In Chemnitz, Germany, commuters of different feathers flock together beneath the pixels of the giant LED facade that crowns two sides of the city’s recently renovated train station. The largest interactive artwork from Berlin’s Lichtvision to date, completed in collaboration with London’s Random International, Swarm Study / IX translates the movements of nearby pedestrians and vehicles into pixelated heat maps that mimic the ebb and flow of migrating birds. Each five centimetre-wide pixel has a luminous flux of 40 lumens; combined into a four-storey backlit display powered by specialized software that generates cues in real time, the pixels create ethereal, ever-shifting masses of light and dark.

Project: Swarm Study / IX

Location: Chemnitz, Germany

Studios: Lichtvision Design (Germany) and Random International (U.K.)

Designer: Raoul Hesse