> Blinkenlights (CCC. Berlin)
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Celebrating its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club has made a special present to itself and the city of Berlin. From September 12th, 2001 to February 23rd, 2002, the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz has been enhanced to become world's biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights (a term defined by the jargon file).
The upper eight floors of the building were transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 lamps behind the building's front windows. A computer controlled each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels.
During the night, a constantly growing number of animations could be seen. But there was an interactive component as well: you were able to play the old arcade classic Pong on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own loveletters on the screen as well.
Blinkenlights was up and running at until February 23rd, 2002, running 23 weeks and 5 days in total. During that period, we constantly improved its feature set. Even now, work on Blinkenlights is not completed. The software has been released as Free Software under GPL.
Using your mobile phone you could play Pong with Blinkenlights or your friend. The program Blinkenpaint enables you to create your own animations allowing you to take part in our contest.
Tim Pritlove, one of the initiators, will be presenting the story of the project.
http://www.blinkenlights.de