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CNNCTR

An interactive mapping installation exploring the digital networks of the 21st century and the shared energy of human connection.

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Cnnctr

Type: Interactive, Generative, Mapping, Public, Lab
Location: Central Square, Plovdiv
Date: June 2015
Event: One Design Week
Creative Concept and Interactive Programming: Petko Tanchev

App Developer: Bogdan Kovachev | Composer and App Designer: Atanas Dinchev | Photographers: Maritsa Kolcheva and Liubomir Atanasov

CNNCTR (Connector) is an interactive mapping installation created for One Design Week, recognised as the largest project of its kind in Bulgaria. Presented from 19 to 28 June 2015 on the thirteen-story facade of Plovdiv’s former Party House, it transformed the monumental architecture into a living interface.

The concept interprets the urban system as a dynamic network, inspired by the digital relationships that define the 21st century and the collective energy generated when people connect. Visitors were invited to interact in real time using their smartphones and tablets through a projection of generative three-dimensional animation. By downloading the CNNCTR application, available for iOS and Android, each participant could move a single point across the facade, link it to neighbouring points, and give rise to new 3D forms within the animation.

In this evolving structure, straight lines and rigid grids of socialist architecture dissolved into a field of abstract play. Geometry bent, connections multiplied, and the building itself became a canvas for a post-digital imagination — a place where order and chaos, structure and freedom, coexisted in luminous transformation.

Architecture as Interface

CNNCTR (Connector) reimagined the urban system as a shifting network of points, animated in real time through generative visuals designed in TouchDesigner. Visitors could join the performance by using a custom mobile app, reshaping the facade with gestures and linking points, and generating new forms in a collective digital space. CNNCTR became both a map of connection and an interpret model of post-digital society — an architecture animated by human presence.

Gallery

The City Rewired

CNNCTR unfolded as a vast projection at the central square of Plovdiv, drawing thousands of people into its orbit. The former Party House was veiled with a translucent screen for ten evenings, transforming its rigid socialist facade into a monumental stage of light and motion. The building’s ordered grid became a canvas where geometry fractured, colours pulsed, and new forms appeared in constant metamorphosis. What emerged was not a passive spectacle but a performance — a city square turned into a shared experience of technology and human presence.

Mapping a Post-Digital City

A Monument Turned Living Network

Plovdiv’s former Party House, a historical symbol of the past, became a canvas for projection, motion, and collective interaction during the One Design Week festival in June 2015. CNNCTR (Connector) reimagined the building’s rigid socialist grid as a constellation of luminous points, shifting and reorganising in real time. Inspired by the digital relationships shaping 21st-century life, it became a poetic model of a post-digital city and an interactive playground where the audience could shape the evolving network through actions.

Interactive Connections

Participation was simple yet powerful. By downloading the CNNCTR mobile app, available for iOS and Android, visitors could select and move a point on the projection directly from their device. Each gesture altered the coordinates of the mapped grid, triggering new connections, shifting lines, and generating three-dimensional forms across the facade. What began as a static raster of architecture became a dynamic, evolving organism shaped by collective play.

CNNCTR custom interface in TouchDesigner

The Facade as Canvas

The site itself posed challenges. The Party House, with its rows of windows and air-conditioning units, was hardly a blank canvas. To resolve this, the facade was covered with a translucent vinyl screen, allowing projections to retain clarity while the building’s contours remained visible. The result was a rare fusion — a monumental structure simultaneously revealed and concealed, its surface oscillating between architecture and interface.

Technology: Generative Systems in Real Time

The visual content was created entirely in TouchDesigner, where every point, line, and shape responded to live input. A custom-built mobile application connected users to the system via the WebSocket protocol, translating movement on their screens into changes across the 3D mapping grid. Up to one hundred participants could interact simultaneously, their data driving colour, position, and time-based transformations. This way, personal actions were amplified into collective visual events, dissolving the boundary between audience and artwork.

City in Motion

Plovdiv’s central square became an open stage, where thousands gathered each night to witness and shape the evolving installation. The building’s grid of luminous points responded to audience gestures, forming new connections and three-dimensional objects that transformed the facade into a dynamic, living canvas. The city itself seemed rewired — animated by human interaction and technological imagination.

CNNCTR acted as a post-digital model of civilisation, revealing how communities create meaning through collective engagement. Its fleeting presence charted a poetic map of a world in flux — luminous, interconnected, and profoundly human, inviting participants to see architecture as an active, responsive organism rather than a static monument.