Spheres, 2008

BMW Museum, Munich, Germany

From an in­door pi­azza at the BMW Mu­seum vis­i­tors can ex­plore the seven ‘houses’ that ac­com­mo­date the dif­fer­ent parts of the ex­hi­bi­tion. The multi-storey houses allow vis­i­tors to see the pi­azza, the ve­hi­cles ex­hib­ited on it and the other mu­seum vis­i­tors from above, cre­at­ing an im­pres­sion of a pub­lic space.

Spheres is a me­di­a­te­c­ture cov­er­ing the inner walls of the space with 3D graph­ics and mov­ing image and ex­pands the per­cep­tion of the space.

The 700 square me­tres of wall space sur­round­ing the pi­azza are cov­ered with white mono­chrome LEDs clad with opaque ar­chi­tec­tural glass. In this way, the LEDs are no longer iden­ti­fi­able as a tech­ni­cal sys­tem or clas­sic video screen, but be­come sim­ply part of a dy­namic façade.

The façades are il­lu­mi­nated with purely ab­stract and ab­stract-fig­u­ra­tive mov­ing im­ages. Around 20 dif­fer­ent an­i­ma­tions cre­ate an at­mos­phere of tech­ni­cal so­phis­ti­ca­tion with a po­etic, emo­tional di­men­sion. Im­mersed in this flow of im­ages, vis­i­tors ex­pe­ri­ence the space in a new way each time they pass through it, thus ex­pand­ing its per­ceived di­men­sions even fur­ther.

The an­i­ma­tions are mostly auto-ac­tive. How­ever, if rel­a­tively few vis­i­tors are in the mu­seum, the sys­tem switches into re­ac­tive mode. A video-track­ing sys­tem picks up the exact co­or­di­nates and move­ments of the vis­i­tors pre­sent, who can then di­rectly in­flu­ence the graph­ics. Vis­i­tors are thus in­volved in the vi­sual ap­pear­ance of the mu­seum and ex­pe­ri­ence it as a dy­namic en­vi­ron­ment ef­fected by their pres­ence.

The BMW Mu­seum is a joint pro­ject of ART+COM (spa­tial media de­sign, in­ter­ac­tive in­stal­la­tions) and Ate­lier Brückner (ar­chi­tec­ture, ex­hi­bi­tion de­sign).