Interview about Top of Austria Permanent Media Installation, winner of the A' Fine Arts and Art Installation Design Award 2021
The DC Tower 1 is Austria's highest building and provides an outstanding welcome gesture. A webcam at the roof continuously collects photos, over time creating an image-pool. These captured moments are arranged in real-time into vivid time-slice montages. It's all about cherishing every single moment. Sensors deliver position tracking, enabling people to influence the layouts. The LED wall in the foyer celebrates both: the location and every moment at it. Additionally it provides dialogue between the people and the building itself through interactivity.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design DetailsAt the very beginning of the creative process there just was the DC Tower. It is the highest building in Austria, a business tower in the capital Vienna. The uniqueness of the tower can not be experienced upon entrance, because it is on the ground floor. Bringing the feeling of the highest building down was the easy part of the idea. But as special as the location is, the everyday visit, the moment itself should also become special. Therefore we needed to find a way to bring the time aspect into the imagery of the view from the roof. The last part was, getting the digital content responsive, because the new tower management wanted to send a strong signal to all vendors and visitors. "We care for you. We want to be and stay in dialogue with you!".
As I said, we needed to find a way to allow the installation to get responsive to people in front of it. We needed anonymous tracking in the public space of the foyer of the tower. 2D-Laser scanners were the ideal solution for that.
Time-slicing in photography is not new. Embedding a time period into one picture has been done before. By digitalizing this approach and by going Real-Time, we hope, we did something innovative. One slice of the picture, that is shown on the LED wall, is always "now". We take pictures from the roof looking down on Vienna every 5 minutes. The most recent picture, we made sure of that, is always shown and always part of the time-sliced collage.
The facade of the tower is simply iconic. We tried to pay homage to it by using it as an extra element in the way we solved the time-slicing for this installation.
We needed a weather-resistant outdoor camera that reliably takes pictures every 300 seconds. We found one, that is normally used for alpine scenarios, an outdoor weather camera for mountain areas. Once we had a camera that delivered constantly photos onto our media server, we could develop an application that utilizes this ever growing pool of photos.
The view of Vienna and the Danube from the roof of the DC Tower is spectacular on its own. We cannot take credit for that. By mixing different times of the day, mixing different days of the month and even mixing different days of the year, it just got more intriguing. And it stays interesting, even to people who pass the installation every day of the year. Simply because it never looks the same.
To us, this installation embodies the essence of makes the DC Tower the DC Tower. Nothing more, but also nothing less. Sometimes being on point, but then being satisfied with just that, is a very good choice. At least to my mind.
The big hardware part of the installation, the LED wall was already in the foyer when we got in contact with the team of the DC Tower for the first time. The stuff that we added was really minor: the weather camera and the Laser scanners.
Honestly, I would not evolve this installation to more than it is right now. We added real-time, of course digital, snow to the installation in winter time. But besides that, we did not change the installation for 5 years now. We did add another installation onto the same LED wall, but this installation does something completely different. Those two installation just switch between each other time-based.
An award recognition is always validation for everybody involved as well. In this case, it especially gave the client of ours confirmation, that going with us and allowing us to think "outside the box" was a good decision ;-)
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