Behind the Screen:
The M+ Facade

Each night as the sun begins to set, the M+ building transforms into a light-powered canvas. Against the rosy blush and golden hues of the horizon, a spectacular show of moving image works enlivens and illuminates the Hong Kong skyline and Victoria Harbour.

Visible from the promenade of the West Kowloon Cultural District to Tsim Sha Tsui and from the Central Harbourfront to Sai Ying Pun, the M+ Facade brings visual culture into direct dialogue with the city. As a curatorial space and a dynamic digital exhibition platform, it extends the museum’s programmes and collections outside the building and is a complex integration of architectural ingenuity, creative engineering, digital innovation, and visual culture.

The Creative Engineering Solution

Designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron (HdM), the M+ building exhibits a distinctive cladding design with terracotta mullions. These mullions serve a dual purpose, functioning as sun-shading louvres for the interiors, while featuring grooves for insetting LED lights. To transform M+’s harbour-facing facade into an outdoor exhibition space, HdM turned to Valentin Spiess, founder of Basel-based company iart, who specialises in media architecture.

‘We had to fully understand the intention of HdM and find solutions to apply a digital layer into the physical layer, to integrate the screen into the architecture and the grooves of the building,’ said Spiess. ‘It was not just about concept, but developing a series of tests, mock-ups, and prototypes.’

The iart team generated models and simulations to understand the effects and emission of light from inside the M+ building and from the cityscape. They designed an integrated solution that readily responds to the facade’s porous structure and its surrounding environmental conditions.

The solution consists of a hybrid low-contrast and high-contrast system that projects and creates depth and texture on screen. A contrast control measures the environmental conditions so that images are displayed with the lowest possible power consumption.

‘The hybrid system controls the aesthetics of the facade and compensates for the gaps between the LEDs that generate a halo effect. The contrast control reads an image’s visibility and adapts the facade’s contrast to its current environment,’ Spiess explained.

The M+ Facade, awarded the best Animated Media Architecture project at the 2023 Media Architecture Awards, is optimised to be visible from various angles, distances, and lighting conditions. Not only does it showcase the possibilities of digital light, but it also plays a significant role in understanding the politics and poetics of the Hong Kong urban space and experience.

While the M+ Facade is able to display pre-recorded works, iart’s research and development eventually birthed a specialised system—one that records and outputs works generated in real-time. This system became key for the launch of Hand Me Your Trust by Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist and demonstrated the creative possibilities of the M+ Facade as a dynamic exhibition platform.

Bridging Art and Technology

M+’s creative technologists, Andrew Crowe and Ashley Lee Wong from MetaObjects, played essential roles when Rist was commissioned for the M+ Facade project. The duo worked closely with Rist to set up a system that allowed the artist to edit her work in real-time using a playback system also developed by iart.

‘As a video artist, Rist wanted to challenge the possibility of the M+ Facade. She was interested in the technical aspect of it and how it would look in context. Hand Me Your Trust is created with this illusion of 3D depth. The images don’t extend to the borders, creating a work that looks almost as if it’s floating in the sky,’ Wong explained.

‘Dedicated to artistic works and curatorial content, the M+ Facade is one way we can engage artists and others to work closely with technologies. It’s a screen for challenging the public aesthetically and artistically,’ Wong added.

Creative technologists like Crowe and Wong play a crucial role in helping artists understand the technological capabilities of the facade and creating solutions, stimulations, and templates that artists can adapt for their works. Behind the screen, Crowe and Wong combine creative and innovative thinking and problem-solving skills with their technical knowledge of the M+ Facade and digital production.

‘Besides being a digital screen, the M+ Facade also has this inherent aspect of digital production and is a tool for us to explore the boundaries of what’s possible with art,’ Crowe said. ‘Digital production is really about the use of digital tools in the creation of works, including anything from a video, interactive work, or a game.’

Challenging Physical Boundaries

It was Nam June Paik who pioneered the use of technology in video art in the 1960s. ‘Since then, artists have embraced technology further, which makes sense when we’re living in such a digital-centric world. And Hong Kong is very much part of that global trend,’ said Ulanda Blair, M+ Curator of Moving Image.

Part digital and part physical, the M+ Facade has created an incredible opportunity—as a spatial extension of the museum’s exhibition space and an inseparable part of the city—for artists to showcase their works.

One example is Ellen Pau’s The Shape of Light, which was an ‘opportunity to see if art could help repair and heal Hong Kong by reminding people of the interdependence of all phenomena, both mental and physical,’ Blair explained.