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Geeks Hijack Olafur Eliasson’s Concert Hall for Giant PONG Game
![eliasson-pong-iceland-1 eliasson-pong-iceland-1](https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2014/09/eliasson-pong-iceland-1.jpg)
Photo: Via Levu.
Benjamin Sutton
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A game of PONG unfolds on the exterior of the Harpa concert hall.
Photo: Via Levu.
The project, dubbed Harpa Pong, was a collaboration between Atli Bollason, a designer, and Owen Hindley, a programmer, and was sponsored by Harpa and cell phone giant Vodafone. “Today, computer games become sort of synonymous with solitude,” Bollason said. “So I thought it was interesting to have an open-air arcade, so to speak.” The project ran nightly from August 23–31, between 9:30 p.m. and 2 a.m.
The Harpa concert hall in Reykjavik.
Photo: Andreas Blome/Wikimedia Commons.
News of the King Kong-sized PONG game, naturally, reminds us of the great MIT Tetris hack of 2012, another ambitious architectural takeover in the name of gaming, albeit one that was not bankrolled by a telecommunications multinational—or even sanctioned by the university on whose campus it took place.
Watch footage of Harpa Pong in action:
[h/t Creators Project]