Digital Video magazine — February 2012
‘Gaga Constellation’ Barneys Installation: The Science Project Develops An Imaginative Interactive Video Display

Shoppers at the Barneys New York Madison Avenue store this past holiday season were treated to a Lady Gaga-themed interactive window display developed by digital agency The Science Project that allowed live streaming of tweets from the popular social media service Twitter using the #gagastars hashtag. Utilizing Twitter’s geo-location feature, The Science Project developed custom applications to help moderate tweets and give priority to those posted from the Barneys window location to provide users with a seemingly real-time experience.

The display, part of Barneys in-house Lady Gaga’s Holiday Workshop designed by Creative Director Nicola Formichetti and New York-based experiential agency Q4, features “Gaga Constellation,” a CG-heavy short film directed by Tim Richardson and produced by The Mill LA that re-imagines Lady Gaga as a celestial being amid a constellation of stars peppered with tweets from Gaga fans around the world.

The installation employed a 12 x 6.5-foot Prysm LPD laser phosphor display, which uses up to 75 percent less power than traditional backlit or projection technology-based products. Jeremy Bergstein, Chief of Strategy at The Science Project, along with Creative Director Dave Skaff both acknowledge that the interactive elements of the project added a lot of moving parts to the equation.  “The Prysm display was one of the few elements of the project that wasn’t a variable,” Bergstein laughs. “It was a great starting point. It was important to Nicola Formichetti and the Q4 team that Tim Richardson’s film be displayed in the most beautiful way possible, and besides using very little power, the Prysm has an extremely high contrast ratio with true black quality.”

Working under a two-week deadline with a team of developers, designers, animators and social media strategists, The Science Project designed a custom font for the title sequence, which they also created using Adobe After Effects, as well as developing a custom API and Adobe AIR-based application that would allow tweets to be displayed seamlessly from within The Mill’s animation sequences.

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