THU 22/10/2015

Harnessing the talents of a team of architects, media artists, musicians, cultural scholars and technical specialists, URBANSCREEN are in the business of creating beautiful, large-scale spectacles out of the overlap between the material and digital worlds.

Specializing in public, site-specific media installations—most commonly taking the form of 3D-video mapping on architecture and augmented sculptures (a physical object with custom-fit projection mapping)—the Bremen-based collective have won numerous awards, displaying the breadth of their imaginations and the strength of their technology on five different continents.
On the ground floor for 320° Licht, which used 21 interconnected projectors. Photo: Thomas Wolf

On the ground floor for 320° Licht, which used 21 interconnected projectors. Photo: Thomas Wolf

2014’s 320° Licht projected 320° around on the 100 meters high wall interior of the former gas holder, Gasometer Oberhausen. Photo: Thomas Wolf
Rice University in Houston, Texas, celebrated their centennial in 2012 with 270° projections along 240 meters of wall with 6.1 full spatial sound. Photo: Courtesy of the artists
2011’s MQ10 featured an audiovisual staging of the Leopold Museum’s architecture in Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier. Photo: Courtesy of the artists
Lighting The Sails (2012) projected onto the famous fins of the Sydney Opera House. Photo: Courtesy of the artists
In 2009’s 555 Kubik (above) — projected onto the Hamburg Kunsthalle — urbanscreen imagined what it would look like if a house was dreaming. Photo: Courtesy of the artists
Allowing their work to also guide a research strand, URBANSCREEN feels like a particularly modern concern. Their cumulative practice illustrates and investigates the principles of communication, lifestyle, and art in the post-digital world, emphasizing how intertwined such ideas have become. They rely on the most up-to- date movements of video technology to create futuristic, yet still poetic, panoramic scenes, and participate in the conversations that surround it. Whether explorations of light and space, virtual theater, or research study and debate, URBANSCREEN are clear leaders in their interdisciplinary field.

The ‘320° Licht’ installation of URBANSCREEN uses the cathedral-like beauty of the Gasometer Oberhausen as the starting point for a fascinating game with shapes and light. Within a radius of 320 degrees graphic patterns grow and change on the 100-metre high inside wall of the Gasometer.