Blinkenlights combined a low-tech installation with high-tech programming that created an opportunity for public participation. In the case of Pong, BlinkenLights existed within two spaces. The ‘game space’ of the 2-Dimensional display or game board, which a light matrix comprised of the window lights from the Haus des Lehrers at Alexanderplatz in central Berlin. In the moment, 2 Pong players (or player, as individuals had the option to play against the machine if there was not another human player there at the same time) were engaged in the competition of the game on their cell phones—a concurrent call could cost them the game and public shame, as could any other human interruption. While a person functioned as a player they were doing so in the middle of a public plaza in a physical space, and were the momentary administrator of a huge visual display. Most of the ‘play action’ took place within the digital, either through their cellphone’s keypad, the building’s binary light display or the project’s website. Apart from the eventual message-sending program Loveletters there was little room for spontaneous social control of the project outside of responding to Pong, beyond the game space. In this way, BlinkenLights functioned less as a game though in its historical context it pushed the limits of an interactive event.

As an interactive system, this project used cell phones as the interface for controlling the display on the building. At the time, this was an enchanting approach to empower a ubiquitous, handheld communication device as a controller for a game broadcast at the city-scale. At the same time, the system was set up for only two players at once, in the case of Pong and was otherwise used for a single animation display, or an on-demand broadcast of a personal note. The use of mobile phones, advanced public participation and interaction beyond BlinkenLight’s precursors. In 2000, La Bastille was created by Technology House at the Science Library at Brown University, Providence, RI, which was the second building-size Tetris game—played on the library’s windows. The game was played on a laptop located inside the building and was viewed from the outside by pedestrians, local street traffic and was visible from Interstate 95. Previous projects like Clickscape ’98 in Linz, Austria allowed visitors to use an office building and computer with mouse to click and create large-scale symbols, such as happy faces that would be displayed as large-scale symbols on that building. The players or users had to be inside of the space to change its exterior display so they could not see it change in person—in a sense missing the most important moment.

BlinkenLights seemed stronger as a display venue than as a game. In addition to Pong, users could submit their own animations created in Blinkenpaint, a free software available on the project’s website. Selected animations were displayed if there were no Pong games being played. In this sense, calling participants users seems more appropriate than game players. The users were not determining much of the outcome as they were entering a contest or submitting images for an exhibition. These submissions could be made to relate specifically to a particular time and place and perhaps it was this point from which LoveLetters emerged. This program allowed ‘users’ to create an animation for a loved one that would be played when they called up the Blinkenlights number and dialed an assigned access code. The website was host to over 250,000 visitors who often downloaded the software and submitted an animation, several hundred different animations were displayed within the first 3 month run of the project.

In a way BlinkenLights was more spectacle than game in that it became more about displaying changing images and even LoveLetters—almost an ongoing low-res animation festival at Alexanderplatz. The animations and LoveLetters was a clever way to keep the physical site engaging even when it did not have active Pong players. It was successful as a venue for ‘personal’ expression and drawing visitors for the spectacles of each evening.

Does play need spectacle? It might be a question of scale. At its best BlinkenLights empowered single individuals to control a huge display device and broadcast their ‘messages’ to the Alexanderplatz in Berlin. This successfully transformed a University office building into a venue for individual public expression—it had the possibility to remove the standard power structure and the mundane use of building lights into a nostalgic and at the same time novel device of the people. This could be fun, turning over control to an unknown entity—although the way BlinkenLights was constructed, power was still very much centralized in the Chaos Computing Club. Apart from controlling paddle locations during a game of pong, all other animations were chosen by the CCC for display.

Did BlinkenLights succeed as a game? I imagine that the novelty of playing Pong (later Tetris, Breakout and PacMan) was compelling perhaps in the same way that Christo and Jean-Claude’s ‘The Gates’ installation, transformed Central Park into more of a social event than the everyday individual experience amongst park goers. Like the Situationist’s Dérives, Project BlinkenLights transformed the banal experience of walking through a plaza or next to an office building into an opportunity to broadcast a game, announce a private sentiment, display an animation or to bear witness to the display of another’s expression. This concept has the power to potentially liberate us from the mundane relationship that we have to urban space and our habitual patterns. Instead, the city becomes a play space, impregnating our experience of architecture and urban space with possibility and mystery. It is in this way that there is an historical relationship to the Dérives of the Situationists in Paris in the 1970s.

‘Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.’ …’ In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.’ Theory of the Dérive by Guy-Ernest Debord.

BlinkenLights was an elegant visual statement and a technological feat for its time. Though it made big strides in developing interactive technologies it was also limited in its interactivity and relied upon a ‘dead’, or dedicated space in order for it to exist. It was a beautiful installation that has generated acute public interest, opening the way for more physically integrating and large scale games to occur in the everyday.