ON, an international AV technology company, has completed a sweeping technological overhaul of the SESI Digital Gallery – Latin America’s largest open-air digital art gallery – in São Paulo, Brazil, replacing the previous 26,000 LED dots with more than 120,000 newly engineered units. The upgrade has transformed the famous façade of the FIESP building, which houses the gallery, on Avenida Paulista.
The installation, executed dot by dot entirely by hand began in January 2025 and demanded months of meticulous manual work, often under tough weather conditions and at height. ON says the result is a fourfold increase in resolution and more than ten times the brightness, offering an enhanced visual experience to millions of passers-by each year.
The FIESP building, an emblem of Brazilian modernist architecture, is famous for appearing to float above Paulista Avenue. At night, its trapezoidal steel façade transforms into a huge digital canvas. ON’s renovation involved replacing the entire digital skin with the newly designed LED dots, each installed by hand across 2,818sqm.
According to ON, the new system has raised maximum brightness from 45 to 471 cd/sqm and increases resolution from 221 x 170 to 480 x 322 dots. Colour reproduction has expanded from 68bn to over 281trn possibilities, thanks to 16-bit RGB processing, the company says.
Each dot operates at 24 volts (compared to 5 volts previously). The sealed architecture, with groups of 40 dots connected in weatherproof units, was designed to reduce the risk of failure from oxidation or contact wear, an important consideration given São Paulo’s demanding climate.
The upgrade presented major engineering challenges. The FIESP façade’s distinctive geometry with its honeycomb-like structure and strict weight limitations required every bracket and connection to be custom designed. Engineers had to devise new mounting strategies, pixel-mapping systems, and control logic to handle the complex trapezoidal geometry of the building.
ON says one of the critical breakthroughs was the development of a custom pixel mapping system tailored to the building’s unique contours. Traditional video mapping methods were incompatible with the trapezoidal geometry. ON reprogrammed the control boxes so each segment of the façade could correctly interpret and display content.
Hugo Rodrigues, CEO of ON, said: “Our goal was to raise performance without compromising the building’s architecture. We had to develop a structure that was lighter, more powerful, and nearly invisible from a distance.
“Installing this many dots on such a challenging structure was like assembling a giant instrument. We needed to respect the architecture while making the technology almost invisible. We had to teach the building how to ‘read’ the video data in a new way. Now, each control box understands its exact starting point, which enables pixel-perfect alignment with the architecture.”
