The City Data
at Museum of Copenhagen (2020)
The City data wall is one of three united installations in the “panorama room” at The Museum of Copenhagen.
The room consists of three major parts that interact via the same 24-minute “day cycle”. In the centre is a giant oval platform with a cast model of the entire city centre, lit by an array of lights that showcase different information onto the cast.
A 280-degree backlit panorama of the skyline encapsulates three sides of the city model - while the last quarter is nested by another curved wall, made up of an array of dot matrix modules - named ‘The City Data’.The studio started by researching display technologies and falling in love with a minimal, low-resolution monochrome look and a dot matrix design. Characteristic for conveying information, minimalistic and a notion of digital history in its look.The Client desired the wall to be semi-transparent, with no visible wiring and curved, following the shape of the city model. The result is an installation consisting of 714 small individual modules mounted on 34 columns where only 36.36% of the potential surface had LED lamps - the rest were “gaps”.
With the challenges of this display and layout in mind, we developed a set of custom-designed and monospaced dot-matrix typefaces, in two different sizes and in two weights. The design research and development phase led us down the simplistic binary world of 8x8 pixel icons used throughout the animation.We developed a 24-minute animation consisting of a mix of data that compares our past and present externally to the rest of the world. It does this on a set of purposely eclectic subjects, big and small, ranging from eating habits, garbage disposal, commuting, how many rats we have in Copenhagen, child mortality rates through the times, to the length of the pedestrian streets and metro compared to other cities.In the end, the visitor has two main options for how to experience it all.
Stand at a distance and get an old-school dot matrix aesthetic and an overview of quite varied figures and facts about the city. Alternatively, get closer and surround yourself with this barrage of information, which becomes a swirling abstraction of numbers and icons - dots that come in and out of existence on the giant exploded curve of metal modules that fills up much more than your field of vision.
Credits
Exhibition Concept & Design: JAC studios
Text & Data Collection: Copenhagen Museum
Wall RnD, Production, Animation, &Typography: Dark Matters
LED Design: Visualed
Electrical Installations: SIF gruppen
Photographer: JAC studios, Jensen Pictures