Overview/Thesis Statement:
Originally intended to connect people separated by large distances, telecommunications technology today is finding compelling new uses connecting people already in close physical proximity. From the Flash Mob phenomenon to Pac-Manhattan, groups of people are subverting the intended uses of technology to their own, often performative, ends.
I will demonstrate that current trends in popular culture and commercial technology have created a new medium for artistic expression: people. Like paint, human behavior can be applied in broad strokes using contemporary theories of information, social networks, group psychology, and distributed computation. My project will turn people into pixels, and turn a moving crowd into a moving image.
Rationale:
This project comes at a time when physical space is renegotiating its relationship to information space. Semioticians, and postmodernists have long bemoaned the separation of an object and its meaning. It has become almost clich頴o mention it in civilized society. But never has this gap been as explicit as with today?s combination of mobile devices and their hypertext capabilities: location-specific information is accessible from cell-phones and PDA?s at the push of a button.
New media artists have begun to exploit this in the creation of new meanings by overlaying physical space with a layer of geographically-positioned information space, whether factual or fantastical. This can be most obviously seen in projects such as Pac-Manhattan, where a video game board is superimposed onto the streets of New York City, and in Blinkenlights, where the fa硤e of an office building was converted into the world?s largest computer display. The separation of information and object can further be seen in museum tours, where handheld devices provide detailed and dynamically updatable information about exhibit pieces directly in front of the viewer. There is something magical in the often-skewed overlap between the information and physical spaces.
My involvement as one of the creators of Pac-Manhattan exposed me to the immense interest, both among cultural institutions, as well as among ordinary people across the globe, in this juxtaposition between information and physical space. Although this thesis, as an idea, pre-dates Pac-Manhattan, and certainly doesn?t have the same pop appeal, it has nevertheless been heavily influenced and altered by this experience.
There seems to be a vested interest on the part of the general public to be performers. This is reflected in the current fascination with ?reality television?, blogs, and might even be argued to be a factor in the massive success of ?first-person shooter? video games in comparison to games with other vantage points.
One particularly foul rainy day in 1999, while living in Seattle, I took a bus from work to my neighborhood, walked a few blocks towards my apartment, and noticed an eerie quiet on the streets. I suddenly realized, through the fog, that I was caught exactly half-way between a line of fully-armored riot police and a crowd of protesters participating in the Seattle riots. Needless to say, I was summarily attacked with many canisters of tear gas and compression bombs, and found myself instinctively running to the side of the protestors, with whom I had never had much sympathy.
As I joined the group of protesters, my belief in their fundamental ignorance on the issues at hand was somewhat confirmed, but quickly became irrelevant. The power of the group, and the level of each individual?s emotional involvement (including my own), was undeniable. Protests are a form of performance, as are other particularly urban types of entertainment, such as Flash Mobs, bike parades, and the like. The organizers of the protests and other group activities are often very well organized and informed, and the individuals who participate must feel interested and engaged in what they are doing in order for the performance to be successful.
How the individual?s involvement and the organizer?s master schemes are mediated by telecommunications technology is a subject relevant not only to protests. Reality television, business organizations, economics, and art could all benefit from manipulating the way people are connected on the ground.
Goals:
My goal is not to solve all the group activity challenges of the 21st century. Rather, I would like to explore the potential of telecommunications technology to mediate the carefully crafted interactions between individuals. Specifically, I would like to use the voluntary participation of individual people as pixels in an image formed by the self-organization of the individuals into a crowd. The interpersonal interactions and the technology?s ability to mediate them, will presumably lead to dynamically adjustable aggregate behavior of the group. The audience for this work will be the participants themselves.
Core Features, Media, Technology:
Participants will hold a portable device which emits bright colored light. These devices will communicate via radio transceivers. The details of what the participants do with the devices are yet to be worked out.
Success Measures:
The pixels, which are held in the hands, or placed on the hats of the participants, must be properly arranged to form a moving picture. Success of this project will be easily gauged by the fidelity of this picture and by subjective measures of the participants? involvement.
This project necessitates that people participate. This means, that people must feel actively engaged and involved in the creative process. Furthermore, they must feel a collective responsibility to form the image correctly. Participants will be interviewed after the event and their feelings and impressions will be collected in an informal manner.
Of course, one aspect of group activity is that people sometimes leave the group, whether in frustration, or as a result of some other reason. Although for this thesis, I will be attempting to maintain everyone?s interest, the frustration of members of the group could, in a future experiment, be seen as a successful result.
Concept Diagram:
Coming soon?..