The New England-based Citizens Bank was entering the New York City market for the first time and wanted to make a big first impression. As an out-of-towner they felt it was important to demostrate that they understood their new customers by creating a unique expereintial space where New Yorkers could learn something about their city and themselves - all while celebrating the rich and diverse cultural fabric that makes up this great city.
The Living Portrait of NYC was concepted, designed, developed, produced and installed by the RadicalMedia Studio team in partnership with Ogilvy New York. Located in the Flatiron district, this pop-up brand installation was a celebration of New Yorkers from all walks of life, putting their stories center stage through dynamic data visualizations, an immersive audio installation, live performance, an immersive film, and interactive engagements.
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Entrance Experience:
The experience began with a real-time data-driven portrait of the city – inspired by what happens when 8.8 million unique individuals come together as one.
Tickers enveloped guests in the live happenings of the city at that moment, where data sets from a custom survey of 1000s New Yorkers, the city archives, and a scrape of nearly 100 other open web sources was distilled into an immersive and engaging data story and graphic visualization of the ways New Yorkers live, work, play, love, eat, spend and get around.
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As visitors first entered the building they passed through a mini-maze of LED-ticker-clad passages. These custom LED tickers displayed realtime data and info scrapped from online datafeeds, news headlines and social media.
Room 1 Experience:
A Living Data Portrait
For the second part of the room we engaged and worked closely with our super talented friends at the London-based data design shop SetReset to help bring our Animated Data Stories to life.
Translating our demographic research, NYC data sets and storyboards into a series of dynamic looping Data Visualization animations that we displayed on large/custom LED walls and ceilings.
These bold and graphic animations wrapped around and over visitors on custom LED panels embedded into the walls — reflecting off black infinity mirror walls to create the illusion of a 2-sided tunnel.
Over the course of the 9min loop, the data visualizations shifted through a series of vibrant colorways to indicate clear changes in themes.
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Data Portrait Kiosks
Three interactive kiosks offered individuals the chance to contribute to the data portrait by taking an simple quiz that compared their answers with other New Yorkers.
The colors of the kiosks were coordinated with the animation and lighting, resulting in an ever-changing and enveloping experience that paid homage to a city that never stands still.
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Room 2 Experience:
An Audio Portrait
The second experiential chapter immersed visitors in a meditative sonic landscape and a responsive lighting design experience. This unique sound-design-driven installation allowed visitors to explore and become lost in the intamacy of the stories.
As they entered the haze-filled space they encountered a grid of glowing light cones. As the entered one of the cones they stepped under a directional audio-spotlight — magically revealling one of 16 sonic collages.
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Each of these 'vignettes' revealled a themed sound collage of intimate stories from real New Yorkers. These stories were collaged, edited and presented through the use of directional audio beams, sound design and responsive lighting – allowing guests to step into a beam and have an intimate one-on-one listening experience.
No one tells a story quite like a New Yorker. And with so much to experience, there are stories here that just couldn’t have happened anywhere else. To find these stories, we sent a dozen journalists across all five boroughs to conduct in-depth interviews with over 200 New Yorkers
We engaged the amazing radio journalist and former RadioLab executive producer Ellen Horne to create the intimate and compelling audio stories that played in the responsive spotlights.
Periodically throughout the day, the room was transformed thru live performances by emerging and respected NYC artists.
From the New Yorican Poet La Bruja to a voguing violinist to a blind bluegrass musician to a lightfoot subway dancer to Freestyle Love Supreme — the room was never the same twice and captured the unexpected intersections that only happen in NYC.
Room 3 Experience:
The Living Portrait
The third chapter of the experience gave visitors a look at the ever-evoling cuture and texture of the city -- a cinematic documentary 'tone poem' and tribute to what it means to live in NYC
The film played across two custom screen arrays that flanked visitors as they moved down the linear space — creating a dramatic and completely enveloping audio-visual experience.
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The film was captured across 20 shoot days and projection-mapped across 241 custom built screens surrounded guests with a immersive audio-visual experience celebrating life in the city. From the morning rush, to the boundless energy after dark, guests experienced the cacophony and synchronicity, sights and sounds of a 24-hour day in the city.
Room 4 Experience:
The Communal Digital Portrait
The forth chapter let visitors contribute their own creations to a dynamic and ever-evolving communal art installation.
A projected tapestry of rapidly animating squares filled the walls of the space — formed from 'portraits' generated onsite for visitors based on their inputs.
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In a series of interactive 'Photo Booths' visitors were able to participate by generating their own tiles to add to the Communal Portrait.
By answering a series of rapid-fire and humourous 'only-in-NYC' style questions they provided the prompts for our custom portrait generator. These personalized results combined with a sequence of photos taken in the booth to create a dynamic looping didgtal asset that they could share via social media — further amplifying and promoting the event.
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Event Branding
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