I was lucky enough to be invited on as a guest on CollegeHumor's video game show, Bleep Bloop. Apparently, after extensive work, uh, "testing" Panasonic's 103-inch and 150-inch plasma screens, I'm somewhat of an expert on playing video games on ludicrously large monitors. Badass.

According to the folks at IAC, who house this monstrosity in their headquarters' lobby, it's the largest, highest-definition screen in the world. That is to say there are larger screens with lower resolution and smaller screens with higher resolution, but this bad boy has the highest combo of both specs. Yes, it is large.

Unfortunately, due to it being 120 feet long, it has a ridiculous aspect ratio that's not designed for regular things like TV or video games, instead acting as a strange art space most of the time. Because of this, we could only use one chunk of the screen. I was told, however, that they have the ability to hook up multiple Xboxes at once, possibly linking them together side by side for some sort of epic multiplayer showdown. I want very much to make that dream a reality, but that's for another day.

Mahoney and I got an opportunity to go behind the wall and check it out, and it's a crazy setup. It has 21 projectors aimed at 42 mirrors. The projectors are actually aimed away from the screen, bouncing down and back off of two mirrors each to combine to fill up the massive screen.

As for playing on the screen, it was pretty killer. Obviously, playing video games on large screens is really fun. But in all honesty, it gets to a point where you aren't even really paying attention to the large screen anymore. You know, it's only a novelty for so long, and then you're just focusing on not falling off the damned buildings anymore in Mirror's Edge. I guess you can get used to anything.

What huge screens like this are really great for is split-screen gaming. If we had played Call of Duty 4 on this thing, for example, all four players would have the equivalent of a 134-inch TV to stare at. But really, a screen like this isn't even an option for anyone other than Barry Diller to use on any type of real basis, but if you ever get an opportunity to spend an afternoon dicking around with one, you won't want to skip it. Trust me.

Thanks to John Mahoney for taking pictures and to Jeff Rubin and Pat Cassels for having me on Bleep Bloop! [CollegeHumor's Bleep Bloop]

Yes, it is final exam time for Shiffman's Big Screens Class—at 6PM on a Friday night, with free wine—and I am standing with a couple hundred other likeminded art techies in the lobby of the IAC Building, a curvy glass Frank Gehry creation on the West Side of Manhattan. We are in front of a 120-foot screen that's the equivalent of six 16:9 displays arranged end-to-end, and we are doing what it's telling us to do. We are obeying it.

It tells us to clap, and we clap. Then we stomp our feet and say "la la la." Then we send text messages to it, filled with the anticipation of influencing what appears on its glowing greatness. We clap to shoo white birds off a power line that's strung across its great length. We do it while drinking and taking pictures of the action, and it is good—a techie church for bigger screens, always bigger! We kneel!

Shiffman and his students have the IAC people, in part, to thank for their classroom. Rather than put in a garden or expansive, empty lobby, Barry Diller's IAC conglomerate—which owns several web-related businesses like Ask.com, Ticketmaster, etc—decided to build one of the world's biggest indoor video walls. It's made up of 27 vertically oriented projectors, linked into a single display by software from Spyder and shined onto a translucent screen to create a massive projection image:

For the Big Screens class, the wall is powered by three dual-head Mac Pros, each driving their own pair of 16:9 aspect-ratio screens (splitting nine projectors for each head), for a total resolution of 8160 x 768 pixels.

The class is part of of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), a two-year graduate degree they've offered since 1979 and the source of all kinds of geeky curiosities. Shiffman, a wizard of the graphical programming language called Processing that many of the students use to fill up the screen (a few others use openFrameworks, another visual language) has taught this class for two years now. Processing has been used in tons of music videos, data visualizations and interactive video art and is popular for its relative simplicity as a way to turn code into amazing visuals.

Talking to the students, it's apparent that such a unique medium can barely be classified as a "screen" in the traditional sense. The immense size, when paired with such an extreme aspect ratio, turns the screen into more of a physical space than anything resembling a TV (even one that's 150-inches). Besides, it's not about resolution, in the home-theater sense. Sure, you can do a lot with 6 million pixels, but it's not why you come to see this 120-foot screen.

Interaction is the key, as you can see in the following videos. Mooshir Vahanvati created a massive 120-foot stretch of powerline with birds who perch when it's quiet and scatter when microphones pick up a loud noise:

Vikram Tank created a six-panel conductor that synced up the crowd's claps, snaps and la-la-las:

Matt Parker's "Caves of Wonder" took a video feed of the crowd from an IP camera and twisted it into a craggy landscape with Processing—part iTunes Visualizer, part Grand Canyon on Mars:

And Alejandro Abreu Theresa Ling combined silohouettes on screen with the shadows of real actors behind the screen to create three vignettes of Chelsea's seedier past:

Shiffman works the controls at the back of the room with a gigantic smile; he is perhaps the only person that could teach this class. He's the primary author of the "Most Pixels Ever" library for Processing, which allows projects to sync up across multiple displays seamlessly without delays—and not just your dual-head monitor. Most Pixels Ever is amazing because it can handle the 6 million pixels of IAC's video wall without blinking, and without it, this class would not exist in its current form. All the art-tech nerds thank him as we file out the door.

"For the students it's just such a completely unique experience—it's unique for anybody, whether you're a grad student or a professional designer. Few people in the world have a chance to work on anything of this scale, and what's great is that I can say to them you can do whatever you want," he says. "You learn a ton about technically producing the work, and also what it means visually to work on that scale."

"I can't imagine that when IAC build that wall that they imagined performances on it with actors casting shadows behind the screen, so that's fantastic."

The rest of ITP's classes are having their semester-ending show this week in NYC; find out more here and look for our coverage starting later this week. [ITP on the Big Screen]