As Canada’s largest low-resolution LED public art installation, this digital gallery screen adorns the façade of a high-rise residential tower, and is integrated into the area’s architecture and building design.
This permanent 10,000 square-foot art installation reinforces the city’s ongoing focus on art and culture. It highlights Digital Art, a progressive contemporary art form that has begun to gain global attention over the past decade, with unlimited opportunity for impact and practicality. The more technology evolves, the more digital art blossoms. Just as a traditional art gallery showcases featured artists, this exterior gallery screen’s digital flexibility enables artists’ exhibits to rotate on-demand, bringing new meaning to hanging art on the wall. The versatility of this technology as a medium marries well with the scale of this exterior digital gallery platform.
One of the biggest challenges was to determine the optimal relationship between the glass and the light source. To ensure legibility of each pool of light the balance between glass type and distance to light source was key. Both computer simulations and full-scale physical mock-ups were used to test combinations of different glass types, and the spacing and depth of the fixtures to ensure that there was not an overlay of hues from one pixel to the next.
The final distance between pixels was calculated to be 600mm or 23 inches approximately. This allowed for each pixel to display a colour without bleeding into the colour of any adjacent pixels. The pixel distance ultimately determines the quality and accuracy to which the digital art is represented. The more precise the pixel distance, the truer the translation of the artist’s work.
With excellent sightlines from the surrounding public realm, equal access for all, including commuters, residents, and visitors, this installation is a bona fide light at the end of the tunnel.
