ZeitRaum

Located at the new terminal of Vienna International Airport, ZeitRaum is a large-scale media art project that I had the chance to work on as part of Ars Electronica FutureLab between 2011-2012. It consists of various installations located on two different levels of the new terminal, with the main focus being on the transient and ephemeral nature of airport spaces. The various installations attempt to interpret, abstract, and visualize the imaginary space that exists and interconnects an ever-changing community of people and cultures in airports all over the world.

The project was realized in two phases, with the concept and prototyping phase starting at some point around 2008 and ending after a year in 2009. The second phase, which was the concept finalization and realization phase, started at around the same time I became a member of Futurelab in 2011. From then on, I worked for more than a year on this project, including a four-month deployment phase at the airport.

The brain of ZeitRaum is divided into two separate server rooms holding more than 80 renderers and servers that provide output for more than 200 screens, plus more than 70 cameras for computer vision and user interaction. My tasks included everything from debugging and optimizing existing codebases, writing add-ons, GLSL code, and finalizing concept decisions, to configuring custom APT servers and Debian packaging for easier deployment of our applications and HTML/jQuery for the web-based scheduler that controls the applications.

Image & Video Credits: Otto Saxinger, Ars Electronica