Click the link to the PDF above to read The Madison Square Squad’s concluding postmortem analysis of our instruction set for strangers.
Archive for October, 2007
Public Art that Emphasizes New Media Triangulation
October 16, 2007Duality
Created by Joachim Sauter and ART+COM
[from www.interactivearchitecture.org]
Located on the bank of an artificial pond at the exit of the metro station Osaki. The project deals with the “duality between liquid / solid, real / virtual and water ripples / light waves. Pedestrians walk over a 6 x 6 meters large LED plane, installed right on the edge of the water. The LEDs are covered with translucent glass diffusing their light. With their steps, the passers-by provoke virtual waves on the LED plane, computed in real-time. When these waves hit the edge of the pond, they are extended into the water as real ripples. “It looks really magical and brought a childish smile to my face with its combination of screen and kinetic technology.” – www.interactivarchitecture.org
Burble London
[From www.haque.co.uk/burblelondon.php]
The Burble is a massive structure reaching up towards the sky, composed of approximately 1000 extra-large helium balloons each of which contains microcontrollers and LEDs that create spectacular patterns of light across the surface of the structure. The public, both audience and performer, come together to control this immense rippling, glowing, bustling ‘Burble’ that sways in the evening sky, in response to movements of the long articulated interactive handle bar at the base of the structure. The ephemeral experience exists at such a large scale that it is able to compete visually in an urban context with the buildings that surround it.
The Burble is held down to the ground by the combined weight of the crowds holding on to the handle bar. They may position it as they like. They may curve in on themselves, or pull it in a straight line – the form is a combination of the crowd’s desires and the impact of wind currents varying throughout the height of the Burble.
Worldview
[From www.haque.co.uk/worldview.php]
Worldview is an urban installation for tourists that enables them to record their experience with both an instant-print postcard and a video clip and look through realtime windows into public spaces in other cities. Funded by the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (with J Pletts).
Designed as an urban attractor, the device has two faces: a “mirror” side that encourages people to ‘play’ and a “window” side that connects in realtime to Worldview locations in other cities around the planet.
Worldview encourages the use of technology in a playful and novel manner and suggests to answer three questions: what would be the experience of encountering the similarities and differences of people and places around the world? What would be the impact on the urban context of placing and linking these devices? And finally, is it possible to capture a sense of “place” in a way that a visitor will find delightful and engaging?
Podcast site is on the up and up!
October 8, 2007As required in my Creativity and Computation class, my brand-spankin’-new podcast site is up and running. You can even subscribe to my podcasts! Good god, how techy nerdy we’re quickly becoming these days…
Take a look, a listen, make fun of my public speaking skills in your head, and marvel in wonderment at my cutting edge technical skills because not everyone can say they know how to podcast and start their own RSS subscriptions.
Observing a Public Space: Dipping into Ethnography
October 4, 2007Assignment: Observe a public space for 1-2 hours, taking note of any recurring behaviors of people interacting with the space being observed.
For this assignment, I plopped myself down at a local coffee shop after scouring my neighborhood for a location that deemed to be active enough to fulfill this assignment. I always found coffee shops to be brewing with interesting observations about the people who frequent them, so instead of interacting in the this environment I tried to observe what people were doing without being intrusive on the haven people create for themselves in these establishments.
My first observation was that people come to these places and basically set up an office-like environment in a bustling public space. There’s definitely something about being in a location other than your home even though it may be louder and busier that makes people want to set up a zone of concentration that encourages better thought processes.
It takes most people several minutes to scour the room and find a table that suits their desired comfort zone. Everyone is very involved in their personal tasks, but sits very close to one another. There may be something about the energy that is released from one internally focused person to another that promotes the flow of ideas. Even when there were many small individual open tables, people tended to congregate around the one communal table in the room and sit with multiple strangers. Personally, I’m more apt to sit at an individual table, but I noticed that many times (not just specific to this location) more people congregate at the communal table at coffee shops. I guess that there may be a sense of calm people get when sitting together with others, even though they may not know one another.
It’s one of the few places of food service that you can sit for hours without feeling like you’re holding up a seat for the next customers. People come in, set out their belongings and tools, and act like their at home.
There’s any almost overly cliched amount of writers. From where I was sitting, there was almost a perfect quadrilateral of writers surrounding me.
The observation I concluded with and though to be the most interesting is that, almost everyone that walked into the room, hesitated at the door before entering. It wasn’t always because they were looking on the menu posted outside. They literally walked to the front two steps, stopped to look around, and either slowly walked in, took a few moments to find a seat, and interacted with the environment, or they came in decided it wasn’t right for them and left. This happened with all single, individuals that walked in. A group of women walked in and immediately sat down. The individuals displayed a slight sense of unease before coming into the room. See image below:
