact

Your contact for inquiries of all kinds is Tim Pritlove <contact@blinkenlights.de>.

If you are interested getting information on our future activities, please send a mail to <blinkenlights-update-subscribe@lists.ccc.de>.

Arcade Gallery