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Project Blinkenlights will be contributing to Nuit Blanche this year with Stereoscope lighting up Toronto’s City Hall. From their page:

Stereoscope

After a long break, Project Blinkenlights is coming back big time in Toronto, Canada this year. Targeting the landmark building of Toronto City Hall, the group is participating in this year’s Nuit Blanche all-night art event on October 4th, 2008. The installation’s name “Stereoscope” reflects the special nature of the building with its two curved, opposing facades effectively creating a three-dimensional appearance.

Not having rested in the recent years, Project Blinkenlights has developed new technology to wirelessly control the lights placed behind the 960 windows of City Hall allowing for a large scale visual concert during the night in downtown Toronto.

Public Participation

As usual, Project Blinkenlights invites the public to be a part of the installation by opening up a variety of ways to interact with and provide content for Stereoscope.

Among the more traditional features, everybody can play classic computer games on the facade simply by using a mobile phone. The two upper parts of each tower serve as dedicated playgrounds each offering separate telephone numbers for individual gameplay. These numbers will be published on-site beginning the week before Nuit Blanche so that people can get the information where they need it – at Nathan Philips Square in front of City Hall in Toronto.

A simple animation tool and open animation data formats enable you to to create simple movies for Stereoscope – addressing one of four parts of the whole facade. Focusing on simple, low-resolution imagery, Project Blinkenlights wants to revive the spirit of the original Blinkenlights installation in Berlin that obtained its charme from the down-to-earth, barebones design of low-res imagery.

For advanced graphic artists, the group provides a set of tools running on Macintosh computers to design complex animation design that serves as the background imagery and core appearance of the Stereoscope installation.

In addition to our usual events, we’ve got two upcoming parties at the lab that you may want to join us for.

The first is our incorporation party– to celebrate our official status as a non-profit corporation, we’re throwing a party. Come join us at the HackLab to celebrate our incorporation, get ready for Nuit Blanche and SecTor, or even check out the space if you haven’t seen it yet. Yes, yes, it’s not a secret, we’re also fundraising– help us out as we try to offset our start-up costs.

Also, we have a couch now, for real. For real!

The second is an unofficial afterparty for SecTor, where we get to show off the lab to everyone from out of town.

Save the dates:

Incorporation Party – 10/3, 7pm – 3am
SecTor Unofficial Afterparty – 10/8, 8pm – 1am

We hope to see you at the lab!