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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!"
Everyone closer than 2 kilometers from the display will get cancer right away. Cheezes.
May want to check out Google's cache of the page. :)
That's great for displaying ASCII-porn! I wonder how long it would take until the german government passes a law that forbids "Blinkenlights before 10PM or after 6 AM"...
But anyway, that's not news at all, it's been around for at least three weeks...
12 years ago in Sausalito...used 36 homes on the hillside. Not nearly as high-tech, however.
Nice to see the spirit lives on.
So IP over Avian Carriers now has competition for hack of the year. Nice one guys.
The months are just too short. I can count the number of days on one hand.
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.
Achtung!
ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS
Das computenmachine is nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Is easy schnappen der springwerk, blownfusen, und poppenoorken mit spittzensparken. Ist nicht fur gewerken by das dummkopfen.
Das rubbernecken signtseeren keepen hands in das pockets--relaxen und watch das blinkenlights.
yeah, but can they play tetris on it????
Oh turn me on Helga. Turn me on.
. . . . . . . [awg] http://acidwriting.org
Is that they ported pong to it.
Damn these guys are cool (in an ultra-geeky way).
Madonna presented the £20,000 ($30,000) Turner prize to Martin Creed for a work of 'art' entitled "The Lights Going On and Off" which basically consists of an empty gallery, and two lights that do indeed go on and off. Other winners have included dirty underwear and an unmade bed.
Read about it here...
Shame us Nerds never enter these competitions, my exhibit "Servers in Various States of Disrepair" is surly a strong contender.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
Tetris for big-thinking people:
La Bastille: A Tech House Art Installation
That installation was up only a few days, though.
some pics (text in dutch)
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
it would seem to me, is getting permission from the bldg owners/occupants - otherwise you just wire a big relay panel by the breakers and drive them with an output port, nothing extremely new or anything, just takes some effort, time, and of course, euro's. Getting past the liability lawyers and insurance agents...
You want to WHAT?? WHY????
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
didn't the MIT guys do this already?
g _vu_meter/
....
link: http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1993/green_bld
and quite a while ago too
Fry: heh, Yakov Smirnoff said it
Leela: No he didn't.
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.
The TU-Delft did the same thing in feb. this year as a stunt. Only they used a 23 floor building to display messages and to play snake :)
u nt .php
Sorry, I coundn't find pictures and the text is in dutch
http://etv.its.tudelft.nl/commissies/lustrum/st
Privacy is terrorism.
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.
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?"
He's referring to a similar project a couple of years ago where you could play tetris on a building using a controller attached to the lights in the building.
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!
8 stories with 18 windows each
each windows is illuminated by a pretty standard contruction lamp with 150W
each lamp is connected to a relais (sp?)
the "Blinkenlights Chaos Control Center" is located in the top story
each relais is connected to the control machine with a simple amplifying circuit
5000m of cable were used (about 5500yards)
3 networked machines are used for central switching control, playing console and remote control
to ensure even illumination all windows have been covered with white paint
The entire setup took less than 4 weeks from idea to realization
+++ath0
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 posted my loveletter to the CCC, took my sweetheart to the restaurant across the road, and sat down at the prime wndow table. Staring romantically towards the glowing lights, framed by the shimmering stars and a huge moon, my message appeared....
"Linda, Will you mar"
Unfortunately, I had forgotten it was only 18 x 8 pixels. Darn. Then there was a powercut.
...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
Finally, if you are going to reply to this (e.g. to write the word 'FUD' a lot) then for God's sake, log in! If it's important enough to reply to, then it's worth burning karma on. Karma really isn't that big a deal.
Yep, what's the point of getting karma if you're not going to spend it? For example, I'm posting this at +1, it's going to get modded down at least twice, but who cares?
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).
Also, when Blinkenlights are taken down (hopefully not to soon, but hey!, I just live ten minutes away), you can always enjoy part of the performance in the new video by the Toten Hosen, a German punk-band (from Hamburg, that is).
Free Manning, jail Obama.
I have to ask you "WTF are you talking about?"
/. I know I am not the oldest - I am 28 years old!
First off, while I am certainly not the youngest on
As far as being a tree-hugger, while I certainly don't like the practices some companies do to the environment, I certainly do not wish to shut down the entire industrial sector and go live in the woods - I believe there can be a happy medium.
Finally, I fail to see how any of this has to do with my question?
I was sincerely curious as to how they pulled this off - and from what I have found out, it seems they have done it with an abandoned, possibly condemned building. I was originally figuring they either had a rich person who was a member of the CCC who owned an entire building for himself (hey, I have nothing against this - it would be that person's money to decide what they did with it), or they possibly used a building under construction.
The idea that they are using a building slated for destruction makes the most sense, though. However, I still find it amazing that they got the permission to do this from all relevant sources. Of course, as one person replied, I am sure with big hint of sarcasm (and perhaps irony), it is possible because Germany "is a free country". I understand this individual's meaning.
What he said and the fact that such a display would be nigh impossible to do here in the USA says something about our society - and that troubles me.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
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