When the days got shorter and the leaves turned colorful EnBW commissioned ART+COM to give their showroom a winterly atmosphere for the time around christmas. Contrary to the loud and hectic christmas mood we decided to create a contemplative space in which people could recreate from their shopping stress and learn something about christmas aside from its economic implications.
Design of the facade
The LED Ribbon on the curved facade would attract the attention of pedestrians. Quaint facts about christmas displayed in a typographic way gave a glimps about what is going on inside the showroom. The words were generated computationaly by Tim Knapens custom software and were assembled out of small snowflakes. Thus, the words would emerge and disappear from time to time in a snow flurry.
On the windows we applied silhouettes of a winterly landscape. Trees and deer create a winterly mood and conceal the interior of the showroom in a dreamy fashion. If people want to know what is happening in the showroom they would have to peek through the leaves of a tree. The silhouttes even casted shadows that were spraycanned on the sidewalk by Tine Paech and our project manager Kerstin Ameskamp.
Design of the interior
We divided the experience in the showroom into two topics. First we exhibited strange facts about christmas from around the world. Second we created a quiet and contemplative area to relax.
For people who are more curious in what christmas is all about we collected around twenty quaint stories about christmas from all over the world. These stories were silkscreened on many translucent banners. Like icicles they hung from the ceiling and structured the whole space and gave it an organic ice cave like impression.
People who would need relaxation would enter the contemplative space. Using the huge LED wall in the showroom we bathed the room in a warm bright light. Thus we didn´t consider the LEDs as a display, we transformed the wall in a giant light source. The abstract imagery reminded of the flickering fire in a fireside. Sitting in huge white cushions the visitors could enjoy the flickering light or have one of the oranges we distributed over the place.
To generate the light patterns on the LED wall Andreas Schlegel and me wrote a custom software with processing, that would extract color information out of different images. The underlying images show winterly and christmassy scenes. They form a color sequence which would define the ambience of the room. In the beginning the space would look bright white then change over a more colorful sequence until it is bathed in a glaring red.
As you can see on the computational illustration below we extracted one single pixel line out of an image and stretched it all over the LED surface. By moving the extracted line we generated a very dynamic pattern.
Print communication
The whole christmas event was accompanied and advertised by many print products. Jakob Lehr used the elements and aesthetics of the images and dynamic patterns to design corporate identity compliant flyers and posters which were distributed all over Berlin and published in several magazines and newspapers.
