Teleopolis
2nd Wednesdays Art Series at the Exploratorium
Co- Curated by Sponge
February 13, 7pm
In the past, being a part
of a city required that you work, play, or other wise participate
in the culture as a real live human being. Now, there are possibilities
for us to be citizens of a city remotely. How does the fact that we
can be avatars in our own cities (or adopted cities) affect the cultural
fabric of the city itself? Or the fact that we can now exist in multiple
cities at once? On Wednesday, February 13 at 7pm, the Exploratorium's
2nd Wednesdays series will explore our preconceived notions
of cities and how those conceptions are being reevaluated based on
the effects of media and technology. How do they alter the cities
themselves? Can we have conversations with architecture? Can a city
be made of icons, images and content? Can media pollute the city?
Teleopolis includes
provoking artistic projects that redefine and question our roles as
citizens and inhabitants of cities impacted by science and technology.
Featured Projects/Artists
on Teleopolis include:
Hubbub by Dr.
Sha Xin Wei
Hubbub is an investigation of how accidental and non-accidental
conversations can be catalyzed in urban spaces by means of speech
projected onto public surfaces. Hubbub installations
may be built into a bench, in a bus stop, a bar, a cafe, a school
courtyard, a plaza, and a park. As you walk by a Hubbub
installation, some of the words you speak will dance in projection
across the surfaces to the energy and prosody of your voice. The project
capitalizes on recognition errors to give a playful character to the
visual projection space.
Hubbub treats speech as a computational substance for architectural
construction, complementary to its role as a medium of communication.
Success will be measured by the extent to which strangers who revisit
a hubbub space begin to interact with one another socially in ways
they otherwise would not. Hubbub is part of a larger
cycle called Urban Ears, which explores how cities conduct
conversations via the architecture of physical and computational matter.
Sauna 02 by Sponge
The urban environment is not only polluted by solid matter, waste
and the fallout of unbridled consumption-it is also polluted by information
and media. We are bombarded every second by electronic media-the average
American sees over 20,000 logos per day. Meaning is firmly encoded
and stamped into our collective consciousness by the persuasive rhetoric
of marketing and design. In response to this over saturated landscape,
the art collective of Sponge has created Sauna 02.
Sauna 02 is an environmental/architectural experiment.
It invites an individual to pass through a contemplative space that
will act as an antidote to the overstimulating sensorial pollutants
of the modern city. Using the same media that is one cause of our
over-saturated lives to create a restful environment, this micro-architectural
space should act as a refreshment for the urban weary. In the Spring
of 2002, Sponge will deploy several of these contemplative hybrid
media environments in public urban spaces in San Francisco. Sponge
will show one of the sauna models during the Teleopolis evening.
Icon City/Live Wired by Erik Adigard
A project that was originally produced for the SFMOMA exhibition Icons:
Magnets of Meaning, Icon City is an interactive
multimedia work that explores how cities have become media environments-shifting
from the physical towards increasingly electronic, information saturated
spaces. Through dense, rapid fire collages of graphic images and sound,
Icon City examines the contemporary city as a space
of navigation, similar to the web and the computer desktop.
Fauna 2.0 by Adrian Van Allen
Fauna 2.0 is an interactive installation that explores
our cultural attitude towards the natural and urban worlds from a
biotechnological perspective. The project consists of two parts (1)
a collection of life-size models of transgenic taxidermy form creatures
wearing clothing with integrated technology, accompanied by a text
panel and (2) a user-controlled projection of 3-D Quick Time VR photographs
of the creatures in various urban environments. Visitors will be able
to view the physical prototypes of the creatures, read the accompanying
text panel and see them integrated into different urban environments
in the projection. Fauna 2.0 offers a forum for literal
and mental; play with the concepts of natural vs. fabricated, real
vs. unreal, possible vs. plausible.
Invisible Soup
by Thom Faulders/Post Tool Design (David Karam and Gigi Obrecht)
The air is aflood with wavelengths. The very stuff that allows us
to be 'online,' to be connected, anywhere at any time. This connectivity
is afforded us by a congested allocation of frequencies under government
administration, the effects of which we can only guess. Through this
invisible world of wavelengths and frequencies, architect Faulders
and designers Post Tool will construct a series of 'service balls'
that monitor a few zones of space within the Exploratorium. When one
of these "lines" is crossed by a visitor, a vibratory sound
is amplified. These "lines" indicate hot spots. As they
become randomly stimulated, groupings of sound form "in concert."
Their activation shapes the environment in the Exploratorium through
sound and hints at the secret world of transmissions.
Transit Time
by Steve Wilson
Transit Time presents an "infomatic" digital
media event based on the real time movement of buses and trains at
the moment of viewing. Using the Web to extract data from the next
bus system, it tracks the movements of all Muni light rail trains
via GPS and advanced signaling.
The installation projects digital video and sound which change in
real time based on the precise current position of Muni trains and
buses. Each train and station has its own sound/video "signature"
which develops with real movements in the city. The sounds include
processed versions of sounds from the city, a range of spoken perspectives
on the way transit affects life, and tonal compositions related to
transit. The voices form a kind of oratorio. The video includes maps,
city scenes, satellite maps, historical images, and other poetical
reflections on transit. Viewers can pick which Muni line to focus
on. The goal is to give visitors a feel for transit as the life pulse
of the city. Another part of the event allows visitors to ride in
a driver's and passenger seat which had been discarded from an old
train. The resurrected seats vibrate in accordance with the real movements.
When the real train stops, so do the vibrating seats in the gallery.
The projected video matches what real riders on the train being tracked
are seeing at that precise moment.
TeleActor by Ken Goldberg, Dezhen Song and others
The Tele-Actor Project
Remote-controlled robots have been used to replace humans in outer
space and undersea. In this project, a human replaces the robot. A
skilled human equipped with a wireless audiovisual system enables
an online audience to collectively interact with a remote environment.
The Tele-Actor combines five million years of human
evolution with a new approach to audience participation. www.tele-actor.net
