Design

London Design Festival: Outrace takes over Trafalgar Square

About this project

You’ve heard of the ubiquitous pop-up restaurant, bar and gallery but what about the pop-up factory? As part of London Design Festival, Trafalgar Square is playing host to ‘Outrace’, a temporary industrial unit cum futuristic light installation. A first for the capital, its eight giant robots are now busy projecting messages from the public into the air.

It works like this: users interact with the robots via the outrace website, typing in what they want to say. The robots then trace these messages in beams of light in Trafalgar Square.

Wallpaper* has guest curated missives from our favourite London-based creatives. Kicking off proceedings were fashion designers Paul Smith, Giles Deacon, Antoni & Alison, plus artists Langlands & Bell and Barnaby Barford, whose musings were all writ large in air.

Now it’s your turn. Wallpaper* readers have been given 500 VIP access codes, which enable you to jump to the front of the message queue and light up the square with your thoughts — be they political, profound, poetic or playful.

Outrace is the brainchild of designers Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram — best known for their technologically experimental work for the likes of Prada, Moroso and Classicon - in association with Audi. It is borne from their desire to create something kinetic, that people can engage with. ‘We wanted an installation that allows active participation. Something that talks about design — and the future of course,’ says Weisshaar.

The ‘elegant, grey and black beasts’ as they call them, are in fact on loan from Audi’s production line. They’ve been fitted with the brightest available LEDs to give them the power to beam legible messages skyward. ‘These Philips Altilon lights are used in the headlights of the Audi R8 and R15,’ says Weisshaar. ‘Each of the light heads we developed for the robots has a cluster of 24 LED packages with a total power of 240W.’

Running from 16 – 23 September, Outrace is set to attract a global audience. Anyone anywhere can put words in the robots’ mouths via the website but demand is expected to be high. In total, the team estimates they will convey some 10,000 constantly changing holographic light messages. A video of each projection will then be shared with the user and, in turn, on social networking sites. As Weisshaar says, ‘the media assets generated are the piece — the physical installation is only an infrastructure to produce them.’

But what of the future of the robots? ‘Having done blue collar work for 10 years in Audi’s Ingolstadt plant, they will take a rest after their London excursion and may come back at some point somewhere elsewhere.’

www.kramweisshaar.com
www.outrace.org
www.audi.com

Write your own message

The VIP code below gives you priority access to the robots in Trafalgar Square. Go to the message section of the Outrace website and write your missive — maximum 80 characters, including punctuation and spaces. Then input the Wallpaper* access code and your details.

Your message will then be broadcast by the robots in Trafalgar Square. The light traces will be recorded on film and you will be sent a video of your message.

Enter your message at www.outrace.org using the following VIP access code:

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