At the Art.on.Wires Festival in May I talked about three recent projects: spacehoppers, my visualization of the Londons bicycle hire system, and NetChimes. I discussed some of the technical details about how these projects were realised and reflected upon the process of building those interactions. I aso demoed the NetChimes audio feed with participants in the audience tuning in, during the talk. Art.on.Wires had a really good feel this year, very cozy, with lots of people learning, hacking, chatting and making things happen. There were several live performances involving collaboration with off-site musicians and dancers, with live feeds streaming in from around the world. My friend Jason Geistweidt had a preview of work he has been doing in the process of creating the World Opera, involving dancers from southern California and dancers in Oslo interacting via life-size video projections and audio. Nice stuff.
Video of my talk is below, but note the title is “Connecting the Physical and the Digital” and not “Of Bits and Bikes” which I presented in London at sameAs.
I’m currently working on the NetChimes project with a group of friends and collaborators in the US and Europe. The result will be an interactive instrument that communicates OSC data live across 4 countries, and which takes local wind currents as inputs into the performance. For the London location (to be sited at Goldsmiths), I’ve been fortunate enough to receive a donation of King David chimes (1.7 metres tall!) from Woodstock Chimes in the US (probably the highest quality manufacturer of precisely tuned consumer chimes). The next step will be designing and mounting the actuator mechanism. Specs forthcoming. Many thanks to Woodstock Chimes for their support!
Urbanscreen, with their installation/projection in Hamburg’s Galerie der Gegenwart have pulled of a very nice example of the technology passively supporting the content – that is, the content stays main event. The effect they produce – an impressive, building-sized, animated trompe l’oeil does what it should do: it amazes passersby with the content and the effect. “How’d they do that?” is less a question – and that’s the way it should be. Anyone can tell it’s a projector; that’s irrelevant. And it’s not even interactive.
So many interaction designers miss this key point: it’s not about the technology. It’s about the experience. The problem with a great deal of contemporary “interactive” installation work is that people become fixated on the how, not the what, which misses the point entirely. People need to be focused on your message and not on how you made it happen.
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