Urbanscreen is a creative art company in Bremen, Germany. It was founded in 2005 as a collective of architects, media artists, musicians, cultural scholars, and tech experts from various fields with a focus on cross-genre artistic expression and blending physical and digital media.
Urbanscreen, comprising of several experts in their respective fields, has spoken at various workshops and conferences worldwide. Of note, they were a speaker at OECD for their talk, “Getting Cities Right” which focused on integrating media facades and other digital installments into city design.
Urbanscreen divides their work into three broad categories, the first of which they call Lumentektur. Lumentektur is the projecting of 3D-mapped video onto existing architecture, using virtual lighting and theater to create art.
Buntes Gold is one of their Lumentektur pieces, projected onto Bremen’s house of commerce. Buntes Gold features four dancers performing across the face of the building as it transforms around them. The piece is designed to show the tensions between creativity and economic action. To create Lumentektur, Urbanscreen designs scale models of the face of the building they project onto, turn it into a green screen, and have the actors perform on it. Afterwards, the footage is edited to create the effects desired for the final piece before it is scaled to fit and projected onto the building.
The second broad category is sculpture. Urbanscreen designs installations of objects and projects imagery onto them. In downtown Houston, in the JW Marriott, is Solanum.
Solanum is a series of circular panels, some of which have had parts removed, offset from a blank wall. A projector hangs from the ceiling a few feet away projecting animations onto the piece. Solanum follows the day-night cycle: during the day, the animations are calm and gentle, as though it were sleeping, while at night, the full animation cycle plays to draw in viewers.
Urbanscreen refers to their third category of work as exploration. They take what they have learned since starting Lumentektur and expand upon it to meld together various disciplines. One of the most impressive pieces is called 320º Licht: it is an exhibition which was set up in the Gasometer Oberhausen, a discontinued gas holder in Oberhausen, Germany. 320º Licht is a projection on a 320º arc and 100-meter tall wall, creating approximately 20,000 square meters of projection surface. Urbanscreen used 21 inter-connected projecters to fill the space, and it became one of the world’s largest and most technically sophisticated indoor projections. The piece was designed to be a play between the real and virtual space as the projection turns the walls of the Gasometer into a series of patterns and shapes.
Finally, another impressive work done by Urbanscreen was on display during the 2012 Lighting of the Sails in Sydney, Australia. Sydney will bring in artists to create art on the surface of the opera house, and Urbanscreen created a play of Lumentektur. They took inspiration from the original architect, Jørn Utzon, who wanted to give the building human expression, by creating a work which tried to establish an immediate architectural expression.
