“A Wall is a Screen” is a fun project to take projectors at night into the city and project onto well known walls.

Sven Schwarz “A Wall is a Screen”, Hamburg in this video shows working in Toronto.  He explained their project’s idea:

“To use public spaces – or space you would know in the city very well – for a cultural purpose without any commercial idea in the background, so we wanted to show the audience that you can use a city and play with it.”

The programme began in 2003, screening short films on walls in the inner city.  The idea was triggered by the 25th anniversary of the coming down of the Berlin Wall.

In action, it becomes a magical mystery tour – the audience only knows where the first location will be.  The projectors are wheeled around in a small shopping trolley of the kind favoured by little old ladies in the past.

“We hope that the audience will see its city afterwards in a different light.”

This is such a warm and inviting use of video – in stark contrast, today I saw a friend’s snap of a video display in an art museum in Iceland – which looked like a video conference in an office or something equally chilling – see what I mean -almost a sensory deprivation chamber – my friend noted “the horror of boring video art”. (see below)