convergenceLA
year: 2017
place: Metropolis Towers Downtown Los Angeles
2018 Public Art Year in Review
Americans for the Arts
Best Public Art of 2017
Image by StandardVision, LLC
ConvergenceLA is a media installation on the façade of the Metropolis Towers in downtown Los Angeles. The canvas for the artwork is an integrated LED display, nearly 100 feet wide. The artwork itself is a generative construct, fueled by data and informed by aesthetics. It explores new ways of storytelling through an intelligent platform that expresses and responds to the spirit of Los Angeles in a seamless fusion of digital content, public space and urban life.
The artwork can also be explored and experienced virtually with a mobile device or on a PC. This virtual environment allows visitors to navigate through the data and experience the artwork with an audio track composed from everyday sounds of Los Angeles and its data streams.
Documentation: Historical
Dataset: Tectonics
Documentation: Culture
Documentation: Infrastructure
Dataset: Weather
Dataset: Social Media
Dataset: Wind
Dataset: Metro
Documentation: Culture
Dataset: Social Media
Commissioned by:
Greenland USA in association with The Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles
Produced by:
Susan Narduli Studio & Refik Anadol Studio
Architect:
Gensler Los Angeles
Art Advisor:
Isenberg & Associates, Inc. Fine Art Advisory
Project Management:
DG Hunt & Associates, LLC
Custom Software Development:
Sebastian Neitsch, Juliana Götz
Web Platform Development:
onformative, Cedric Kiefer, Thomas Kombüchen
Server & API Management:
Stefan Curow
Sound Design:
Kerim Karaoglu
Dataset: Weather
ConvergenceLA receives realtime data from eight individual publicly available APIs and processes four million points of data per hour. This ever-changing cinematic narrative of Los Angeles harnesses demographic, astronomical, oceanographic, tectonic, traffic and climate data streams, social media posts and news feeds, and frames them within fragments of cultural and historical content of Downtown Los Angeles. An intelligent timeline uses the incoming data to inform the generative sequencing of the artwork. While a reflection of the ongoing rhythms of the city, the collected data also holds the historical chronology of Los Angeles for the life of the artwork.
