Next week, the citizens of Toronto will be wondering if they’ve walked onto the set of Bladerunner when they look up at the two curved towers of their city hall and find it transformed into a giant display showing user generated movies and games. They’ll have to blink their eyes a few times before they realize that they haven’t time-traveled to a city with flying cars but are, in fact, looking at Stereoscope, the latest and most epic blinkenlights project to date. Each window of the two majestic and curved towers will become a blinking pixel wirelessly networked to create the most amazing dual monitor system ever.

Blinkenlights is the brain child of Tim Pritlove, the cunning schemer, dischordianist preacher and host of Chaosradio, the popular German podcast. With co-conspirator Thomas Fiedler pulled together a rockstar team for each version of blinkenlights to make them much more than buildings. I heard about the project while at the Chaos Communications Camp in 2007. I met Tim to get the scoop on the history of the history of blinkenlights project.

Blinkenlights all started in 2001. The year marked the 20th anniversary of the Chaos Computer Club which was started in 1981. Wau Holland, founder of the CCC had just surprised everyone by dieing and the motivation to do something really special to mark the 20 year anniversary was high. A five-day retrospective exhibition about the history of the CCC was set to take place in the Congress building in Berlin and a nearby landmark, the teacher’s building, was being remodeled and empty. Tim had the keys to the building and his initial idea was to create a giant CCC design in lights on the side of the building but when Tim quietly mentioned this idea to a few select friends, their instant reaction was that they had to play Tetris on the side of a building. Within hours a crackerjack team of 8 people were huddled around a table planning the first building-sized display screen. Was it possible? Would it work?

They kept the project secret and after a mere five weeks of hacking without much sleep, the hardware and software had been set up and it worked. 8 floors of 18 windows each for a total 144 lights needed to be controlled and nside the building a network of cables, wound around the building like a 1000 lost snakes. If you were in the building when it was running, you could hear the relays clicking on and off. The windows were painted white to diffuse the light. After a short delay due to 9/11, the project went live and was up and running for 6 months. The components were hammered with activity and amazingly, only 30% of the lights had to be changed in that time and 50% of the relays. The team got to the point where they could tell which animation was up because of the sounds of the relays echoing through the building.

While the world was confronting the stress of the terrorist action, the team programmed the building to show a gently beating heart into the night. Shortly after launching, one blinkenlight team member, an ISDN expert, hacked together a pong game that you could play on the building with cell phones. You called a number and got connected to the display, which converted the tones from your phone to the ups and downs of the paddle controller. The whole thing was set up to be simple because it had to be.

What really sets this first project apart is the interactive component. The blinkenlights team put out a shockwave app to convert movies and a design app was released for people to create their own animations. The first animation they got from a stranger was a personal love letter animation saying simply, “I love you Julia.” They played it on the building and suddenly, everyone just got it. The team set it up so that anyone could submit an animation over email and when it was approved, they would get a confirmation number. With this number you could call the building and dial your confirmation message and your animation would show on the building. Declarations of love and proposals of marriage ensued and Tim told me that the apex of the project was when he got tracked down by man who was desperate to get back together with his girlfriend. He pleaded with Tim to put his animation on the building. Desperately he claimed, “My girlfriend just left me, Blinkenlights is my last hope!”

As we chatted, Tim lit up when recounting some of the early handcrafted animations. Make sure to check them out in the above video. My personal favorite is the animation of the cat that stretches.

Because of the interactivity and public generated animations, the installation was adopted by the public as their own. Blinkenlights had turned a boring part of Berlin into something vital, interactive, and special. When Tim began passing out party invitations for the closing of the installation, the standard reply was, “NO! You can’t take it away from us! It’s ours!” A circular saw dramatically severed the huge bundle of cable that networked the lights and the project went dark. The building had to be returned to regular use and the lights went black for the blinkenlights project.

But even though the installation came down, the project didn’t die. A year later, in 2002, Tim was approached by the Nuit Blanche festival in France and asked to repeat Blinkenlights in Paris. Having had such a successful experience in Berlin, Tim swore that blinkenlights would only be revived if presented with a really interesting building. The French rose to the challenge by offering the Bibliothèque Nationale de France as a blinkenlights platform. The blinkenlights team stepped up their game, rewrote the software, and new hardware was installed with a dedicated linux box on every floor. The matrix was expanded to 20 floors with 26 windows on each floor with 520 windows in total. Members of the Gimp development team were brought onto the project. The blinkenlight project was upgraded to display grayscale animations and the phone interface rang off the hook. It was a glorious and short two week performance, but again the blinkenlights project was thrust into darkness where it would remain for 6 years.

Now, with Stereoscope, Blinkenlights is on the brink of being back stronger than ever. Stay tuned! Later this week, I’ll be following up this article with part 2 which will get into the technical details of Stereoscope, the most epic blinkenlights project yet!