The ‘Touch’ project aims to transform the general perception of a media façade, in this case the Dexia Tower, from a marketing and corporate image device towards an urban light art work. The challenge lies in the design of participation and identification through interaction which involves every user with the setting up of an urban landmark. From this point of view the illumination concept is the design of communication.
The project considers Brussels Dexia tower not as a media façade, a screen-like device, displaying pre-rendered video loops or images, but works on the architectural characteristics of the building.
On Brussels’ Rogier Place, at the bottom of the tower, a multi touch screen is mounted where people, both individually and collectively, can interact in real time. The interaction is constituted by both static and dynamic inputs and takes parameters of size (finger, hand), direction (horizontal, vertical, diagonal) and duration (introducing growth) into account. The user’s inputs establish a play of graphical elements inspired by abstract art such as Mondriaan's ‘elementarism’ and Kandinsky’s ‘point and line to plane’. These geometric figures are associated to the building as follows: points = pixels = windows, lines and diagonals = levels and edges, and surfaces = the facades. These shapes are displayed in real-time on top of a monochromatic light which the user defined in a first step whereas the shapes are displayed in black and white according to the positive or negative (up/down, left/right...) direction of his input. The project gives the inhabitants of Brussels the possibility of interacting with the building – establishing a new relation between architecture and the citizen. Here a simple finger tip of a person changes the appearance of an entire building, a 145m high tower.