year: 2002

Elbe (Bitwall 1)

Bitwall sculpture for the Federal Institute of Hydraulic Engineering in Ilmenau, 2002

The Federal Institute of Hydraulic Engineering is the authority responsible for the maintenance of Germany's inland-waterways. The project is based on an uninterrupted sequence of photographs of the banks of the river Elbe, Prague to Hamburg, over a stretch of approx. 800 km. With GPS, the individual images were coded with the exact geographical data on the respective point where they were taken.
A 10-meter high pillar holds a custom made bitmap display system on which the banks of the Elbe unfold, in very low resolution (7 x 7 cm pixels), at the leisurely speed of a boat on a river. This "virtual bank of the Elbe" is superimposed on the real backdrop of the existing landscape in front of the Institute building.

Programming: Thomas Lauerbach
Display techology: Sytec
Construction: MBM
Coordination: Jens Scheiber