ON has completled a renovation of Latin America’s largest digital art façade, the SESI Digital Gallery on the FIESP building in São Paulo, multiplying its resolution by four and brightness by ten.
ON, the AV company behind the original installation in 2012, has completed a technological overhaul of the SESI Digital Gallery, replacing the previous 26,000 LED dots with more than 120,000 newly engineered units.
The SESI Digital Gallery is a curated space dedicated to artistic expression. It serves to showcase digital artworks and video art by invited artists, exhibit cultural and experimental AV content, and function as a platform for urban visual communication.
The FIESP building, an emblem of Brazilian modernist and brutalist architecture, appears to float above Paulista Avenue. At night, its trapezoidal steel façade transforms into a monumental digital canvas. ON’s renovation involved replacing the entire digital skin with around 120,000 newly designed LED dots, each installed by hand with architectural precision across 2,818 square metres, making it one of the largest permanent LED art installations in the world.
The new system raises maximum brightness from 45 to 471 cd/m² and increases resolution from 221 x 170 to 480 x 322 dots. Color reproduction has expanded from 68 billion to over 281 trillion possibilities, thanks to 16-bit RGB processing.
Each dot operates at 24 volts (compared to 5 volts previously), greatly improving efficiency and stability. The sealed architecture of the new system, with groups of 40 dots connected in weatherproof units, dramatically reduces 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. The installation, executed dot by dot —entirely by hand— beginning in January 2025, demanded months of meticulous manual work, often under tough weather conditions and at height. Engineers had to devise new mounting strategies, pixel-mapping systems, and control logic to handle the complex trapezoidal geometry of the building.