TILO

A Hybrid display system for cultural venues

Why we created Tilo

As media artists creating generally ephemeral artworks for public spaces, We where surprised how little attention was being given to the public spaces within cultural venues. We wanted to animate these spaces and create an interface between the building its host organisation and the public. We also wanted to create a system that allowed the programming of public art interventions within a venue context and our hope is that a network of venues using Tilo can commission small projects and share them.

Why the name Tilo

Our high level aspiration for the project was born out of our interest in the convergence of digital and the real world, And the question, “Can a building have a digital soul?”, A reflection of all the people that inhabit or visit over time. With that in mind we named the project after “TIlo”, an African creator God.

Overview

The system is based around a core of Tilo player/s (computers) that display various content types on large digital screens in a venue and that are scheduled and managed from a central cloud server and content management system (CMS). What makes the system hybrid is it’s ability to integrate with external data and hardware at various levels of sophistication. It was designed from the ground up to programme complex media artworks, hacker experiments and hook ups to external data streams from either web feeds or hardware sensors.The play list and over layer content is scheduled as a play list, that typically displays a twenty minute loop of alternating media pulled randomly from a selection of media buckets. A poster – a video – media art – poster – live data visualisation – interactive etc.. Alongside the play list is content that runs in parallel in an over layer and allows artists to create projects that can detect people and temporarily take over the screens to engage visitors directly, view the TIlo website at this link