This is something I've lost sleep for the past couple of nights, having a day job and everything :)
If you're not "in the know", Assembly is the oldest, largest and best LAN party in the world, with thousands of people packing up their screens, computers, speakers, sleeping bags, and two boxes of energy drinks, gathering into a huge arena for three straight days and nights, playing multiplayer computer games, chatting and hacking. The roots are in the demo scene - people used to pull off some real magic with the old Amigas, Ataris and Commodores!
It's been many, many years since I last visited Assembly but this year I got a chance to participate in a somewhat different way. Enter Megascreen.
Megascreen is essentially a huge group of computers collaborating to render a video into a massive screen, each computer screen serving as a single pixel. The video resolution was set to 75 x 13 so that we could utilize all the computer places on the arena floor, effectively rendering the video on 975 screens (minus dead pixels - not everybody participated) in two directions, totaling almost 2000 screens altogether (minus the dead pixels).
We had a mixed team of people for pulling together video, sound and the technology to play them in sync on thousands of screens. Jukka Lindström, a colleague at Reaktor and myself took care of the technical implementation, Lauri Warsta from Las Palmas Films created the animation, and Mete Ufacik from Ufacik Partners produced the whole thing. While for me and Jukka the Megascreen was mainly an exciting project and experiment in environmental art, the actual video we were playing was a commercial for N-gage, part of their Get Out And Play campaign, and Nokia naturally sponsored the project.
If you were there, great! If you weren't, you can try and get your share of the experiment through some video clips available on Youtube or check out the one below. It has the original video embedded so you can compare :)
Even though there are a lot of dead pixels (people build all kinds of "obstacles" on their computer places, including two-meter speakers, tents and what not), I feel freaking awesome about the outcome.
We did it!