Scenic Panner Live!
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Click here for the official Scenic Panner Website
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Collaboration with Stefan Bischoff
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Scenic Panner is a custom written application allowing a user to create an ongoing panning projection of a city, consisting of single city objects, controlled by an input device such as a musical instrument.

Urs Hofer and Stefan Bischoff from Lucerne, CH, concepted and created Scenic Panner during a 4-month stay in Chicago in summer 2005 as part of an art scholarship granted by the Lucerne-Chicago City Partnership Association.

The two generated thousands of city objects from numerous images of Chicago and created Scenic Panner to display these objects, in a way which resembles the perspective of a traveling person who sees a town passing by outside.
The city images move from the left side of a multiple video projection to the right at a constant speed, and disappear.

Despite a basic grid of blocks and surrounding streets Hofer and Bischoff have perceived Chicago as a giant sprawl of typical city objects appearing in ever new and seemingly random combinations rather than exhibiting clear town centres or structures. Scenic Panner resembles this impression in an artificial and highly esthetic manner, as if one could build buildings, blocks and complete cities on the push of a single button.