OUTRACE at Trafalgar Square

A quick (and overdue) entry on Clemens Weissharr and Reed Kram’s OUTRACE installation in Trafalgar Square as part of the London Design Festival.

In a nutshell, participants are invited to type a message of up to 70 characters, some of which are then selected and lightpainted by 8 industrial robots from Audi’s production line.  Each movement is captured by a series of DSLR long exposure cameras, the resultant images from which are strung together to create a 8fps video message.

The OUTRACE website itself is clean and simple, but as ever with these very clever mergers of art and design (and technology I personally like), some more dymanic content would have been nice.  The online ‘paper‘ is a nice touch though.  Although, I have to say the intigration of a live webstream (sadly now defunct) which also cuts to the completed message is very cool.

Anyway, brilliantly ostentatious and gimmicky.  You can see my own facetious OUTRACE message here:

Personally, I thought the graffiti-esque letter forms were a slight missed opportunity …

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