I-grid
is an environmental installation where Open Source was selected to
transform a typical billboard along Sunset Boulevard in West
Hollywood, California. The City of West Hollywood’s Arts and
Cultural Affairs Commission donates a billboard along the infamous
strip for experimental art and design several times a year.
Billboards predominate the visual landscape along the strip and vie
for your attention with representational imagery. I-grid presented an
opportunity to investigate the billboard typology, not in a
representational manner, but rather exploring the geometrical
structure of the billboard surface. The project consists of a
computed protocol that transforms the original format of an existing
20 ft x 50 ft billboard. Initially based on a 5-foot incremental
grid, an evolutionary algorithm produces a series of iterated
mutations that index the intensive computing system. I-grid expresses
the notion of instability inherent to its info-engineered nature in
constant mutation.