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 …