The Reed

THE REED ran on one of the most complex custom DMX systems in Berlin: hundreds of fixtures spread over multiple DMX universes, all unified in a single real-time pipeline built on TouchDesigner and distributed over Art-Net. Nothing came off the shelf — every control surface was designed in-house. User interfaces were generated directly from Photoshop layers, so the look of the control room could be art-directed like any other asset, and an interactive light map laid over the architectural floor plan gave direct spatial control of every single fixture in the venue: touch the room, and the room responds.

Custom UI built for the floor staff to run the ceiling LED panels: one theme per day, presets such as cleaning or disco, and the room's audio volume handled through DANTE.

For one event the client asked to track the evening's host across the ceiling… after plenty of ideas, the final solution was: follow him with the mouse! :-)

The same pipeline fed the club's 9024×1152 LED wall, played live: real-time VJ sets rendered on the GPU and mapped across the full surface, reacting to the night as it happened.

Beyond the light rig, the venue hosted complex one-off installations — like an elevator lined with 18 screens and driven by a Kinect, turning the ride itself into an interactive piece. Both the installation and the live VJ set shown above were produced for a private VICE event.