FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

The Mood of the Chinese Internet Lights Up the Facade of Beijing's Water Cube

It's not often that ancient Chinese texts about divining the future and social media meet.

It's not often that ancient Chinese texts about divining the future and social media meet. It's even less often that they meet in the form of a giant light show that takes place on the plastic bubble facade of a former Olympic venue. But this is what takes place in artist Jennifer Wen Ma and lighting designer Zheng Jianwei's Nature and Man in Rhapsody of Light at the Water Cube.

The installation was unveiled last month at the Beijing National Aquatics Center (known as the Water Cube) and uses a computer program to translate the I Ching and the collective mood of the Chinese people, through the emoticons they use on microblogging site Weibo, into a real-time light display on the building's blistered exterior.

Read an interview with technology director Guillermo Acevedo at The Creators Project.