The Vessel That Looks Back: Anatomy of Piccadilly Lights

At Piccadilly Circus in London, you look up at the curved screen that fills the corner of the building on the north side. Coca-Cola, Samsung, Hyundai — what is playing is the same sequence of advertising as ever. But the surface is quietly taking your measure as you look up at it. Cameras built into the foot of the screen read the model, colour and fuel type of the cars crossing the junction, and estimate the approximate age and gender of the crowd waiting at the lights, down to their facial expressions. What is shown is adjusted according to who is standing there. The audience that believes it is watching the advertising surface is, at the same time, being watched by it.

This essay sets out to dissect Europe's largest single screen as a vessel — a ki (器). In the terms of East Asian landscape painting, it is the scenery itself, the ground that carries the figures and boats of the tenkei: a container neutral in itself, whose meaning is decided by what is placed inside it. But the vessel called Piccadilly Lights has stopped being neutral. The vessel now goes out and chooses its own contents.

Lineage — From a Nervous System of Tubes to a Single Canvas

Piccadilly Circus became known for advertising in light at the beginning of the twentieth century. The first electric sign appeared in 1904; in 1910 Bovril raised the first substantial neon sign. From then on the junction became an international emblem in its own right, an accumulation of brand names in light. Coca-Cola above all has been present here without a single break since 1954, and remains the longest-resident brand to this day. Its first sign is said to have used close to a mile of neon tubing and to have weighed more than two tonnes. In 1998 a digital projector was installed in the Coca-Cola slot, and by 2011 the neon tubes had disappeared entirely.

For a long time this surface was a patchwork, divided up and sold by several operators. Neighbouring signs blinked side by side under separate contracts, at separate resolutions, on separate refresh cycles. What rewrote that condition from the ground up was the rebuild begun in January 2017 under the lead of the owner, Landsec. After a period of works, on 26 October of the same year, the six separate surfaces were consolidated into a single seamless curved screen. The moment of the switch-on was streamed live on Facebook and YouTube. It was the day the advertising tubing that had branched like a nervous system was folded into one canvas.

Anatomy of the Vessel — 783.5 Square Metres, Watching

After consolidation, the screen measures 44.62 metres across and 17.56 metres high, an area of 783.5 square metres. A single surface wider than a tennis court, it is held to be the largest advertising screen in Europe. It was manufactured by Daktronics of South Dakota. The pixel pitch is 8 mm; the resolution, 5,490 × 2,160, exceeds 4K; the pixel count is roughly 11 million, assembled from 5,500 LED tiles. Each tile is rated IP67 for water resistance, with an expected life of 100,000 hours. The palette runs to some 281 trillion colours. A dedicated 200 Mbps fibre-optic line and Scala's content management platform drive it, and brightness is adjusted automatically by ambient light sensors as day turns to night. Twenty-four hours a day, it does not stop.

This enormous single sheet is operated on a programming scheme that lets one surface sustain several brands at once. The resident brands at the time of consolidation were Coca-Cola, Samsung, Hyundai, L'Oréal Paris, eBay, Hunter and Stella McCartney. The basic arrangement is a six-slot grid, in which each brand's position changes roughly every ninety seconds so that every slot circulates on equal terms. Once an hour, in addition, each brand is allotted a "takeover" — around forty seconds in which it occupies the entire screen, up to 550 square metres, seven-tenths of the surface. It is a design that shuttles between division and unification along the axis of time.

And the vessel responds to the world outside it. The "live data hub" built in from the moment of the switch-on changes the display according to weather and temperature, and pulls in social media feeds. Added to this, the cameras described above analyse the characteristics of passing vehicles and the approximate attributes and expressions of pedestrians, swapping the advertising to suit the audience actually present. This mechanism is what was meant, at the top of this essay, by the vessel choosing its contents. The container has crossed over to the side that judges what ought to be put inside it. Roughly 100 million people pass through this junction each year; by the operator's own count the screen generates 260 million impressions annually, and one passer-by in five photographs it. A surface optimised to be looked at completes its optimisation by looking.

An Editorial View — A Container That Is Not Neutral

Why should TENKEI treat this overwhelmingly commercial apparatus within the frame of "exhibition"? Because Piccadilly Lights embodies the theme of the vessel at its highest purity.

As seen in the essay on CIRCA and the Globally-Synchronised Screen Network, for a few minutes each night this surface turns into a platform for contemporary art, through Landsec's donation of the time. On those occasions Landsec explicitly keeps its distance: showing an artist on the screen, it states, does not imply agreement with that artist's views or message. It is a declaration that the vessel is only a vessel, and does not take on the meaning of what is placed in it. The commercial sequence that fills most of the day, and the donated minutes of artwork — the same 783.5 square metres receive two kinds of content, governed by different logics, as though nothing had happened.

Here the formidable and the uncanny sides of the concept of the vessel sit together. A vessel was supposed to be neutral with respect to its contents — just as the scenery of an East Asian landscape painting does not choose the boats and travellers of the tenkei drawn into it. Yet Piccadilly Lights measures the crowd with cameras, reads the weather, identifies cars, and actively sorts what it will hold. A neutral container has turned into a container with preferences. Just as DeepScreen's anamorphosis feigns depth on a flat plane, this vessel feigns being "merely a surface" while in fact operating as a subject that analyses its audience.

In terms of the paired concepts of ma (間, the interval) and tenkei (点景), the reading in which a gap of a few minutes is opened inside the commercial sequence, and a work is kindled there as a tenkei, has already been written in the essay cited above. This essay moves one level below that, shifting the point of view to the side of the scenery — the vessel itself — that carries the tenkei. When a vessel ceases to be neutral, upon whose scenery does the tenkei kindled there rise? Scenery for the advertisers, scenery for the audience, or scenery for the sake of the scenery itself? Piccadilly Lights goes on raising that question into the sky above Piccadilly Circus every night, in the form of one curved surface.

Outlook — Into the Age of the Surface That Reads Its Audience

What Piccadilly Lights presented in 2017 was not simply an increase in scale but one completed form of the vessel: an advertising surface that reads its audience and responds to the world outside. Since then, 3D expression (anamorphosis) on large outdoor screens, and interactive distribution that takes in the audience's reactions, have spread to screens elsewhere. The more capable the vessel becomes, the heavier the editorial judgement of what to place in it. This single surface embodies the paradox that the most commercially honed vessel can at the same time become the most closely watched platform for presenting work.

When a tenkei is kindled in the scenery of the city, that scenery may look back at you — the nights of Piccadilly Circus quietly announce the threshold of such an age, as the most photographed single surface in Europe.

Sources

1. fig.001'One Good Thing' Capital One — DeepScreen, Piccadilly Lights (Fold7 / Ocean Outdoor)
2. [2]Piccadilly Lights — The Screen (Official)
3. [3]Piccadilly Lights — Landsec (Owner)
4. [4]The Venue, Piccadilly Lights — Ocean Outdoor (Operator)
5. [5]Piccadilly Lights' screen spectacular — AV Magazine (specifications, 27 Oct 2017)
6. [6]Piccadilly Circus billboard uses recognition technology to deliver targeted adverts — Dezeen
7. [7]Piccadilly Lights: 110 years of an ad landmark — Campaign
8. [8]Celebrating 5 years of the new Piccadilly Lights — Ocean Outdoor (footfall / impacts)
9. [9]The Piccadilly sign: how Coca-Cola found a home at Piccadilly Circus — Coca-Cola GB

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Owned by Landsec; operated by Ocean Outdoor

LOCATION

London

MODEL

Ad-slot takeover — The art slot exists as a nightly donation of minutes by Landsec (CIRCA); the operator explicitly notes that showing an artist implies no endorsement

CADENCE

24/7 advertising (a six-slot grid rotating every 90 seconds, with a 40-second full takeover hourly) plus the nightly minutes of art

SPEC

44.62 × 17.56 m (783.5 m²), 5,490 × 2,160 px (c. 11 million pixels), c. 5,500 LED tiles

SINCE

2017-10

STATUS

Active — The current seamless single screen was lit on 26 October 2017 after the Landsec-led rebuild

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