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G. Tscherteu, O. Schürer et al.:
"Medien Fassaden Festival, Conference";
Group exhibition; organised by: Media Architecture Group, curator: O. Schürer; catalogue: "Media Facades Festival"; Berlin, 2008-10-16 - 2008-12-12.

Media facades create utterly new connections between digital space on the one hand and architecture and urban space on the other hand. Never before was there an interface between the physical and the digital world, which was public to such an extent, that it appeals not only to individual users, as in the case of a personal computer, but also to hole groups or even to a whole urban population and that furthermore also allows to "reply", i.e. to interact with a facade or to design its content. In this case, a powerful potential for design and effectivity is created, involving a range of chances and risks that are difficult to estimate and that require thorough discussion. The producers and the users of media facades equally face a range of challenges, and it will need time for fully differentiated opinions and positions to evolve from the discourse which is just taking shape. This exhibition has been conceived in a way that it supports this essential discourse by collecting relevant projects, looking behind the "facades", and by making apparent their materiality and technical structure. Certainly a more refined technical understanding will be helpful for developing a more differentiated attitude to media facades. One of the purposes of the following introductory text is to demonstrate the range of technical characteristics that have a substantial influence on the visual experience, but also on the interactivity and the "urban value" of media architecture. Media facades elude a classification into mutually exclusive categories and therefore it is more meaningful to discuss their most important characteristics (display technology, translucency, interaction, ...) and to demonstrate that the individual projects presented in the exhibition base themselves on quite similar elements of design, but interpret these very differently and thus vary from each other. Thus, in the diagram below, a media facade will not only be classified concerning only one element, but it will take a place in relation to every single one of these characteristics. The so-called media facades are simply good examples for
the relevant characteristic, but naturally they also exhibit other characteristics and would eventually also serve as good examples in those places. It is not the point to rigidly classify media facades and media architecture, but to have a set of terms at hand in order to be in a better position to compare and discuss them. Earlier attempts of classification and disambiguation that have partly found their way into my work are not to remain unmentioned and are cited in the sources.

medien fassaden, media facades