Digital Grass
National Architecture Week is an annual celebration of contemporary architecture and the built environment. For 2007, the 11th year it has been held, the theme was How Green Is Your Space? This prompted the screens to team up with HMC Interactive in our sister port city of Plymouth to create a means by which nature could reclaim the city via computer trickery.
Digital Grass on the Big Screen Liverpool
The result was Digital Grass, adapted for the Liverpool screen and toured across the wider UK network. This installation responds to pedestrians passing by: if numbers remain consistently high, a meadow springs up overlaid upon a realtime camera feed. The blades of grass wave and bend in response to the direction of travel. The more people pass, the thicker and increasingly luxurious the greenery becomes - eventually filling the entire big screen.
But when footfall drops, the blades whither and shrink back, returning the cityscape to a concrete shoreline. The piece works by using a camera aimed at the street below, fed direct to a PC running Adobe Flash and linked using automated output to appear at regular intervals throughout the period of display.
