Drawing inspiration from the visualization of atmospheric conditions, Current Air, borrows from the graphic language of meteorology to create a hybridized visual current of color, image, and pattern. This video hints to scientific expressions of temperature, moisture, and wind allowing for free associations of the viewer. Developed to activate 150 Media Stream with vibrant colors, it draws from the fluid dynamic of the adjacent Chicago River. This video hints to the ephemeral qualities outside: the wind blowing into the city along the river from Lake Michigan, moisture from snow or rain, and the shifting temperatures. Using a strong visual language, it brings the outside in to enliven the interior atmosphere. 

From 1950–1975, Chicago-based Container Corporation of America ran a series of provocative artworks in national publications, as a means of promoting discourse. “Great Ideas of Western Man” was heralded as one of the best advertising campaigns in history. For this installation at 150 Media Stream, the Chicago Design Museum (ChiDM) animated three advertisements from the original campaign. The world has changed a lot since 1975, but great ideas are timeless. On April 20th, ChiDM opened an exhibition of contemporary works to continue the conversation, “Great Ideas of Humanity.”

Cities & The Sky #3, a new digital animation by Brooklyn-based artist Sean Capone, is the most recent in a series of public art projects that the artist has been engaged with for several years. This body of work explores more experimental, process-based and phantasmagoric forms of animation, using generative software to create and manipulate dynamic visual systems in real-time. Visually, the Cities & The Sky series evokes the dynamics of landscape painting, the pop graphics of mural art, and the synesthetic ‘visual music’ of abstract art and expanded cinema.

As an artist working in the public sphere, Sean is interested in using moving imagery to immerse and surprise the viewer, to encourage a reflection on one’s experience of the built environment and the temporal flow of media information, and—in the case of the 150 Media Stream project specifically—to engage this flow of imagery as part of the very architectural fabric of the space itself. In our contemporary media culture, more so now than ever before, the ‘screen’ is both a surface to observe and a space to inhabit.

The Adler Planetarium presents two video pieces. Planet Nine features the research of Dr. Michael Brown from Caltech, and tells the story of why he believes that our solar system contains a distant as of yet undiscovered large planet. Our Planetary Experiment is based on a presentation of Dr. Daniel Schrag from Harvard, and tells the story of global climate change. Each video piece consists of scientific visualizations initially created for the Kavli Fulldome Lecture Series. That lecture series consists of presentations which use a technology called domecasting to simulcast lectures to planetariums all around the world.

In 2016 Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin proposed the existence of Planet Nine, a new planet in our solar system. This piece tells the story of Planet Nine in four movements. The first shows the discovery of the Kuiper Belt starting in 1992, 2,000 new objects orbiting the Sun out beyond Neptune. The second movement shows the 11,000 year of Sedna, one of Michael Brown’s discoveries that provided early hints about the existence of Planet Nine. The third movement is a computational simulation of how a hypothetical Planet Nine would affect the solar system over its 4.5 billion year history. The final movement presents several possible orbits for Planet Nine, a treasure map for the many astronomers hoping to fine it.

Our Planetary Experiment begins by imagining that we could see atmospheric carbon dioxide glowing red in the atmosphere. Then we could watch the buildup of carbon dioxide since Charles Davis Keeling began monitoring it in 1958. We then use the 89 bladed of the 150 Media Stream display to map out global temperatures over the last 89 years. Consequences of this warming include last years severe Hurricane season as well as the catastrophic die-off that occurred in the Great Barrier Reef the past two seasons. Finally we show (at 1:1 scale) a projection of future sea level rise.

Dancing Human is a part of the artist Judy K Suh’s ongoing exploration of the construction and deconstruction of the moving image. Drawing inspiration from Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of motion, the piece breaks down a dancer’s movement into a series of still images created from shooting on Super 8 and 35mm. It was conceived specifically for the unique structure of 150 Media Stream, utilizing the vertical screens to present the film strips in their entirety. Alluding to film editing, the strips were cut and organized for a visual rhythm rather than temporal rhythm. The advanced digital technology powering this video wall exhibits analog technology in all its imperfections—dusts, scratches, light leaks—and is now obsolete.

Time Mirror II (2018) is Haskins largest interactive video work to date. The work is entirely live, and never recorded. It transforms 150 Media Stream into a 150′ digital mirror, reflecting the architecture and its visitors back onto itself, compressed and stretched in time.

Here, visitors are invited to contend with the various polarities experienced as a person, such as the singularity and plurality of the self, the internal perception and exterior reality of the self, and the present self-contending with the past and future self.

The work offers an opportunity to slow down and see oneself moving through different layers of time from a third person point of view. Haskins says, “seeing the self as ‘other’ opens a doorway of understanding and compassion towards the self and the world at large.”

Time Mirror II is an extension of Haskins new solo museum exhibition entitled Polarity, which ran Sept 8, 2018 through January 13, 2019 at the Elmhurst Art Museum.

Tonal Conversations by animation artist Anne Beal and composer Christopher Zuar is comprised of thousands of colorful images that Anne created while listening to Christopher compose music on the piano. The ongoing collaborative project debuted on the 150 Media Stream featuring Christopher Zuar’s nine-piece jazz orchestra.