40 Years of Connectivity
A spatial storytelling system built across 33 screens.
40 Years of Connectivity
40 Years of Connectivity is a large-scale video installation conceived for Vodafone Group's stand attractor and curved wall at Mobile World Congress 2026, Barcelona - a towering column of 32 screens rising above the exhibition floor, visible from across the hall, and designed to tell a single unbroken story across seven distinct chapters.
Release Date
2026
Type
VIDEO INSTALLATION
Specifications
MULTICHANNEL VIDEO
Comissioner
VODAFONE GROUP
40 Years of Connectivity is a celebration of 40 years of human connectivity - an inquiry into what it means to have built, over four decades, a system of communication so vast and so intimate that it has become inseparable from how we remember, how we relate, and who we are. It is an invitation to look at the infrastructure of the modern world not as a utility, but as a living record of collective experience: the accumulated choices, technologies, and human stories that have made everyone.connected not just a proposition, but a fact.
A spatial storytelling system built across 32 screens — designed and produced using Blender, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Pixera, and AI-assisted workflows developed in ComfyUI, in collaboration with a particle simulation specialist working in Houdini. Seven thematic collections move through the installation in sequence, each one a chapter in the longer story of how Vodafone has shaped and been shaped by the evolution of global connectivity.
The collections span the full arc: from the brand's origins as Racal Telecom, through the visual identity that has evolved across four decades and dozens of markets, through the milestones — the first mobile call, the first text message, the launch of 3G, the first holographic call, the first direct-to-device satellite video call — to the present day, where AI-animated customer imagery brings the living, breathing reality of everyone.connected into the room. Football partnerships across Women's UEFA, the Champions League, and national teams from Albania to South Africa complete the journey, connecting the technological story to the human passions and communities it serves.
Between each collection, a murmuration particle system — developed in collaboration with a Houdini simulation specialist and integrated into the Pixera content architecture — sweeps across all 32 screens simultaneously, dissolving one chapter and revealing the next. The particle system carries the everyone.connected thread through every transition: the connective tissue of the installation is, literally, connection.
Standing at the centre of Vodafone's MWC presence, 40 Years of Connectivity was the visual and conceptual anchor of the entire stand — the thing that made the stand's many elements cohere into a single experience, and the thing that remained in peripheral vision throughout, always moving, always telling the longer story of what connectivity has meant and continues to mean.
40 Years of Connectivity was commissioned by Vodafone Group and presented at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, March 2026.
The creative development of 40 Years of Connectivity was guided by an extended research process into the visual, cultural, and technological history of global telecommunications — tracing the arc from Vodafone's origins as Racal Telecom in 1985 through four decades of network evolution, brand transformation, and human connectivity, to the present day of satellite communications and AI-enabled networks.
Working in close collaboration with Vodafone's Group Brand team, archive specialists, and market leads across the business, the team conducted a thorough audit of available historical assets — logo evolutions, archival photography, broadcast advertising, milestone documentation, and partnership content spanning Women's UEFA, the Champions League, and national football teams across Europe and Africa. This research formed the foundation of the seven-collection content architecture, each chapter grounded in the specific visual and cultural language of its moment in Vodafone's history.
The particle transition system that connects each collection was developed in collaboration with a specialist working in Houdini, whose simulation expertise allowed the team to build a murmuration behaviour — organic, dynamic, and precisely calibrated — that could move coherently across 32 screens simultaneously while carrying the everyone.connected proposition through every transition. The development process required extensive testing against the physical screen topology, adjusting particle density, velocity, and dispersion to behave consistently across a fragmented display environment at architectural scale.
The present-day collection introduced a custom AI animation pipeline developed in ComfyUI, designed to bring stillness to life — animating existing customer brand photography with subtle, breath-like movement that could be felt rather than consciously noticed. The pipeline was built to process multiple images consistently, producing motion that felt organic and human rather than algorithmic, and calibrated specifically for the luminance and ambient light conditions of the exhibition environment.
The visual output across both the 32-screen installation and the 8-metre curved display wall was managed and mapped in Pixera, with each surface requiring individual geometry calibration and content adaptation. Content designed for the flat, fragmented topology of the screen column behaved differently on the continuous arc of the curved wall — requiring every sequence to be considered and adjusted for both surfaces from the outset, so that the story of everyone.connected read coherently across the full spatial environment of the stand.
The 32-Screen Installation - 40 Years of Stories
At the centre of the stand, a column of 32 screens rose above the exhibition floor — the visual and conceptual anchor of Vodafone's entire MWC presence, and the space where the story of everyone.connected across 40 years was told in full.
The installation was structured across seven thematic collections, each one a chapter in the longer history of how Vodafone has shaped and been shaped by the evolution of global connectivity. Between each collection, a murmuration particle system — developed in collaboration with a Houdini simulation specialist and integrated into the Pixera content architecture — swept across all 32 screens simultaneously, dissolving one chapter and revealing the next. The particle system carried the everyone.connected thread through every transition: the connective tissue of the installation was, literally, connection itself.
The seven collections trace the full arc of 40 years:
Brand Transition — the particle stand wrap that opens the system, linking the installation to Vodafone's overall brand identity and establishing the visual language of everything that follows.
Branding and Customers Through Time — a journey through Vodafone's visual identity from Racal Telecom to the present day, animated particles carrying archival brand assets, evolving logos, and nostalgic references across the full 32-screen field.
Everyone.Connected Takeover — the brand proposition rendered as a full-system moment, everyone and connected cascading across all 32 screens simultaneously in a combination of animated particles, Vodafone logos, and typographic sequences at every scale.
Vodafone Firsts — 40 years of connectivity milestones: the first mobile phone call, the first text message, the launch of 3G, the first holographic call, the first direct-to-device satellite video call. Each milestone treated as a screen-within-the-screen, surfacing individual moments of technological history within the larger spatial field.
Present Day — current customer brand imagery brought to life through subtle AI-generated movement, developed using ComfyUI workflows built specifically for this project. The AI motion was calibrated to be felt rather than noticed: the sense that the images were alive, breathing, without any obvious artificiality.
Current Market Ads — a curated selection of Vodafone's current advertising from markets across the globe, assembled in collaboration with Group Brand and formatted for the screen topology — Albania, Czech Republic, Egypt, Ireland, Portugal, Romania, UK, Vodacom, and others, each market's story present within the collective whole.
Football Partnerships — the human passions and communities that connectivity serves, told through Women's UEFA Championship content, the Champions Travel eSIM, and men's football partnerships spanning the UEFA Champions League, Borussia Dortmund, and national teams from Albania to South Africa. We are all connected by passion.
