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Big Berlin Blinkenlichten
karm13 writes "The Chaos Computer Club has made a huge display using the 8 top floors of a house in Berlin with 18 windows each as a present to themselves and Berlin for their 20th birthday.
You can submit animations on the Blinkenlights project page, and even play pong with a mobile phone!"
Be sure to check out Blinkenpaint. While other projects like this have turned houses into displays before, this one is much more interactive. You can create animations of your own and they will be added to the rotation, if the ccc-folks like them. Or you can have them added to a "loveletter" database from which you can invoke the animation by a telephone call.
I drive by this thing every day and it is just too cool to see those geeks showing off their skills in the very heart of Berlin. Alexanderplatz is a very busy public place in Berlin, everybody knows the Blinkenlights.
You just gotta love the CCC.
Is that they ported pong to it.
Damn these guys are cool (in an ultra-geeky way).
I have a vague memory (aided and abetted by a fine bottle of Lagavullin) of new year 2000 seeing a similar thing in Brussels that was put into place on one of the bank headquarters there. This used two or three chunky colour changers per window and gave a resolution of about 50x20 if my memory serves me. Looked very pretty as well in full colour, but the choice of content wasn't nearly as cool as the Chaos lot.
The only Good System is a Sound System
No, but they are playing pong on it.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
much web crawling later, you should check out Marnix 2001 for the high budget alternative...
The only Good System is a Sound System
Too bad they didn't use three lamps per window; red, green, and blue. Each controlled by a digital dimmer with 256 levels. The resolution would be even greater than the icons in your favorites folers.
...pay for the replacement lightbulbs..
And I wonder how much it costs to play pong?
This could be largest arcade machine in the world!
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story..."
Prompted by tales of this having happened in the past, I created a poster consisting of a picture of a desk lamp, a date and time, and the words "watch and copy", one of which I placed in the foyer of each building.
At the allotted time, I turned off my main room light, and began flashing my desklamp on and off. Within 5 minutes all three towers were shimmering, including, I'm told, the faces not visible from my window.
It was a neat, if not original, social hack, and a lot of fun... This thing in Berlin is much cooler technically of course.
i'm thinking a PEACE-LOVE-UNITY-RESPECT sequence is in order. or maybe somebody with some skills could make a little DJ : )
gracie
p.l.u.r.
I seem to remember Canary Wharf (London's tallest building with 100+ floors) doing something like this in the early 90's. They were having trouble selling some of the space so organised the office lights to blink on and off in patterns as a giant advert!
This reminds me of the various hacks done on the Green Building at MIT, my favourite being the VU metre.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
It seems to me that it would have been alot easier to maintain and control if they had used X-10 controllers with wireless modules to span any splits in the power lines. The others reader's idea of colored lamps would be neat as well.
I don't know if there are X-10 modules available in Germany though. Seems like an awful lot of work to run all that power around the building when you could just plug the lamp into a control modules and run it all with a firecracker X-10 serial controller.
Brian
Remember Lexington Green!
here poli-uni students dorm in Warsaw.
The BBC Reported A student group at Brown University converted their Science Library into a giant video game screen by installing over 10,000 Christmas lights in the windows. on Wednesday, 19 April, 2000. Someone said this was "Off Topic", but as it also appeals to people who get excited about using large non-comkputer-oriented objects as video displays, then it is entirely relevant. I like the idea of both this and the CCC Blinkenlights. Talking of blinkenlights, try telnetting to here and see a starwars movie via telnet. I think this has been around for about as long as the CCC's Blinkenlights page has.
Follow me
...I have to ask it again:
How are they really able to do this?
I don't mean the technical part (that part is relatively easy, from a hardware standpoint). I mean the legal/economic part?
Perhaps they got a grant for artistic reasons - but I tend to doubt that because they did it in four weeks.
The building seems to be pretty large - how did they:
a) Obtain an entire building for use for several months, and
b) Were allowed to paint 144 windows, and
c) Get the money to pay for bandwidth and electricity (somebody is paying it!), and
d) Do all of this inside of four weeks
???
The building can't be vacant - though it kinda looks that way from the pictures. Still, somebody owns it, and has to pay electricity and other costs, and would thus have to pass that along to the CCC (unless they have a "rich" member of the CCC who owns the building, which is quite possible), right?
Furthermore, wouldn't there be permits and such for such large public displays that would have to be procurred from the city government? Maybe things are radically different over there, and such legal stuff is easy to obtain in a very short amount of time, or not needed at all.
Maybe I am misunderstanding what CCC is? What function do they perform (I don't think they are a hacker group, right? Wasn't that something called the Kaos Komputer Klub?). I am just curious how they managed to pull off such a large display without running into financial or legal issues.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
This reminds me of the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland) last January, the town sits within a valley with snow covered mountains each side, they used a high powered laser to project words onto the snowy hill above the town, you could submit messages through the web or via SMS (GSM text).
I was there from Nov 28 to Dec 02 just wandering around Berlin, and I saw this and took a picture. you can find it here (take a note of the uptime, that's a W2K machine!)
In any case, it was pretty cool and I was watching it for a while, but that really doesn't look like a house, it's an office building in downtown Berlin... well "downtown" Berlin...
If God gave us curiosity