BIX is a permanent light and media installation for Kunsthaus Graz, the organically shaped Austrian art museum designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier that opened in 2003. BIX (combining "big" and "pixels") consists of a Plexiglas facade with 930 fluorescent tubes on the building’s eastern side that functions as an oversize, undulating urban screen. Each light ring, adjustable for brightness, is a single pixel in a dynamic, low-resolution display that tattoos the building with still images, text, and video. For the designers, BIX is "an architectural 'enabler,' enhancing the building's communicative possibilities and range" as well as its identity. Through manageable, inexpensive, and (for its time) eco-conscious technology, this modular system embodies a vision of architecture as a changing, moving, and performing medium and demonstrates an accessible integration of media surfaces in urban landscapes.
Gallery label from Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects, July 24–November 7, 2011 .
