Sesc Paulista

Sesc Avenida Paulista opened in April 2018, seventeen floors built around the themes of art, body and technology. It is one unit of Serviço Social do Comércio, a non-profit institution funded by the commerce and services sector that runs 580 units across Brazil, with services and programmes aimed at quality of life, and in particular at workers in retail, services and tourism. We took on the art direction and the programming of the unit’s digital visual identity, in collaboration with Kiko Farkas and Máquina Estúdio.

A building dedicated to technology could not be given an identity merely applied on top of its screens. Everyone already spends the day looking at a device. The challenge was to turn that condition into something worth looking at.

We wrote an algorithm, and out of the algorithm came an entity. It lives autonomously on every screen in the building: it does not loop a finished animation and it does not wait for a command. It is the inhabitant and the guardian of the place.

The entity also leaves the building. Visitors can follow it on their phones.

And the system crosses over into print. The launch covers were drawn in correspondence with the digital form, and the entity reappears on top of them in augmented reality when a camera recognises them.

An identity that is not applied but inhabited. The unit opened with a language of its own on the very axis it had chosen for itself, technology, and with a system that behaves the same way on a screen and on paper.