See the project page.

Please stop by Harriet Island (a map) on Earth Day, Sunday 22 April, 2007 for the “Wishes for the Sky” community art event. I’ll be working to facilitate the broadcast and recording of individuals’ wishes with Mary-Ellen Childs. For more information, visit http://www.wishesforthesky.org/.

Urban Echo (working title)
ArtsMosis 2006 Project Proposal

Submitted by:

Christopher P. Baker (Graduate Arts)
Laura Baker (Graduate Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning)
J. Anthony Allen (Graduate Music)

Description:

The metropolitan experience is filled with encounters among strangers – from the brush of two shoulders in a crowd to animated conversations on street corners. When woven together, these threads of casual interaction form the fabric with which the city is made. Each encounter informs our sense of place in the urban framework. But this sense of place does not exist apart from each individual’s experience of it. So how does one make a true connection in the city? How do complete strangers come to understand one another and their place within the landscape?

This piece is intended to celebrate the stories that each person in a city has to tell, and the ways in which those stories help to create and strengthen the places they inhabit. These narratives are told on large screens that reach for the city skyline. Each person that encounters the piece is asked to answer who, what, where and why they are. Their answers are echoed onto the screens, becoming beacons – variable sculptures – that call on others to respond or initiate communication. The responses are digitally “woven” into the fabric of the screens, becoming a fixed part of the space. The individual stories of the people in this place grow to be the collective story of the place itself.

Technical Details:

Situated between the Regis West building and the Barker dance center, the installation will consist of four large vertical screens measuring approximately 30 feet high by 4 feet wide. Throughout the evening, visitors will be asked to add their responses to who, what, where and why they are. These responses may be collected via email, text messages, hand-written responses, or roving laptop kiosks carried by collaborators throughout the evening of the exhibition. The collected responses will be stored in a local database. At dusk, the four large screens will be illuminated by four video projectors that will tell the story of the arts quarter community and beyond. These projectors will project text and graphics – both painterly and digital – rendered by custom software. Each of the four screens will echo a call and response visually and aurally – reinforcing the ideas of communication and conversation. Visitors will be encouraged to inhabit and move among the space around the screens – both on and off the winding pathway between the two buildings.

Collaborators:

This is a collaboration between Christopher Baker, Graduate Art student, Laura Baker, Graduate Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture student and J. Anthony Allen, Graduate Music student. Christopher brings a host of technical, programming and production skills to the project. Laura brings a breadth of design, construction and architectural skills to bear – all with an acute sensitivity to the creation of natural urban gathering spaces. J. Anthony Allen brings a well-refined sense of sonic structure, aural landscapes and the rich communicative properties of music and sound.

Estimated Timeline:

21 June, 2006: Proposals due.
5 July, 2006: Second round of planning.
26 July, 2006: Screen construction begins.
26 July, 2006: Programming and Sound design begin.
30 August, 2006: Programming, sound design and construction completed.
6 September, 2006: In situ mockups and test runs carried out.
27 September, 2006: Final project completed.

Conclusion:

Ultimately, this project aims to excite the questions of identity tucked quietly within the folds of our common urban tapestry. We hope to glimpse and celebrate the multiplicity of viewpoints by asking the simple, yet profound questions: who, what, why and where are you?

This project, which is still untitled, was an attempt to create an ambient display of recent news headlines. It was motivated by my desire to convey information in ways that do not require the user’s full attention. The late Mark Weiser wrote extensively on the topic of ambient information displays. Weiser and others desired methods of accessing information that evoked a sense of calm rather than a stressful feeling of information overload. In theory, this sense of calm is facilitated by making information easily accessible in the user’s periphery. This peripheral information placement requires special attention to the preconscious sensual experience. While this can be visual, it can also be haptic. This project attempts to leverage the human ability to immediately recognize the emotional state of another human face as a means to convey the emotional content of a given news story. Ideally, this piece would not require the user’s direct engagement. Instead it would provide the emotional gist of a given new story. The techniques used in this project were inspired by the work of Zachary Lieberman, Golan Levin and Mood News. Each of these artists was interested in alternative methods of both data visualization and communication. In JJ, Golan Levin used language analysis software to analyze the emotional content of sniffed network traffic. The emotional content was communicated by displaying the appropriate emotional face from a standardized database of emotional faces. Zachary Lieberman created a tool that located faces in images navigated through a large database of faces moving from face to face. Mood News is a feed that organizes BBC headlines based on the emotional content. For this project, I used Java to download RSS feeds of news stories. I used ConceptNet to guess the mood of the story. I used emotional face imagery from google searches to create my face database. The locations of faces were determined using the OpenCV library. The whole package, including the animation was created in Jitter. A sample of the raw animation is below.

For purposes of critique and discussion, I included printed copies of my code (below).

Influences

• Mood News : A project that attempts to order the current BBC based on emotional content.
• JJ : A Carnivore client by Golan Levin. It attempts to characterize the emotional content of sniffed network data.
• Picturing Family : An image navigation system created by Zachary Lieberman.

Technical Resources Used

• OpenCV : Computer Vision Library written in C++.
• Rome: An RSS/Atom library for java.
• ConceptNet : (Hugo Liu, et al.) A library capable of text analysis, gisting, mood guessing and more.
• Max/MSP/Jitter : Multimedia software.