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As the sands run down in the hourglass for the artists of Nuit Blanche - Saturday night's citywide contemporary art event in Toronto - no one has probably had more headaches to contend with than Tim Pritlove and his working partner, Thomas Fiedler, two of the leading artists of the Berlin-based hacker collective Blinkenlights.

Together, they and their band of 14 or so computer programmers and designers are creating what will arguably be the centrepiece spectacle of the night-long festival: a digital animation work called Stereoscope that will transform the curved inner façades of City Hall into two giant pixel screens. Lamps placed in 960 windows in the towers will be wirelessly controlled, displaying images programmed by the team and by the public, who can alter the pictures with their cellphones.

That is, if it works. When I met Pritlove downtown a few days ago, it was clear he had been up half the night, working from his temporary headquarters on the fourth floor of the east tower. There he and the team have been sorting the bugs out of their as-yet-untested epic experiment in digital art. Dark circles ringed his eyes, and his clothes had an unmistakably slept-in look.

"There are so many obstacles," he said in his heavy Berlin accent, "and historically, we have about a 95-per-cent burnout rate." The Toronto effort will be their third time crossing the finish line, he says, with many previous projects in Europe succumbing to funding collapses, last-minute management changes, shifting urban conditions and technological limitations too complicated for the non-hacker to comprehend, much less relate. "You never know what will happen," he says, "right up until the last instant."

May the force be with them. Like many of the pieces in Saturday night's all-night art event it may be a cliffhanger, like the upstart festival itself, which drew an astonishing 800,000 people last year. (This year's budget has grown to $1.6-million from last year's $1.06-million.)

Blinkinlight's first work was born into chaos. Their digital animation in the windows of a disused office building bordering Berlin's Alexanderplatz launched on the night of Sept. 11, 2001. They decided to go ahead anyway. "There were the Twin Towers going down in New York and here we were in Berlin, essentially taking control of another building." The group gained instant fame. "A couple of weeks later, we were internationally acclaimed media artists," he says, "which we never claimed to be, because we never said it was art to begin with."

The artists and the community of hackers around them (in particular, the Chaos Computer Club, the oldest hacker club in Germany) developed imagery that could be downloaded and played on the surface of the building: a beating heart, a cat swishing its tail, a game of Pong eight storeys high. Pictures and games that the public is invited to play with by using their cellphones. The point of the work was not so much the imagery on display but rather the idea of creating an open democratic platform where the public could get involved for free. Their next project, titled Arcade (it featured many games), was staged at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2002.

"Everyone was electrified with working on that scale," Pritlove remembers. One of Pritlove's hopes is that projects such as Blinkenlights will redeem the hacker community from its current underworld reputation.

"People always tend to think of hackers as criminals and we are totally against that. You have movies like WarGames in which you see a child causing atomic explosions from the computer terminal in his bedroom. People don't understand computers. Hackers are seen as wizards," says Pritlove (who named his young son Merlin). "They are thought of as dangerous, because people don't understand what they do, so it must be bad."

In fact, he says, hackers have a lot in common with artists.

"Artists are hackers in their minds. We take things apart and figure out how they work and put them back together again in a different way. Everything can be remade."

Like artists, too, they tend to work off the grid, amid the free flow of ideas. "Sharing is one of the most important principles of the hacker scene," he says. "When we did the Berlin project, we shared everything - protocols, formats, software design, hardware design.

"It was all free for whoever was interested. Then, when people took our ideas and ran with them, we were able to share what they had learned. People would say, 'Did you patent this?' And we would say, 'Of course we didn't.' No ads, no sponsorship, no nothing. It's for the people."

How, then, do they find the money to make the work? "We were called by the Nuit Blanche people and asked, 'What is the least amount of money that you need to do this piece?' We of course answered honestly that we thought we could probably do it for about 150,000 euros [$224,000] at a minimum. Of course, once you've said it, that's the number you end up with."

As a result, many members of the team are working for free as volunteers, and each additional unexpected cost adds a fresh twinge of financial pain. "We love what we are doing," Pritlove says, "and that makes us very vulnerable. The truth is, we would do anything to see what this looks like."

Access the programming portal at http://www.blinkenlights.net. The project premieres at Toronto City Hall on Saturday night.