A building you would have liked to stand next to on September 11, 2001.

On September 11, 2001, NYC was swept by the tragic collapse of two giant shopping malls conference centers while downtown Berlin was delighted to see a building come to life. The Blinkenlights, an array of 144 lightbulbs inside the Teacher’s House on Alexanderplatz, made its debut on this fateful day. Chaos Computer Club, a German group of hackers and technology enthusiasts, had taken over the building prior to its planned reconstruction. Celebrating their 20th anniversary and amazing the public with their technical skills, the club installed floodlights behind the windows in the upper eight floors, lighting them up with animated content controlled over the network. People connected to the Internet would submit 20fps, 18x8 animations via email to take part in a pixel art contest, or have a love letter displayed at will. This is where this “BlinkenPaint” program came into play. GSM integration also enabled anyone to play a recreation of Pong, as well as remote debugging. The installation instantly became popular with music videos filmed in front of and inside it, and thousands of people came to the February 23 farewell party. The club released their hardware blueprints and source code to the public, enabling reconstructions of this project elsewhere.

In September 2002, the CCC created another installation, the “Blinkenlights Arcade”, to celebrate the “White Night” festival in Paris. The French National Library sprang to life with a 20x26 array of lightbulbs. Forgoing the abuse of relays in the original Blinkenlights, solid-state circuitry allowed 8 stages of grayscale, enhancing the look of GSM-controlled games such as Pong or Tetris, as well as music visualizations during the October 5 party. In 2008, the Toronto City Hall was lit with a 960-pixel, 16-step grayscale screen during this festival.

By the way, the title of the installation references a 1950s meme text hung in computer rooms worldwide, exclaiming to “turisten und nonteknischen lookenspeepers” that “das komputermaschine ist nicht für der gefingerpoken und mittengraben […] für gewerken bei dummkopfen” and encouraging them to “relaxen und watschen der blinkenlichten” instead. Someone will surely have posted the entire copypasta in the comments. Also look there for clarifications and corrections of any mistakes in this text.

Over the past 20 years, giant LED screens have become ubiquitous in cities, and the idea of a display this size does not seem as outlandish anymore. Nevertheless, most display advertisements round the clock, and having the public play games and submit love letters remains unique to Blinkenlights and the installation should be remembered to this day.