Original article published 9 November 2016 here:
Regardless of where you may stand on the polarizing results of the 2016 American Presidential race, New York was apparently the place to be on November 8. Donald Trump and his camp watched their path to victory become a reality from the New York Hilton (because his own properties supposedly couldn’t support the crowd size), and the deflated Clinton campaign eventually accepted defeat from the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center a mere two miles away. Thanks to a partnership between CNN, Instagram, CA Technologies, the building’s management and the projection mapping extraordinaire company Obscura Digital, the south façade of The Empire State Building became a 32-story, real-time election tracker.
Using 40 projectors at a distance of three blocks, Obscura Digital covered 70,000 square feet of building space with brilliant red and blue hues as well as real-time election results, campaign photos, Instagram mosaics and animations. Then, when the long night of crunching electoral votes finally came to an end, the 45th president’s visage towered over Manhattan alongside blinking lights and animated fireworks. Plus, Instagram gathered select and thematically appropriate image posts from people using the hashtag #MyVote for inclusion as part of the #MyVote social media tour’s grand finale.
