Brand New School Creates Interactive Mural for Adobe

Blurring the line between art and branding, bicoastal directing collective Brand New School has teamed up with software giant Adobe and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, to create a dazzling installation: a Flash-driven interactive wall mural whose imagery is motion-activated by nearby viewers.

The wall went live this morning at the Virgin Megastore in Union Square, NYC and is set to run in London's Piccadilly Circus in early August.

As people walk by the 25'x10' projection, layers of eye-popping graphics-triggered by the viewer's movement-appear. The piece showcases Creative Suite 3's library of effects, including Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Flash, and other applications. It recently debuted at a launch party for CS3 that was held at Skylight, an 18,000 square foot gallery space located in the Soho district of Manhattan. The murals are designed so that when a person walks from left to right, there's an evolution from simplicity to complexity. As someone moves in that direction, more animations are triggered and the density of the imagery increases.

One striking aspect of the project is that the advertising and the product are integrated: Brand New School used the product being sold to create the wall mural. "Each layer is inspired by the actual software," says Jonathan Notaro, creative director/founder of Brand New School. "Something might look like it was made in Illustrator, and something else was a product of something you can do in Photoshop. This was an exploration in the aesthetics of what you can do in CS3. It's a mixed media display that hits the different disciplines of imagemaking and mixes all those things together in an intriguing way."

Obscura Digital, along with Goodby and Adobe, developed the mural's mechanism that tracks a person's movement as they walk by. Studio For Interactive Media co-founder Justin Bakse, who acted as the action-based scripter, commented, "The mural knows to hone in on the person who is closest to it and disregard other information. The mechanism assigns people multiple layers of code that is used to create designs and put them in motion. The result is a dialog between the person walking by and what's happening on the projection screen."

Brand New School
With offices in New York and Los Angeles, Brand New School is a bicoastal directing collective working in all fields of commercial art. Ever evolving, the studio continues to cultivate a sense of wonder and exploration. For its artists and clients alike, BNS represents an opportunity to play at work, to conduct experiments in image-making, and to feed the inspiration that drives the industry.

Brand New School: http://www.dexigner.com/directory/detail/9266.html

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