25 Years of Blinkenlights
Sep 11, 2026
Exactly 25 years ago, in the night from September 10 to 11, 2001, the lights went on for the first time at the Haus des Lehrers on Berlin's Alexanderplatz: Blinkenlights turned the top eight floors of the building into a giant display of 18 × 8 windows – 144 pixels, each one a lamp behind a pane of glass.
September 11 is remembered for very different reasons. All the more it meant to us that over the following months thousands of people stopped on Alexanderplatz, looked up, played Pong against the building with their mobile phones and sent their own animations and love letters across the facade.
What started as a project for the 20th anniversary of the Chaos Computer Club became much more than a one-off installation. It was followed by Arcade in Paris and Stereoscope in Toronto – and by a community that still creates movies for the Blinkenlights formats today.
Thank you to everyone who built, soldered, programmed, animated and played back then. Here's to the next 25 years!