In July, Las Vegas unveiled an extravagant spectacle - a colossal LED-wrapped spherical structure, standing 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide. This entertainment event venue instantly captured the public's gaze, becoming a local landmark and attracting global attention through extensive news coverage. Similar spherical concepts have been proposed in London and at a smaller scale in Los Angeles. These massive display structures open up questions about facades as digital canvases. What role can architecture take as an urban canvas other than as a billboard? And what are different ways for architecture to engage the public through digital art besides gigantic LED spheres?
In September this year, the Vegas Sphere started its artist rotation using its 1.2 million LED facade as a 360-degree digital art display. Its first artist, Refik Anadol, took over the Sphere with an artificial intelligence data sculpture called "Machine Hallucinations: Sphere." The piece uses data and machine learning algorithms to make large-scale animated abstractions that draw on urban environments, nature, and space. In an interview with the LA Times, Anadol said the Sphere allowed his work to stretch in new directions and take his video art to new heights. The novelty of the Sphere as an unusual art display opens up the question: what are other ways architecture could produce unique canvases for digital art?
At pavilion scale, Pixel Cloud by UNSTABLE transformed an ordinary scaffolding structure into a visually captivating layered architectural installation in Reykjavik, Iceland. Located in front of the Icelandic House of Parliament, Austuvöllur Square had previously been the stage of a series of protests in 2008 that led to an unprecedented change of government. This architectural and digital installation temporarily transformed this space into a site of reconciliation. They created a fully immersive environment of light and sound using obsolete scaffolding structures scattered across the city. The structure was covered with a porous membrane of multiple layers of white net fabric. The membrane captured the light projected onto its surfaces while letting it pass through its porous openings, reaching its numerous layers and creating an environment of light and shadows inside the structure.
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In Japan, "Sculptures of Dissipative Birds in the Wind" allows visitors to experience data collected about birds flying by in an ethereal way. It is a giant installation in teamLab's exhibition, "teamLab Botanical Garden Osaka," depicting the continuous energy dissipation by flying birds and the wind. Movement is reflected in real-time, creating artwork that continuously changes. Its transformation of gathered data to graphics projected into the physical environment allows visitors to view and understand the botanical garden in new ways. The entirety of the teamLab Botanical Garden Osaka art space transforms interactively in different ways at night, influenced by wind, rain, people, and fauna.
These examples showcase the uncharted territories to explore between the digital art and architecture fields. While the Sphere attempts to push boundaries through its mere massive size, plenty can be explored beyond scale. Interdisciplinary approaches to these types of installations could pave the way for new types of public art and possibly a more profound and new understanding of the built environment.
