is an urban intervention designed to engage people in actively marking up public space.
Created using the labs own NextText Java library (which is also available for Processing):
The project reconfigures private communication technologies into private-to public (p2P) tools. Our motivation for providing a public outlet for privately-produced messages is driven by an interest in addressing the ongoing media reconfiguration of shared urban spaces which favors commercial global consuming culture over personal or local points of view. Our targets are the large-scale LED screens that are increasingly found in Western urban cores. Cityspeak provides a means for urban inhabitants to talk back to these giant screens.
Users can send messages to the public displays from mobile devices or desktop computers (see diagram above) effectively reappropriating the city for every day users through a number of individual broadcast strategies.
Heart-Donor (diagram above, images below) by Laura Beloff, Erich Berger and Elina Mitrunen (see here for previous wearable art) is a wearable art with similar aims to some connected wearables I have posted about before.
The concept for Heart-Donor was developed as an idea about one’s social network within “hybrid space”*. The hybrid space is a space, which we –humans- inhabit in increasing measures via various devices like mobile phones and pdas used in our everyday lives. The work takes its point of departure by rejecting the (common) concept about differentiation of virtual (digital) and physical (”real”) layers of the world. This work is specifically constructed for the hybrid space. The work attempts to make this fairly new concept of space we live in, visible and materially concrete, in contrast to common unnoticeability influenced by the ordinariness of mass-produced devices.
Here’s how the work functions:
One can collect 30 recordings of heartbeats of friends and family -or other ideas for personal networks- into the HDvest. These heartbeats will be stored into 30 small lamps embedded into the front of the HDvest. The blinking heartbeats function as personal mementos of close people and friends. The heartbeats are combined with another concept relating to the technological world. The default color of a recorded heartbeat is green, but it changes to blink in red-color when the person (whose heartbeat is stored into the HDvest) goes online (with Skype). The “owner” of the HDvest can follow his/her selected social network of people shifting their presence between the physical and the virtual layers of the world wherever he/she and the people in the network may geographically be. The HDvest and its wearer exist continuously in the hybrid space.
An interesting work but problematic on a few points for me. It seems that such a work, designed to share a sense of presence with those you are close to, should be an intimate device (Rachel Murphy’s jewellery is still the most successful at this) and the Heart-Donor vest is not discreet enough to allow that.
Shiftspace is a firefox extension which it’s makers call:
An Open Source layer above any webpage
It deserves mention here amongst the last few posts about Art Browsers as it gives users the potential to intervene, modify and subvert existing websites within the spaces used by all Shiftspace users, essentially mashing up content. So it’s a platform which promotes mashups but what’s interesting is that it does not preference any particular type of content such as images and it does not lock the content in as so many of these so called platforms do which are made in Flash or something else which instantly renders them useless.
Shiftspace has already got a lot of attention from artists working in new media with it’s honorory mention in the Prix Ars Electronica in 2006 and Turbulence commissioned artworks in 2007.
Something I missed in London on the 18/04/08 - 20/04/08 which I would have liked to have seen was the O2 Memory Project (image above), an outdoor installation created by Jason Bruges Studio. The work is a ploy to advertise the launch of O2’s new social networking initiative, Bluebook, however is an interesting (albeit simple) idea based around how people use picture messaging and what is supposedly networked collective mass memory. It’s interesting how photography, and here the works idea is based on this assumption, has begun to completely shape our idea of memories. A photograph is a memory and in turn our memories become photographic in nature. The work is:
designed to investigate how we capture and store digital memories. Reminiscent of Victorian cycloramas, the unit is a 4mhigh cylinder with 11 cameras placed around its perimeter which, Bruges says, ‘looks like a clock in plan’.
Here’s how it works:
Each camera takes a picture in sequence every five seconds, creating a 360-degree digital panorama of the outside location every minute. These images appear on giant screens in the structure’s interior…By standing in the centre of the installation, a person can view what is happening in the present, but by moving forward towards the screens he or she can choose to move back in time, and see what was happening in the morning.
The work will tour England and Scotland for the rest of the month and into May. Once finished it will return to London to the O2 venue in Greenwich, a fitting location seeing as if I remember correctly there is a small Victorian cyclorama close by. If you can’t get to any of the venues then the website (image above) is a pretty good substitute and a video explaining and demonstrating the work can be seen on the BBC News website.
Fitting in with the surveillance theme in the last few posts but also some older work discussed here (World Bench, Miroir Aux Silhouettes, Intimate Transactions and the work of Paul Sermon), Worldview allows users to engage with both the spaces around them, subsequent users to the installation and users interacting with a similar installation elsewhere. The installation
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.
It raises 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?
