Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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.
Oh turn me on Helga. Turn me on.
. . . . . . . [awg] http://acidwriting.org
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.
much web crawling later, you should check out Marnix 2001 for the high budget alternative...
The only Good System is a Sound System
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.
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
...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).