The Rubin Museum hired our company, Electronic Bohemia, as consultants to develop a dynamic sign for two screens that were installed in the museum’s main window displays on 7th Avenue at the corner of 17th street in Manhattan. The signs were intended to draw attention to the museum and provide quick insights into the worlds that could be encountered within its walls.
Being by far the busier of the two facades of the museum, the high-traffic 7th Avenue location played a very important role for drawing in potential visitors. It was clear that we had an exceptionally short time-frame during which passersby would pay attention. Therefore textual information was kept to a minimum and an emphasis was placed on visually attractive animation and imagery.
Video footage of a 7th Avenue Sign.
It proved an exciting challenge to combine the very serene and calm energy of the museum with movements and animations that could compete for bypassers attention on a very busy Manhattan street. The movement of countless lines of text created a captivating allusion to the flow of a river within the ripples of which numerous events would come and go.
All movements are calculated based on a series of dynamic randomized parameters so that the signs will never look exactly the same twice.
Video footage of the two 7th Avenue Signs installed and working side by side.
The animations across the two screens are coordinated so that they alternate in highlighting happenings at the museum. The shading and coloring of the waterlike background texts are also extending across both screens. The sign loads and formats all information directly from the museum’s database requiring minimal extra effort for maintaining the sign.
The software for this project was written in C++ with openFrameworks on a Mac using Xcode.
Stills from the 7th Avenue Signs.
