A Screen Shared by Advertising and Art: Outernet London and the Now Building

Come up from the ticket gates at Tottenham Court Road station and, on the corner with Charing Cross Road, a room filled with moving image right up to the ceiling stands open. There is no ticket booth at the entrance. No booking is needed. Step inside and the walls and ceiling, four storeys high, form one continuous screen, across which vast imagery by the Korean design studio d'strict is running. Yet those same surfaces will, at another hour, carry branded films for soft drinks and smartphones. Here, advertising and art share a single screen.

This is Outernet London, and at its core, the Now Building. It opened in 2022, developed by Consolidated Developments with the architectural practice Orms, at the foot of Centre Point on the corner that leads into Denmark Street — the old "Tin Pan Alley". The operator is Outernet Global. They call the place neither a museum nor a music venue nor an advertising medium, but an "immersive entertainment district". That very vagueness names the character of this screen rather well.

The Screen as Architecture

What astonishes first about the Now Building is not the flamboyance of the imagery but the fact that the screen is a wall and a ceiling. A four-storey atrium, roughly 14.5 metres high. LED at a 3-millimetre pixel pitch wraps around five surfaces; the internal screen area comes to some 1,209 square metres, with a further 439 square metres or so of floor. The total area is around 23,000 square feet. Below ground waits HERE, a music venue with a capacity of 2,000. Set out in a row, the figures read like the spec sheet for an advertising installation, but what matters is that this screen is not signage retrofitted to an existing building: it was designed as the building itself.

At the crossings of Shibuya and Shinjuku, screens are fixed to the outer walls of buildings and shine outward, toward the crowd walking the street. Outernet's screen does the opposite: it invites people inward and wraps the body in image. It is a vessel open to the street, and yet its interior is closed like an exhibition room. Where the shop window separated inside from outside by a single pane of glass, here the passer-by walks straight into the space on the inner side of the screen. Seen from the standpoint of "ZO (造)" — the screen as architecture and space — Outernet is one of the most thoroughgoing cases of the idea of building a screen.

Art Placed in a Commercial Vessel

Outernet is a for-profit media company. Much of the screen's time is given over to commercial content made with brand partners, and expansion to Los Angeles and New York has been announced. Even so, the place cannot be dismissed as a merely enormous advertising apparatus, because a free art programme called Outernet Arts runs alongside on the same screen. Led by its director Tony Tremlett and creative producer Ruth Waters, it commissions and programmes contemporary art year-round. Admission is free. No booking is needed. Inside a commercial vessel, a time for art open to anyone has been secured.

This structure resonates with several of the screens this journal has followed. Set it against the practice of CIRCA, where the advertising surface of Piccadilly Lights in London is surrendered to art for three minutes every night, and against the operation of Piccadilly Lights itself, and the difference comes into sharp relief. Where CIRCA temporarily "borrows" time from an existing advertising billboard, Outernet built a room from the outset on the premise that art and advertising would cohabit. The former is a point of scenery slipped into an interval; the latter is an attempt to provide the vessel itself.

Rather than borrowing an advertising surface, build from the outset a room in which advertising and art live together. What Outernet demonstrates is an architecture for sharing a screen by time.

SCREENS LANDSCAPE Editorial

What Has Been Shown

The lineage of Outernet Arts begins with a commission in the year after opening. From 22 January to 26 February 2023, the moving-image artist Marco Brambilla's Heaven's Gate had its European premiere. The work converts Hollywood's "dream factory" into a vertiginous collage of countless fragments of film stacked one above another. The four-storey wall made an ideal support for this vertically extending apparatus of image.

The following year, in 2024, the Korean studio d'strict presented FLOW. Having made an optical-illusion water tank appear on a street corner with WAVE at COEX K-Pop Square, they now used all five surfaces to fill a room with wave and flux themselves. Then, in October 2025, the sequel FLOW, Thereafter opened. It re-reads the artist Nam Jinu's Star Cliff (2023) through two opposed viewpoints, "Play" and "Hunt", as enormous human figures race along the walls, give chase and collide. Not a one-off film but a serial work that cites and varies what came before it — strata of time have begun to accumulate on the screen.

The supply of art does not come from in-house commissions alone. From 14 November 2024 to 31 March 2025, Outernet joined with Tate to show work by the Palestinian-American abstract painter Samia Halaby. Conceived in response to Tate Modern's large exhibition Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, the project reconstituted for this enormous screen the "kinetic painting" that originates in the programmes Halaby wrote herself on a Commodore Amiga 1000 in the 1990s. Two pieces newly commissioned for Outernet, Tottenham Court Road and After the Green and After the Black Dune, were joined by the well-known Brass Women (1995/2019), with sound layered over them by the musician Four Tet (Kieran Hebden).

From 14 May to 7 September 2025, in collaboration with the British Museum, animated imagery after Utagawa Hiroshige occupied the screen. Running in concert with the museum's exhibition Hiroshige: artist of the open road, nineteenth-century views of famous places began to move across a twenty-first-century canopy at Tottenham Court Road. A circuit has been built here by which a museum's collection spills out beyond its own building, onto a screen anyone may stop at free of charge.

The Free Screen as Tenkei

Laid out in this way, it becomes clear that two kinds of time run across Outernet's screen. One is the commercial time of brands; the other is the time of art. The two are not in opposition. Rather, it is precisely because the commercial vessel stands firm that a freely open time for art can hold inside it. Advertising supports the building; art kindles meaning in it. The relation in which ma (間) prepares the vessel and tenkei (点景) edits its contents alternates along the axis of time, inside a single room.

A room filled with image up to the ceiling could, technically, be built anywhere in the city. But it is the editorial judgement about what to show there — when, whose work, and what kind of work to slot in among the nightly advertisements — that separates this screen from a merely enormous billboard. Whether this vessel, standing open and free of charge on the corner of Tottenham Court Road, will shift its centre of gravity toward commerce or toward art is still an open question. At the very least, though, the passer-by coming out of the station today can walk inside the screens of Brambilla and Hiroshige and d'strict without passing a ticket booth. A tenkei that kindles meaning in the scenery of the city has been secured inside a commercial vessel — and that fact in itself makes Outernet a present-day case worth watching.

Sources

1. fig.001d'strict — FLOW / FLOW, Thereafter
2. fig.002Outernet Arts — About
3. fig.003d'strict — FLOW, Thereafter: A Misinterpretation Performance
4. [4]Outernet London — About
5. [5]Outernet Arts — About (Tony Tremlett / Ruth Waters / Foreign Body Productions)
6. [6]The Outernet — Orms (architects)
7. [7]Outernet London — Wikipedia (opening year, development and specifications)
8. [8]Outernet and Tate premiere new work by Samia Halaby with sound by Four Tet — Tate Press
9. [9]Outernet presents Hiroshige in collaboration with The British Museum
10. [10]Step Inside FLOW, Thereafter — Outernet London

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Outernet Global (operator) / Consolidated Developments (developer); the art strand is programmed by Outernet Arts

LOCATION

London

MODEL

Operator commission — Runs as a commercial immersive-media district while Outernet Arts commissions and programmes a free public art strand; the same canvas alternates branded content and art across time

ARTIST PAY

Works are site-specific commissions (Halaby’s two pieces were specially commissioned for Outernet); fees are undisclosed

CADENCE

Open year-round, free and without booking; art works rotate over months (Brambilla Jan–Feb 2023, Halaby Nov 2024–Mar 2025, Hiroshige May–Sep 2025, FLOW, Thereafter from Oct 2025)

SPEC

The Now Building: four storeys (c. 14.5 m), 3 mm pixel pitch, five-sided wrap-around LED; c. 1,209 m² of screen and c. 439 m² of floor across some 23,000 sq ft, with the 2,000-capacity HERE music venue below

SINCE

2022

STATUS

Active

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