An interactive art installation showcases an LED cube at the center of a room encased in mirrored walls. The cube cycles through black and white typography, prominently listing the names of bands featured at SXSW 2022.

The Ledger Digital Experience

The Ledger is an infinite, immersive room featuring a real-time visualization of blockchain data at SXSW. Working with the folks at Whatever Co, we took on the digital experience of the Ledger, to explore a dynamic visual language behind the blockchain.

Our concept was to begin and end with the literal sea of activity, and along the way get to know some of the data being exchanged. What viewers will perceive initially as noise, becomes at the end an awe-inspiring wealth of information.

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Our Process

Combing through the data from Polygon APIs ( which allowed us to use real time data), we identified relevant information to measure and display. Transactions are the most immediate activity on the blockchain, which happen every second of the day. Transactions are like the grains of sand that make up the blockchain beach. Because we are at SXSW we were interested in data surrounding events such as POAPs. Proof of Attendance Protocols can tell us when people check in at an event, a marker of human presence. Lastly, we looked at the NFTs minted and sold during the run of SXSW, in addition to public bio photos of artists involved. Ultimately all this data would get pulled every hour into a pool of data to be displayed in the visualization.

The design of the experience takes people initially into the sea of transaction data, a wash of noise that then begins to take shape into the names of events. Then POAP badges begin popping onto the cube for each check-in happening at SXSW, and viewers feel the activity that’s happening all around the city of Austin. Next the NFTs fill empty glass cubes with color. Finally cubes of NFTs, POAPs, Events, and Transactions swirl together onscreen to return to the sea of data. But now we can see what the sea is made of.

Results

The Ledger represented the first ever blockchain time capsule created at a festival. The resulting experience is a content generator, as attendees would immerse themselves in the data and then photograph what they saw and share it online.