The Media Facades Festival Berlin 2008 presents:

First public testscreening will happen on the rearprojection facade of the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin on the August 30 2008, starting after dawn. We will present first selected artworks produced in the framework of the Media Facades Festival. The final Urban Screenings will take place from October 18 - November 3 2008 on four media facades in the center of Berlin. 24 meda artists and interaction designer will gain temporary use of the facades and one interactive city terminal ito explore their cultural, political and social roles. They invite a wider audience to gain hands-on experience in this special connection of content, format, and site-specificity, and to take part in a new interactive infrastructure.

Wanted suspects on digital screens wasn’t a single social project proposed by screen operators. In the beginning of 2006, Lamar Advertising agreed to broadcast for free messages of national program AMBER Alert on its own LED signs in Connecticut. Later other screens of Lamar joined the project…"

A mesh LED net is temporarily covering the facade renovation at Piazza Duomo, Milan

The Urban Screen in Milan at Piazza Duomo became media partner of the project Check-in Architecture, a participative research project, inviting artists, architects, designers and sociologists, studying in the most prestigious universities in Europe, to tell stories about our cities in the form of 3 minute-long documentaries. The project interacts with its participants through a website, collecting and managing the documentaries via YouTube and GoogleMaps. It will also publish daily reflections on a blog. Check-in Architecture is also a free-press publication, a part of the Urban Screen programming and an exhibition taking place during the Architects’ Congress in Turin and the Venice Biennale.

"We at CIA have never really liked the word ‘content,’ as it makes art and advertorials one and the same, but let’s say instead of content, Urban Screen will be showing the Check-in Architecture documentaries, roughly between 3-4 and 8-9 everyday."

Source: Anouk De Clercq

A new Video installation by Anouk De Clercq is running on the SEVEN SCREENS in Munich from April 25 to November 9, 2008: Movement is the focus of her installation Motion for Newton. Inspired by the famous physicist’s laws of motion, the Belgian artist allows lines and forms to affect each other in an interplay with their direct environment.

Point of departure was an analysis of the OSRAM building’s architecture. The artist thus created a work that was specifically developed for its location and those passing by the site in their vehicles. The artist refers to her new work as Motion for Newton. This title stands for a “constructive mobile,” which is inspired by the vertical forms of the SEVEN SCREENS, as well as by the city’s architecture, high rises and sky scrapers. Forms encircle each other in continuous motion. The work’s main theme is the moving body in relation to its environment. The SEVEN SCREENS are transformed into "motion sculptures," which become a homage to Isaac Newton…

Los Angeles, 2009?

Here a short WIRED report about Sonny Astani, a real estate mogul who is planning to bring 2019 Los Angeles to life in the form of two 14-story animated billboards modeled on Ridley Scott’s opening sequence of Blade Runner….The idea, pending city approval, is to install hundreds of rows of LEDs, each spaced 6 inches apart, across the buildings’ floor-to-ceiling windows. So what will happen if our dystopian future movie visions are slowly reaised?

Thanks Sascha for the link!

The FLARE membrane developed by WHITEvoid is a modular system to create a dynamic hull for facades or any building or wall surface. Acting like a living skin, it allows a building to express, communicate and interact with its environment. Each stainless steel flake reflects the bright sky or sunlight when in vertical standby position. The FLARE system consists of a number of tiltable metal flake bodies supplemented by individually controllable pneumatic cylinders. When the flake is tilted downwards by a computer controlled pneumatic piston, its face is shaded from the sky light and this way appears as a dark pixel. By reflecting ambient or direct sunlight, the individual flakes of the FLARE system act like pixels formed by natural light.

Post suggested by Mads Rasmusen 

Vox Pop by Antonia Hirsch is a 2-channel video project that will be screened April 7 to 13, 2008 on a dual video billboards above the intersection of Granville and Robson Streets in downtown Vancouver.

Silent, and one minute in duration, Vox Pop is set in a large, empty sports stadium. A panoptic tracking shot, evoking the mass-movement of an Audience Wave, is contrasted with the portrayal of a single audience members gestural action. A subtly provocative investigation of the individual within the crowd, the artwork draws attention to the spaces and behaviours through which we are encouraged to perform and celebrate shared values. By slowing down the rapid pace of video advertising, Vox Pop troubles the site of recreation, competition, and the particular dynamic of the collective.

Vox Pox was curated by Barbara Cole and presented by Other Sights for Artists‘ Projects.

Photo by Charlie Samuels

The Moons , a Percent For Art Project by Chris Doyle, consists of three circular LED screens suspended over a seiers of gardens in the plaza at the Sprint Arena in Kansas City. The videos depict over 600 people from Kansas City flying across the screens. They run 24 hours per day and change with the seasons.

In a showcase of international Urban Screen initiatives, Our Friends Are Electric introduces the concept of urban screens to the Melbourne audience in anticipation for the next Urban Screens Event - Urban Screens Melbourne 08 from 3rd-8th October 2008.

From the subways of Paris to electronic billboards in cities such as Toronto, Berlin and Amsterdam, Our Friends Are Electric is a series of projects created specifically for public screens throughout the world. The series will include a range of video art programs in addition to individual artist initiatives created from collective, worldwide contributions.

Beginning with the launch of the Streaming Museum, the first international moving image gallery to be broadcast both in
cyberspace and public space over seven continents simultaneously, Our Friends Are Electric celebrates how today’s cities are
becoming connected through a network of urban screens.

Featured initiatives:

The Streaming Museum
Visual Foreign Correspondents
Videospread
The Vernacular Terrain
Do Billboards Dream of Electric Screens?
Upgrade! International
Best of Transmedia
At Play

This project, curated by Kerrie-Dee Johns and Mirjam Struppek, is presented by Federation Square and the International Urban Screens Association - a network of international collaborators.