Sightings: LED Graffiti Wall Lit Up By Water

August 14, 2012 by Dave Haynes

As spotted in The Verge:

French artist Antonin Fourneau created  digital art project last month in the small city of Poitiers that used a temporary wall of custom LED panels to empower graffiti painted on using water.

As the blog explains it, the Water Light Graffiti project was made of thousands of LEDs, each of which were triggered by a small “flower” of metal contacts when the circuit was completed by water. The installation is akin to a temporary graffiti wall, and visitors were invited to use a water gun, vaporizer, paintbrush, or their fingers to paint whatever they wanted.

Fourneau calls the current iteration of the Water Light Graffiti wall “low-tech” and hopes to develop the idea further. He’d like to see it become a long-lasting material that could be used more permanently in cities as “a wall for ephemeral messages” without damaging buildings or public spaces. The installation in Poitiers unfortunately ran for only three days — hopefully Fourneau will be back with a bigger and better version soon.

Nice. Definitely not a replacement for a proper video wall, but you could see how as this idea evolves it could be applied as an ambient or interactive feature for something like a public building.