Naming the Airport In-Between: Ars Electronica Futurelab's ZeitRaum at Vienna Check-In 3 (2012)

On June 5, 2012, the new Check-In 3 terminal at Vienna International Airport opened for service. On the same day, across the passage that leads from the check-in counters toward the security checkpoint, a five-metre "wall of letters" rose into place. Seventy-eight 46-inch monitors, arranged seven wide and eleven tall, composed a single surface. On its face, the alphabet fell like rain; the letters accumulating at the bottom formed a terrain; the terrain shifted, ceaselessly, in response to live data from the airport's departures and arrivals. One letter stood as a symbol of one person currently inside the building.

The device carried the name ZeitRaum. It was the work of the Ars Electronica Futurelab, designed in parallel with the terminal itself and installed permanently into the fabric of Check-In 3, the umbrella title for a constellation of media-art installations distributed throughout the building. Zeit in German means "time"; Raum means "space"; the coinage sutures the two into a single word. What Futurelab was attempting to name was not the ordinary space fixed to the earth's surface, but the invisible single place to which every airport in the world is connected once you cross security — a place a passenger enters the moment they pass through the gate, and leaves the moment they land at their destination. This essay reads Check-In 3, 2012, from both sides at once: the act of naming, and the architectural integration that made that act possible.

To Name a Space That Had No Name

The German press release of June 5, 2012 describes the central concept of the work as "the imaginary space that connects all airports of this world with one another."

Im Mittelpunkt der Arbeit steht jener imaginäre Raum, der alle Flughäfen dieser Welt miteinander verbindet.

— Ars Electronica Mediaservice (2012-06-05)source

Its borders shift with the rhythm of air traffic; inside, cultures and languages and nations move past one another like time zones. The passengers are strangers; they share, for a brief interval, a temporary commons. A category of place that humanity had not previously bothered to name — this is what Futurelab here called ZeitRaum.

The naming was not merely one element of the work. It functioned as the higher-order narrative that bound together the multiple devices scattered across Check-In 3. As a passenger walks toward their departure gate along the physical corridor, they are at the same time walking through this imaginary space. Precisely because the devices are integrated into the architectural body, the act of naming circuits back into the space itself — this condition of possibility is what makes the present essay read ZeitRaum as a work in kei = 造.

Architectural Integration: One Hundred and Fifty Surfaces

Lay the physical infrastructure out in numbers. One hundred and fifty displays in total. Of those, seventy-eight compose the five-metre wall in the check-in area, eighty-seven form a second wall at the security checkpoint, and the remainder are distributed across the terminal as satellite installations (operated under a framework of ten works × twelve surfaces = a hundred and twenty slots). The server room that drives the video output sits a hundred and twenty metres from the passenger area, and the most distant satellite is another eight hundred metres beyond that.

CWDM Mux/Demux units enable four video outputs to be multiplexed onto one single-mode fiber cable... thereby reducing the overall cable fiber requirement by a factor of four.

— IHSE Case Study — Vienna Airport KVM Deploymentsource

Video signal cannot be carried over those distances as-is, so the design multiplexes four video outputs onto a single single-mode optical fibre via CWDM Mux/Demux, reducing the required fibre count by a factor of four. The KVM layer relies on Draco vario extenders, transporting DVI signal at 1920×1200 across both copper CAT cabling and optical fibre.

These are not the visible, headline-grabbing elements of the project. But without this layer, real-time coordination at the scale of a hundred and fifty surfaces would have been impossible — both economically and spatially. That a corner of the passenger area did not have to be surrendered to servers in order to make room for art; that equipment security could be brought into alignment with the airport's own operational standards — these invisible design decisions are what allow the work to be read not as "an LED array temporarily placed for an exhibition" but as media art integrated into the building's structural fabric. The fact that the official Futurelab credit list runs to more than sixty names, including field technicians and developers alongside the artists, reflects the thickness of this layer directly.

Four Works Sharing a Single Apparatus

The hundred and fifty surfaces of Check-In 3 were shared, in their operational hours, among four works.

ZeitRaum / Timescapes (Futurelab) — the central work that animates the five-metre wall of letters. The letters piling up at the bottom form sentences; those sentences in turn compose a terrain of textual hills and valleys (Timescapes). The texts drawn into the field are taken from writers including Humberto Maturana, Anton Zeilinger, David Sasaki, and Michael Dosier, all working on themes of space, time, society, and movement, so that the wall functions as something to read during a passenger's wait. Anton Zeilinger, a quantum physicist, would go on to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022; in 2012, then, his words were mixed in here before he had received that recognition.

Industrious Clock for the project "ZeitRaum" (Yugo Nakamura / tha ltd.) — a digital clock that, while functioning as a clock, continually writes its digits by hand and then erases them, writes and erases. Futurelab handled programming and project management; the concept and expression came from an external artist, the implementation and operation from inside the institution — a clean division of roles. The work's place within Nakamura's longer sequence of clock pieces is treated separately in Clocks, Many Times Over: Yugo Nakamura's Fifteen-Year Dismantling of the Timepiece.

Last Clock (Jussi Ängeslevä, FI + Ross Cooper, UK) — a device that compresses live footage shot at the airport's runway into three concentric rings. The outermost ring updates every second, the middle ring every minute, the innermost ring every hour. On a single circular screen, three different granularities of time coexist.

AIRPORT SOUNDSCAPES #1 (Rupert Huber, AT) — the only auditory work in the set. A composition built on data sonification, converting control-tower data and Mach-number telemetry into sound, audible from the piers (the boarding waiting areas), turning ongoing air traffic into an experience for the ear. Huber is one half of the duo Tosca, formed with Richard Dorfmeister in 1994; his way of translating data not as direct information transfer but as abstract acoustic landscape gave the piece a register distinct from the visually-weighted other three.

The four works are independently legible; each is also built from the operational data of the airport itself. Departure and arrival schedules, control-tower data, the live image of the runway — the art functions as a device that reflects the place's reality back to itself, in visible and audible form. The content is not a "generic digital art" that could be lifted and dropped anywhere; it is designed as a generative system specific to this place. That specificity is what underwrites the legitimacy of striking a "contract" with airport infrastructure in the first place.

Art and Advertising, Splitting the Same Apparatus by Time

Here we touch on the operational core of the project. The agreement between Futurelab and the airport divided the hundred and fifty surfaces by time: half of the operating hours given over to art, half to the airport's own advertising media.

This is not the zero-sum relation where "art steals an ad slot" or "advertising contaminates art." It is a coexistence in different time slots on the same physical platform. The same display network grows a terrain of letters slowly in one block of hours, and shows airlines, duty-free brands, and tourism promotions in another. Across the cycle of a day, the apparatus's reason for existing shuttles between two registers.

This temporal partition is a far more sustainable solution than running the hardware as pure art-only equipment. Advertising revenue underwrites the maintenance of the physical layer; the art hours secure the expressive margin that the layer affords. The concept of ma (間) — the Japanese term for interval — that this journal has consistently engaged surfaces here not so much in its spatial sense as in its temporal sense: the ma as margin in time. To set aside half a day, against the brute operational time of an airport — that, in the end, is the condition of the apparatus's existence.

The Apparatus as Tenkei, the Method as "Poetic Systems"

Futurelab locates ZeitRaum within its own methodological category, "Poetic Systems." Their own description names this category as a body of work that translates different layers of knowledge, cognition, and perception into a layer of poetic meaning — a set of techniques for reconstructing data not as direct information but as sensible experience. Rather than presenting the airport's departures data as a table of "flight number / time / gate," it is translated into falling letters and accumulating terrain. Rather than showing control-tower data as a spectrogram, it is heard as acoustic landscape. What is happening here is not an expressionist flight from functional information; it is the generation of an information layer of a different kind.

To restate it in this journal's vocabulary: ZeitRaum is a device that treats the people passing through not as the landscape itself but as points placed within the landscape. When one letter symbolises one person, and their accumulation forms a terrain, what is being drawn on the screen is the very fact of human passage as tenkei — the small figure that, in classical East Asian landscape painting, brings the view to life. The same ancient idea — the figure or the boat that animates the scene — was being repeated, here, on an airport media apparatus. Into the ma that the architecture of Check-In 3 had opened, Futurelab was continuously placing points through the translation of data. The work of naming, in the end, was that operation.

A Device Now Written in the Past Tense; A Design Vocabulary Still in Force

On the Futurelab site, and on the 25th-anniversary page, the descriptions have all been rewritten in the past tense.

[ZeitRaum] was an interactive art installation... designed for the new terminal at Vienna International Airport.

— Ars Electronica Futurelab — Projects: ZeitRaumsource

The specific date of removal, or any announcement of operational shutdown, cannot be confirmed from publicly available material at the time of writing. Vienna Airport has carried out continual renovation of its terminal complex between 2012 and 2026, and it is highly probable that the display network has been updated or removed in the course of that work — but we stop short of asserting it.

This is where another question that permanent media-art installations always carry comes to the surface. Designing in unison with infrastructure makes the art physically robust, and at the same time binds the lifespan of the work to the lifespan of the infrastructure. The deeper a device is embedded into a building's body, the more thoroughly it is tied to that building's renovation cycle. The same structure that places Carsten Nicolai's chroma actor at Seibu Shibuya's ART GATE on a path toward shared fate with the building's closure is at work in Vienna. There is probably no universal answer; ZeitRaum is a work that posed the question early.

But the physical lifespan of the device and the lifespan of its design vocabulary are not the same. The conceptual operation of "naming the in-between of an airport," the operational model that re-links "art / infrastructure / advertising," the methodology of "translating data into poetic meaning" — these are vocabularies that remain inheritable, and remain in force, after the device has stopped. Now, as the connection between stations, airports, and urban OOH and art is beginning to enter realistic consideration in Japan as well, ZeitRaum is worth re-reading not as a fine past case but as a reference point for the design documents still to be written.

The letters that were falling on the wall of Check-In 3 have now passed fourteen years since 2012. Whether each of those letters is still falling, in some other airport, in a different alphabet, or whether everything has stopped entirely — this journal still has no certainty on the matter. What remains, set down here as one design document, is the work of giving a name to a space that had no name.

---

Sources

1. fig.001ZeitRaum — Ars Electronica Futurelab (Projects)
2. fig.002ZeitRaum at Vienna International Airport — Ars Electronica Futurelab
3. fig.003Jussi Ängeslevä,Last Clock — Jussi Ängeslevä
4. fig.004Textscapes — Ars Electronica
5. [5]Ars Electronica Mediaservice,ZeitRaum am neuen Terminal des Flughafen Wien (press release, 2012-06-05)
6. [6]ZeitRaum at Check-In 3 — Ars Electronica Blog (2012-06-06)
7. [7]ZeitRaum — Ars Electronica Futurelab 25 Years Anniversary
8. [8]Art at the Vienna Airport powered by KVM — IHSE Case Study
9. [9]tha ltd. (Yugo Nakamura),INDUSTRIOUS CLOCK FOR THE PROJECT "ZEITRAUM" — THA LTD.
10. [10]Jussi Ängeslevä,Last Clock — Jussi Ängeslevä (artist site)
11. [11]Rupert Huber — composer
12. [12]Tosca (band) — Wikipedia
13. [13]Clocks, Many Times Over: Yugo Nakamura's Fifteen-Year Dismantling of the Timepiece (TENKEI)

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Vienna International Airport × Ars Electronica Futurelab

LOCATION

Vienna

MODEL

Operator commission — Co-designed with the airport infrastructure; the same display network splits its hours between art and advertising

CADENCE

Permanent in the Check-In 3 terminal, cycling daily between its art and advertising registers

SPEC

150 displays in total: a 5 m wall of 78 × 46-inch monitors at check-in, plus security-area and satellite groups

SINCE

2012-06

STATUS

Status unverified — Official documentation now uses the past tense; no removal or shutdown has been officially announced

View on the registry