Link to the world

We once again take to the streets of Auckland City, this time looking for what has so integrated ourselves into our public spaces that we hardly notice them. When you actually begin to look, you find screens everywhere, removed a recontextualized from the traditional domestic setting, sitting around with the family. Once we began to think about it, we notice four predominant purposes and uses for these screens: providing information, entertainment, advertising and surveillance.

And in fact screens are often used as a form of "Out of Home Advertising", which encompasses other forms of media such as billboards, have proved to be a much more effective at providing instant impact and appeal, in particular to people and consumers on the go. It is a highly visible medium but tends to appeal more to people through engagement rather than intrusion such as other traditional forms of advertising and, based on the context, is tailored to maximize communication with target audiences.

Though screens in urban spaces aren't necessarily always purely for advertising, it is important to remember that someone put the screen there to get something out of it. Many retail stores down Queen Street have screens with what would be classified as entertainment for the shopper but in each store, the content of the entertainment is relevant to the 'theme' of the shop (i.e. content of outdoor activities in sports equipment stores, pop music videos in clothing stores targeted at teens) and has the underlying purpose of keeping that shopper in the store longer which increases the chance that they will purchase more. Venues such as bars often screen big events (often sports) to create a communal, social space to bring together people of common interests, and if they are having a good time, they will stay longer and buy more drinks. So even when screens seem to be for entertainment, it can still act as a very subtle advertisement for the location itself.

Though we aren't focusing for this project on urban screens purely as a form of advertising, the concepts of contextualization are important. The other important aspect is that of the public space. Where the public sphere used to be a literal physical space for coming together to discuss important issues, we have chosen to take this idea of the virtual public sphere which has emerged through the internet; the virtual world has become the place where anyone can discuss their opinions and thoughts on important issues to facilitate change.

We are wanting to make this connection between the virtual and physical public sphere through the idea that despite what physical space you are occupying, the virtual public sphere enables to you be connected to what is happening in other physical spaces around the world. Our basic concept at the moment is based on periodic photographs taken of a space to show how it changes and what happens throughout the course of the day. When each photograph is taken, a program will pull RSS feed from a recent newspaper headline (traditional informative media), occurring as close as possible to the time the photo was taken, and take a key word from the headline which will then further pull from other RSS feeds from sources such as Flickr (images), Tweets (comments) and Blogs (opinions). This combination of media will represent the ways in which we process, understand and experience events, unlimited by physical distance to interact. It is the idea that we can almost be everywhere in the world at the same time.

Ultimately, the content and conceptual meaning will be impacted by the context in which we choose to use our screen. Possible locations (with logistal complications aside) for this are parks or public transport.

Public open spaces within the city can tap into that idea of the traditional domestic use of a television as a place to stop and sit down and engage with the content as these parks within the city offer that chance to escape from the fast paced rush of the city to sit down and engage with a different setting and atmosphere. Interestingly enough, we also noticed the large open space outside the shopping mall is overlooked by the upstairs food court where diners sit looking out the window at this open space with the same sort of fixation as one would a television screen but rather the physical space outdoors has become the content.

Public transport raises ideas around public sphere within the context of public transport; there is a borderline of the public space as you have to pay a fare to access it and once on it, you often don't engage with those around you. Busses such as The Link are equipped with screens which provide all four types of content which we have identified (advertisments, new, weather and location information, surveillance footage and snippets of movies) and the context creates the perfect situation for engagement as people often have nothing to do during such commutes, giving them something to focus on. At the same time, the idea of transport and movement links to the idea of events happening in the world around you, as though you were moving around the world.

The next step now is to focus more in fusing the concept with what is logistically possible in preperation presentation of concepts next week.

Brainstorming and Brainwashing

This week has been slow going in the design and development phase. The most difficult part has been trying to think of my design in terms of something that will be acoustically successful. This may be a bit obvious given the basis of the project is to create a sound producing instrument but I've found myself thinking more in terms of visual aesthetic and performative capability.

Initial ideas were to create something large scale so I could really physically interact and perform with it. Aside from a few smaller ideas, my main one I though about was revisiting an earlier side project where I controlled an animation on screen by tap dancing, wired up and programmed with a keyboard hack. I though about applying these same concepts through a large scale xylophone like structure, capable of supporting my weight. Where this would work as an acoustic instrument, I could also add a digital element by wiring up the different notes and the plates of the tap shoes, perhaps to somehow manipulate the sound.


From there, I began to link it more to a conceptual basis. and context. I have always been interesting in ideas around consumerism and thinking about this enabled me to start developing my ideas. The xylophones turned to cans with product labels on them, reminiscent of Andy Warhol's 100 Soup Cans which reflects this idea of mass production, consumption and availability of consumer products and brand awareness and marketing. After discussion with Phil, he suggested a way to use this same concept but helped me fill in the musical aspect of it. Instead of cans, it changed to Coca Cola Bottles which can be pressurized by inserting tyre valves into the caps to produce sound when hit. Similarly like, again, with Andy Warhol's Coca Cola Bottles, it presents the same idea but also in a product we are perhaps we can associate with more.

I felt additonally inspired by the exhibition and artist talk we went to last week which linked to my ideas and enabled me to develop them further. The work by SWAMP (Studies of Work Atmospheres and Mass Production) focuses around these ideas and in particular I was interested in the project Coke Is It which featured a robot programmed to search for puddles of Coca Cola on the floor which it would then suck up and spray over itself. The acidity of the Coke would eat through the umbrella above it and leak into the circuitry of the robot, causing it to short circuit and break down. Essentially it is an explicit commentary on "the routine destruction we do to our bodies" by consumption of the product which we know if bad for us, but continue to consume anyway, almost like we have been programmed to do so.

To translate the concept and acousitc element back into a visual and performative instrument. Researching further into the design and marketing of Coca Cola, I discovered that the unique design of the bottle is designed so that "a person will recognise as a Coca-Cola bottle even if he feels it in the dark. The Coca-Cola bottle should be shaped that, even if broken, one could tell at a glance what it was". Similarly the unique curve which has become integrated into it's marketing has also become iconic and instantaneously recognizable. From there, I was thinking about the nature of marketing and the methods companies go to to encourage brand awareness was not unlike brainwashing. To play on the curve and contour bottle, I am wanting to create a spiral which will hold the 5 different sized bottles and spin when hit to give the illusion that the bottles are suspended in midair while the spiral is spinning. This design came from the idea of garden wind chimes, shown in the image to the left.

I intend to make five of these spirals giving me 25 different sounds to use. The only thing now I am brainstorming is the best sort of support structure to build to suspend them from. On possible idea was a child's mobile-like structure to allude to the young age from which we are targeted, like how icons such as the Golden Arches of McDonald's for a young child become connotative of good experiences.

Mission now is to collect materials and experiment on a smaller scale to ensure it will produce the result I want before embarking on a larger scale.