Slow Screen
The MuDA – Museum of Digital Art in Zurich has rooms with extensive windows, admitting a great deal of natural light. In order to create suitable indoor conditions for exhibitions, it proved necessary to control the incoming illumination. A solution involving curtains did not seem in key with the thematic focus of the institution. As an alternative, Slow Screen was developed – a kinetic installation which extends over the entire 100-square-metre window façade of the museum. It consists of 805 physical pixels in the form of revolving aluminium panels, individually controlled and powered by motors in such a way that the angle of tilt can be continuously adjusted. This not only makes it possible to regulate incoming light on the museum’s premises – outside visiting hours, Slow Screen metamorphoses into a display which conjures up slow-moving animations, patterns, pictures and text messages behind the museum façade.
Comments of the nominators
An innovative project which combines practically functional, technological and poetic qualities. Above all in the context of the Museum of Digital Art, Slow Screen is highly effective as communication and so makes a crucial contribution to the identity of this still young non-profit institution.
Comments of the jury
The kinetic installation Slow Screen impresses first of all with its specially developed, sophisticated technology, and then again in view of its perfect fulfilment of its immediate objective – to control the incoming light in the exhibition rooms of the Museum of Digital Art. But the crucial quality of the installation, in the jury’s opinion, is the associated added value it reveals, aesthetically and in the form of communication, outside the museum’s opening hours. This is when the characteristically slow-moving Screen transforms itself into a display for patterns, images and texts, whose gradual appearance and subsequent dissolution can be contemplated with pleasure.
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