Liverpool Town Hall's Council Chamber is one of the most absurdly grand rooms in the north of England. Georgian chandeliers. Gilded ceilings. Portraits of long-dead dignitaries staring down at you with the quiet disapproval of people who never had to deal with a livestream.
We filled it with a massive collaborative digital mural and handed the paintbrush to the entire city.
Paint the Sky is a real-time participatory installation built around a single, growing panoramic image of Liverpool's skyline. Every tile in the mural belongs to someone — coloured, decorated, and submitted by a member of the public, either in person at Town Hall or from wherever they happened to be that night. As the evening unfolded, the image grew. Piece by piece, the city painted itself back into existence.
This is a playful, visually spectacular experience for all ages — and a genuine experiment in what happens when you give an entire crowd creative agency over something beautiful.
How We Pulled It Off
The mechanics are deceptively elegant: individual participants design their own tile through an online interface, and each submission is woven into the expanding panorama in real time. In the Council Chamber, the full mural was projected across the space as it grew — so the people in the room could watch the contributions of people at home appear live, and vice versa, as Liverpool stitched itself together tile by tile through the night.
Hybrid physical-digital interactivity, a live projection canvas, a public livestream, and enough moving parts to make your eyes water — all running smoothly on one of Liverpool's biggest cultural nights of the year.
The Team
Produced as part of LightNight Liverpool, presented by Open Culture Interactive mural concept and build — Despite the Monkey
