Rundle Lantern
Adelaide, Australia - 2008
Designer : Damien Mair
System design and configuration provided by Fabian Barzaghi and Dan Ditmann from Space Cannon Australia.
Products: 1428 custom Space Cannon Bisquit luminaires.
Display space of one thousand square metres, made up of 714 "tilesâ€, forming a permanent covering on the large building used as a car park in the centre of Adelaide. The city of Adelaide, capital of South Australia, launched a design contest to find ideas for animating the pedestrian area at night. The local company Fusion beat off the competition with the idea of permanently wrapping the eight storeys of a car park with a sort of dynamic and illuminated canvas.
The concept devised by Fusion was not the usual giant screen for watching football matches, motor races and music videos. According to the designer Damien Mair: "our vision for the Lantern was that of creating an experience which would capture the city's imagination and add beauty to people's lives.†Wrapping the building's surface area of over one thousand square metres required a display with an unusual format which would not form an impediment to the natural outflow of air for eliminating exhaust gases.
Mair's solution was to build the display with 714 individual "tiles†in anodised aluminium, appropriately angled to allow a better visual from the road below yet at the same time offering minimum impediment to the natural ventilation of the building. Each of the 714 "tiles†is illuminated from below by a pair of custom Space Cannon Bisquit RGB LED luminaires for a total of 1428 pixels. The Bisquit outdoor luminaires used for the Rundle Lantern are IP66 rated and contain 12 high-efficiency LED sources (4 red, 4 green and 4 blue). They are configured for full RGB colour mixing via DMX512A control and remote addressing with the RDM protocol.
The images are sent over Ethernet to the Rundle Lantern by a Hippotizer V3 stage media server from the building and distributed by the Enttec Datagate and Ethergate decoders via Technical Art Solution DMX splitters. Content creation and management for the Lantern are supplied by contract by the Fusion team using Green Hippo's Pixel Mapper software and Zoo Keeper Remote Management software, from their facility in central Adelaide, every night, hour by hour, from sundown to midnight. Rundle Lantern can be programmed to display numbers, letters and geometric shapes as well as an infinite series of lights, colours, morphing designs and patterns. Inauguration of the Rundle Lantern took place on 24 October 2008.
