Jan and Tim Edler on the rooftop of their Berlin studio (left and right).
Realities:United's first use of light as a medium was BIX, a communicative display system designed for the Kunsthaus in Graz in 2003. A custom-designed software program controls the intensity of light from each of the 930 circular fluorescent tubes arranged in a grid on the east facade.
In 2005, Realities:United realized a project called "Spots." Designed for an uninhabited office building overlooking Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, "Spots" continued the studio's thinking about media elements in an urban and architectural context.
"Nix," also completed in 2005, continued this line of thinking by asking: Why apply these technologies just to a building's facade when you could use a building's three-dimensional form as a multidimensional pixel landscape?
The studio's 2008 media art installation in Singapore, "Architectural Advertising Amplifier" (AAMP) was its first use of colored light for a media screen, employing a low-resolution matrix of 546 full-color, computer-controlled LEDs.
"2x5 (Brothers) in 2012, on the campus of Brown University in Providence, R.I., explores the role of time. Two backlit light boxes, each containing colored canvases, rotate on mechanical poster scrollers, which move according to a series of algorithms synchronized to the university's calendar.
