Creative agency Squint/Opera and creative technology consultancy Hirsch & Mann recently joined forces - having been commissioned by Weill Cornell Medical College - to design and build a donor recognition wall for their new biomedical research building in the Upper East side of New York. The resulting Discovery Wall is a permanent digital artwork created from 2,800 independently controllable LCD screens and lenses, designed to look like it is floating in front of the wall, with the potential to show infinite collections of dynamically changing content at street level.

From across the street, the wall looks like a huge animated image, but as you get closer the detail becomes apparent. “The Discovery Wall offers viewers three distinct positions to engage with the artwork” say the creators. “From across the street there is a macro view – a large scale image that can be a huge resolution image or an animation; outside the window, the viewers will see the mezzo content – titles of research areas and clusters of hundreds or thousands of images; and, by standing right in front of the artwork, viewers can discover the final, micro view – high resolution images and paragraphs of text related to the area of research visible from the mezzo and macro positions.”