Title	HACKING RICHTER
Brand	INTERACTIVE COLOGNE
Product/Service	AN INTERACTIVE COMPOSITION IN COLOGNE CATHEDRAL WHERE LIGHTING EFFECTS ON SMARTP
Category	A01. Innovation
Entrant Company	DENKWERK Cologne, GERMANY
Advertising Agency	DENKWERK Cologne, GERMANY

Name	Company	Position
Alina Schlaier	Denkwerk Gmbh	Creative Director
Gregor Kuschmirz	Denkwerk Gmbh	Creative Director
Mohshiour Hossain	Denkwerk Gmbh	Art Director
Henning Schenk	Denkwerk Gmbh	Conception
Christian Neuls	Denkwerk Gmbh	Programmer
Anja Kirsch	Denkwerk Gmbh	Programmer
Matthias Wessels	Denkwerk Gmbh	Project Manager
Alexander Barth	Denkwerk Gmbh	Project Manager
Gregor Schwellenbach		Music Artist
Winfried Bönig		Music Artist
Damian T. Dziwis		Music Artist

The Brief

The digital location of Cologne unites agencies, businesses, start-ups and investors. The city’s annual “Interactive Cologne” festival showcases digital trends and visions from the worlds of technology and the creative and internet sectors, and brings together web workers. In addition to its digital expertise, Cologne also has a world-renowned tourist attraction: Cologne Cathedral – a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the most-visited tourist attraction in Germany. Our task was to create an unforgettable experience for the participants of “Interactive Cologne 2014”, which combines technology and creativity and is linked to Cologne as a location. The term “hacking” is inextricably linked to the digital sector. So we “hacked” our way into Cologne Cathedral and the stained-glass window designed by Gerhard Richter, the most expensive living artist in the world, merging it into a phenomenal interactive composition with 360 smartphones of the invited guests, in cooperation with three musical artists. For this we developed an app that can read the IP addresses of the smartphones. It was possible to control the telephones from the musicians’ computers – as well as the more than 10,000 pipes of the Cathedral’s organ. The live concert not only transformed the individual IP addresses into music, but also the audience’s smartphones into a collective screen for the matching light show composed from the 72 colours featured in Gerhard Richter’s artwork.

For the interactive organ concert during „Interactive Cologne“ we developed an app via which the concert visitors inside Cologne Cathedral were able to log into a special, local network with their individual smartphones. So on the one hand we were able to send their IP addresses, converted into sounds, to the organ. And we also controlled all of the smartphones to create a light show on the displays to complement the music. To achieve an entity of music and colours, we used the MIDI signal of the Cathedral’s organ, which we processed with existing frameworks from the Java world. We created the web interface for the browser and the one to control the smartphones with HTML/Javascript. Via HTTP it was possible to monitor the connected smartphones and configure advanced settings. For the backend we implemented a Java WebSocket server, including an HTTP server. So during the concert we had a clear picture of all connected smartphones and were able to provide the participating musical artists with the current IP addresses at all times. And vice-versa, it was possible to set the sounds of the organ to the colour palette of the window by Gerhard Richter as harmonious, moving patterns on all the displays of the audience’s smartphones.

With Hacking Richter we succeeded in offering the audience an impressive experience at the very edge of technical feasibility. The event brought technology and artistic creativity into harmony with the unique venue of the concert, the World Heritage Site of Cologne Cathedral, and its artwork by Gerhard Richter. We thereby made it possible for the musicians to interact with their audience in a brand new way. With their smartphone, every single listener became an integral part of a complex artwork and at the same time a special ambassador for Cologne as a digital industry location.