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Themesicon: navigation pathPublic Sphere_sicon: navigation pathPublic Sphere_s
 
Blinkenlights (Chaos Computer Club e.V.), 2001IO_dencies (Knowbotic Research), 1997
 
 
 

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microphones throughout the building’s interior. One of the most enjoyable reactive architecture projects has «Blinkenlights» (2003) by the Chaos Computer Club, whose software program «Blinkenpaint» enables users to create animations that can be played on office towers, whose lights are turned into a very large-scale computer screen. It was even possible to play Pong or Tetris on the building façade using a cell phone as the interface. As Inke Arms writes: « ‹Blinkenlights› is not concerned with the aspect of dynamic architecture as media supported ornamentation, but precisely with the maximum possible visibility of a participatory impetus in urban space. It is concerned, in other words, with an emphatic notion of what is public.» [28] The architects Diller + Scofidio have a long history of interactivity integrated into their architectural projects. «Facsimile» (2005) is a 16’ high by 27’ wide video screen that traverses the façade of the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. Live feeds of the interior (private) space are interspersed with various fictional scenes that one could imagine to be happening. On the interior side of the screen, Ben Rubin and Mark Hanson have programmed 3 live feeds of Google to

 

create off kilter, poetic news of the outside world.

The City As Interface

But as Archigram theorized and the reactive architecture of individual buildings points to, it is at the scale of the networked city that public space and the new discourse architecture of very large-scale conversations are converging. As researcher Anthony Townsend has written, «while computer scientists’ laboratory fantasies of seamless global access to broadband communications remain unfulfilled, urban research must acknowledge the pace at which reality is rushing to meet those expectations. The potential spatial and social implications of these new infrastructure networks must be identified and explored.» [29] And a number of artists and research projects are addressing the city as a whole. An important early project in this regard is Knowbotic Research’s «I0_dencies» (1997). While it specifically shifted issues about urban processes from the real, physical space into an «experimental field of events and flows in the data network,» [30] «I0_dencies» identified the possibilities in the tension between local

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