Bauschild
Berlin, late 2002 - January 2004
From March 2002 to January 2004 the Haus des Lehrers and the adjacent congress hall were restored and converted into the Berliner Congress Center. In front of the building site stood, as it must, a large construction sign showing a drawing of the future building. Into that drawing we built Blinkenlights — en miniature.
Exactly where the original had its matrix, LEDs sit behind the facade drawing on the sign: 18 by 8 pixels above the mosaic frieze, the same geometry as on the real building. We built the miniature in late 2002, and it ran night after night until the construction work ended in January 2004. So the building kept on blinking throughout the years the builders were at work behind its windows.
Greyscales
Because these were LEDs and not flood lights, the construction sign could do something the original installation never could: greyscales — the same thing we had introduced shortly before with Arcade in Paris. To let people paint movies for that new ability, BlinkenPaint received a major overhaul: version 3 handled both the old BLM and the new BML format, and finally ran on Mac OS X as well.
Apart from that the miniature was a fully fledged Blinkenlights installation: you could play Pong on it with your mobile phone, just as on the real building. The rest of the time the construction sign ran its movie programme.
The construction sign in action
A short movie shows the sign glowing at night.
Towards the end of the construction period Blinkenlights returned once more at full size: over the 2003 holidays Blinkenlights Reloaded ran on the building, still under reconstruction.