Blinken Lights

December 10, 2001 12:12 PM

Blinken Lights the world's biggest interactive computer display, a special 20th anniversary present to itself and the city of Berlin by the Chaos Computer Club. Since Sept 12, 2001, the upper eight floors of the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) have been transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 lamps behind each of the windows. A computer controls each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels. The icing on the cake, you can play pong on it via your mobile phone!
posted by riffola (9 comments total)

I'm not sure this is actually the biggest, I think this tetris game done by some brown students early last year is bigger.
posted by malphigian at 12:27 PM on December 10, 2001

sure is cool, though. How stupid and fun, a wonderful waste of time and resources - I love it.
posted by hotdoughnutsnow at 12:38 PM on December 10, 2001

I love this! You can create your own images and animations for it, as well. What an awesome thing.
posted by acridrabbit at 1:07 PM on December 10, 2001

that is one of the coolest things I have ever seen
posted by ColdChef at 1:10 PM on December 10, 2001

The CNET article about the Brown game of Tetris warmed my heart: "My girlfriend came in from California and put in several days of soldering," Spies said.

Ahhhh....what a gal.
posted by jennak at 1:33 PM on December 10, 2001

there's a hotel in san diego (mission valley) that does this.. it says "joy" durring the holidays.
posted by afx114 at 1:39 PM on December 10, 2001

Guys?... Hello?... Nobody has mentioned the original?...

Well, it's the earilest one I know of, anyway...
posted by whatnotever at 2:26 PM on December 10, 2001

There's a building like this when I look out the window. Usually it's all sortsa patterns but sometimes it sits for minutes on (I swear) c:\>_. I'm dying to find the IP address.
posted by thijsk at 1:10 AM on December 11, 2001

I thought the KPN building in Rotterdam (what thijsk was talking about above) was newer, but I guess it was just built the least time I was there: more pics - more about the building (scroll down, click on the thumbnail next to "KPN Telecom Office Tower")
posted by sylloge at 1:45 AM on December 11, 2001