ADELAIDE, Australia — Local firm Fusion responded to a design competition to liven up the capital of South Australia with a plan to permanently wrap an eight-story parking garage with a moving illuminated canvas. Designer Damien Mair said the idea was to “capture the imaginations” of passersby “and add beauty to people’s lives,” not just entertain or inform them with yet another giant video screen. Mair needed to wrap more than a thousand square meters of display around a parking garage that relies entirely on natural ventilation to clear away the exhaust fumes, and came up with 754 individual anodized aluminium “tiles” individually angled to allow maximum viewing from the streets below, but offering minimal impediment to the building’s natural air flow.
Each of the 714 active tiles is illuminated from below by a pair of custom-built Space Cannon Bisquit LED luminaires, for a total of 1428 “pixels.” The Bisquit luminaires deployed on the Rundle lantern are IP66 rated exterior fixtures containing 12 high-efficiency LED sources (four red, four green and four blue). They are configured for full-spectrum RGB color mixing via DMX512A and remote addressing using the RDM protocol.
Images are fed over Ethernet to the Rundle Lantern from a Hippotizer V3 Stage media server in the bottom of the building, and distributed by Enttec’s Datagate and Ethergate decoders via banks of Technical Art Solution DMX splitters. Fabian Barzaghi and Dan Ditmann of Space Cannon Australia undertook the system design and configuration.
Content creation and management for the Lantern is supplied as part of an ongoing contract by the design team at Fusion, using Green Hippo’s Pixel Mapper software and the Zoo Keeper remote management software, from their facility in central Adelaide.
For more information, please visit www.fusion.com.au and www.spacecannon.com.au.
