Københavns Museum
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A Special Wall, for a Special Room
The Museum of Copenhagen has been the official museum of Copenhagen since 1901 when it opened in a small attic inside the City Hall. In 1956 it relocated and headed to the Vesterbro area, where it remained until late 2015 when it was closed down in order to relocate again. This time back to the central part of Copenhagen, next to the city hall - on the corner of Stormgade and Vester Voldgade, facing the National Museum on the other side of the intersection. JAC Studio was hired to design and oversee the production of the new permanent exhibition, and as part of the overall project, they also oversaw the making of the museums new crown jewel; ‘The Copenhagen Panorama’ - an indoor room meant to take over the role of a beloved outdoor city model at the previous museum. The room consists of three major parts that all interact via the same 24 minutes “day cycle”. In the centre is a giant oval platform with a cast model of the entire city centre, lit by an array of lasers that showcase different information drawn directly onto the cast. A 280 degree backlit panorama of the skyline which encapsulates three sides of the city model - while the last quarter is nested by another curved wall, made up of a huge array of dot matrix modules - named ‘The City Data’. This is where we come in. We were contacted by JAC Studio who wanted us to design and produce the animations and oversee the physical production of the City Data wall. JAC desired a wall of information that was semi transparent, no visible wiring and which curved drastically following the shape of the city model. We started out by researching display technologies, in the process, we ended up falling in love with a minimal, low-resolution monochrome look which together with a lot of practical testing, led us down the path to the dot matrix design. This, coupled with the original specifications for semi-transparency led us to a design solution consisting of hundreds of separate modules spaced out in perfect distances to ensure a grid of dots where we would still be able to write across without anything getting obscured. Everything down to the print plates for the electronics had to be custom designed and produced. So for physical manufacturing, we teamed up with the skilled team at Visualed who worked hard, with their partners in China to make this complex construction come to life. This resulted in an installation consisting of 714 small individual modules mounted on 34 columns where only 36.36% of the potential surface had LED lamps, the rest was “gaps”. With the challenges of this display and layout in mind, we proceeded to develop a set of custom-designed and monospaced dot-matrix typefaces, in two different sizes each and in two weights. The design research and development phase led us down the narrow binary world of 8x8 pixel icons used throughout the animation. Working with the curators at the museum and our clients at JAC, we developed a 24 minutes manuscript based on the data. The process resulted in a 24-minute animation that consists of a mix of data that draws comparisons both internally between our past and our present, and externally to the rest of the world. It does this on a set of purposely eclectic subjects, big and small, ranging from eating habits, garbage disposal, commuting, how many rats we have in Copenhagen, child mortality rates through the times to length of the pedestrian streets and metro compared to other cities. In the end, the visitor is left with two main options for how to experience it all. Stand at a distance and get an old school dot matrix aesthetic and an overview of some quite varied figures and facts about the city. Alternatively, stand up close and let yourself be surrounded by this barrage of information, that up close becomes a swirling abstraction of numbers and icons - dots that come in and out of existence on the giant exploded curve of metal modules that fills up much more than your field of vision. EXHIBITION CONCEPT AND DESIGN JAC studios TEXT & DATA COLLECTION Copenhagen Museum WALL RND, PRODUCTION, ANIMATION, TYPOGRAPHY Dark Matters LED DESIGN Visualed ELECTRICAL INSTALLATIONS SIF gruppen PHOTOGRAPHER JAC studios, Jensen Pictures http://darkmatters.dk/