MFF 2010: iMAL Media Facade & City Sleep Light

Light installations on iMAL Facade

For the opening of MFF 2010 in Brussels, the building of iMAL will be transformed into a media facade. This DIY LED facade will be inaugurated with "City Sleep Light", a new creation by Antoine Schmitt produced by iMAL. Facing the canal , it will be pulsating to the rhythm of Brussels, becoming the night-light of the city.

City Sleep Light by Antoine Schmitt (FR)

City Sleep Light makes a radical move by transforming a whole building into the sleep light of the city, akin to the sleep light of a computer. All the lights are pulsing together in an organic rhythm, turning the building into a luminous cell of the living city.

Computed from the current global socio-economic activity of the city, the rhythm and shape of pulsations differ every night and change for each city. For the festival, City Sleep Light will be visible in each city, literally connecting inhabitants through multiple adaptations of the project on the facades.

You can become a living pixel in phase with your city : the City Pulses are available through the internet, so that you can display a City Pulse in your browser on your computer screen and make your room and your window pulse in sync with the city's sleep. Browse to the City Pulse page of your city!

About Antoine Schmitt

iMAL Media Facade

Media facades are not the privileges of banks or large institutions. Small organisations and groups of individuals should be able to broadcast visual contents in the urban landscape, proposing creative programmes produced freely according to their own criteria and ideas. Indeed the usage policies of the public space as a medium for diffusing content is one of the key issues addressed by the Media Facade Festival.

This is why we have decided to build our own temporary media facade along the canal. As the cost of LED technology is falling down, new types of screens, projectors and lighting devices easily deployable in the urban environment will become available and affordable. For our media facade, we use powerful low-energy LED spotlights controlled through DMX to transform each window of our building into a colored pixel.

On August 27th, the first row of windows was completed and for the finissage week-end of MFF2010 and the Nuit Blanche on Saturday 2nd of October, the 18 windows of the whole facade will be turned on into a huge matrix of 6x3 highly luminous pixels staging along the canal.

City Sleep Light is the main project proposed on this facade and is visible every week-end from Friday night to Monday morning.
For the other nights during the week and before midnight on the finissage w-e, programmes especially developed by artists (e.g. Yannick Antoine, Stefaan Quix) and digital art students from ESA Saint-Luc Bruxelles will be displayed exploiting the possibilities of this new low-res low-tech urban screen.

The iMAL media facade project is made possible thanks to the collaboration of our neighbours: Urban Platform and Rabbit.

"iMAL Media Facade"
Video shooting: Rafael Abril
Video editing: Kristina Ianatchkova
Photo documentation: iMAL

Credits

Curators and coordinators: Marie-Laure Delaby and Yves Bernard

Technical support: Yannick Antoine, Vincent Evrard

Funding Partners: European Commission Culture Programme, French Speaking Community of Belgium (digital art commission)

IT & Media Partners: Streampark, Nacamar