Architecture turned into a different kind of art in Berlin last week as building facades became pianos, kaleidoscopic fractal designs, and dizzying weather patterns, all with the vibrant colors we'd see in paintings or other traditional forms of street art. Using a keen eye for malleable visuals, video projectors and software like Resolume Arena  or MadMapper, artists at the Berlin Festival of Lights turned anything and everything into an interactive 3D surface.

This year featured two themes: "New Dimensions," and "Vision of Energy." Light artists went out in advance of the festival, mapped and measured their unique, historic canvases, and planned around those specifications. Every ribbed column, pinnacle and arch was fair game to be repurposed as a canvas.

Below is the Brandenburg Gate-mapped vignette which won the first-ever Berlin Festival of Lights Award. Creator MP Studio of Germany/Bulgaria was chosen as the audience award winners out of six artists from six countries. According to the festival, the story here is that "Little Hans and his sister Anna are lost in time and space, accompanied only by the little brother’s teddy bear. They want to come back home, in our present time. The only way to succeed is to recall their memories of all the beautiful things that they miss most in Berlin.”

 

What's cool about these videos below is how well the lights fit in with their public spaces. Instead of a fest with a specific location and requires a ticket for entry, you're an attendee if you're in the right place at the right time when walking home from dinner.

Here are a few more of our favorites: