Driving visuals at the heart of ‘Living Canvas’ public art installations

Irish creative production studio Algorithm relied on Screenberry media servers to control and program playback at two major multimedia art installations in Dublin city centre commissioned by IPUT Real Estate Dublin. 

The multimedia installations, entitled ‘Living Canvas’, establish new ways of exhibiting artworks on large scale outdoor formats in Dublin’s city centre at Wilton Park and at Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. The latter area is also known as ‘Silicon Docks’, home to the European headquarters of some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter. 

Rear projection at Tropical Fruit Warehouse, Sir John Rogerson’s Quay

Screenberry helps turn windows of a renovated Tropical Fruit Warehouse into a bright display. The building was established back in 1890 and now it is being transformed into an high-end office space. The projection onto windows overlooking the river Liffey creates a spectacular media art canvas for everyone passing by the former warehouse building. The first digital artwork exhibited is called ‘Where Glass Meets Water,' as it links the rich history of the Liffey with Dublin’s revived docklands.

To run the installation, Algorithm used one Screenberry server for aligning and controlling 8 x Panasonic projectors located on two floors of the Warehouse. The server outputs 3580x1264 px video onto a smart projection film that can go transparent at the flick of a switch.

Curved LED panorama at Wilton Park

At Wilton Park, Screenberry runs a digital LED screen. One server controls 3168x576px@50fps video playback on a curved 21x4m LED panorama. It is the largest-ever outdoor digital screen in Europe dedicated solely to cultural use. From 8 am to 10 pm every day this LED canvas is showing artworks of both local Irish and international artists. Algorithm also used Screenberry to program the installation.

“What sets Screenberry apart is that there is a node for nearly everything you could possibly need to do. And because it's node-based, it makes it incredibly easy to connect everything up. On top of that, it's constantly being updated, adding new features every time. It's also very intuitive to use,” says Algorithm’s Creative Technician Fergus O’Hagan.

“The feature I found most useful would be the timelines and timeline triggers,” adds Fergus. “This allowed me to trigger multiple different things at specific points in the timeline like our accompanying digital companion for the screen that live updates when the content changes on the screen.”