In late July of 2011 Uta Hinrichs and I (working as the TRAUBENSAFT! Collective) took residency on Bumpkin Island in Boston Harbor, and spent five days using experimental cartography and psychogeography methods and strategies to create a map archive of the island– a participatory mapping project. This Archive is part of the Berwick Research Institute’s Annual Bumpkin Island Art Encampment, produced in cooperation with the Boston Harbor Island Alliance and the MA Department of Conservation and Recreation.
Visitors to Bumpkin during the Encampment browsed Traubensaft’s small collection of original, experimental maps of the island. The map archive also offered visitors use of a “map-making kit”, with materials and instructions to create their own maps. As part of the map making process, physical flags/pins could be placed in the environment (and carry a message or label) by the artists and participant cartographers. These flags referred to landmarks or symbols recorded on particular maps, and created visible signs of the mapping process on the landscape.
Visitor-created maps were donated/contributed to the Bumpkin Island Map Archive. The Archive headquarters and display site was fully integrated into the landscape, located on under a tree at the center of the Island. At the end of the project, the archive consisted of over 70 maps, the vast majority created by the public. This project is documented on Traubensaft!’s website.
]]>This project was independently conceptualized, designed, and coded in Java/Processing during an internship with the Creative Systems Group at Microsoft Research, Summer 2009. Thanks to Shane Williams and Tom Bartindale for their support and assistance with this project.
]]>Awkward_NYC, or The New York City Map of Awkward Social interactions in Public Spaces, is a collaborative online map for reporting social accidents and small interpersonal traumas that occur unexpectedly in public spaces. The map pinpoints sites in the New York Metropolitan area where misunderstandings, outbursts, physical altercations, arguments between friends or strangers, and romantic spats or break-ups have occurred. These mishaps are characteristic of the human urban experience– they’re unsettling, often comic, strangely powerful mini-narratives and dramas that would otherwise go untold, but may linger in memory for months and years, as we move through the same urban landscapes, day in and day out.
Anyone can add a story to the map; the project is fully web-based and participatory. The map taps into the confessional, voyeuristic, narrative impulses that typify online behavior and subverts the notion of mapping as reductive, objective, and authoritative. As stories are added to the map, a series of data visualizations depicting the emotional terrain of the city will be generated.
Awkward_NYC is a 2012 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funds from the Jerome Foundation. Thanks to Rodrigo De Benito and Adam Lassy for troubleshooting code.
]]>This project seeks to strip away the dominant, semantic aspects of a text and explores and expresses its purely formal qualities, the underlying skeleton of the text. textApart is a Processing application that visualizes the structure, rhythm, and phonetic patterns of a collection of words. TtextApart displays the selected text in a series of views, where the text is abstracted into shapes and patterns. Stacks of word-shapes and identify repeaters, uncommon word-shapes swell and common word-shapes shrink. By comparing text, we can discover the differences and similarities in what’s hidden under the message– in the mechanics of the text. In these examples, texts by Henry James and Brittany Spears are visualized and compared.
]]>The Semantic Thermometer is a playful, visual way to display current local temperature data. The program takes a location and accesses up-to-the-minute weather information for that location, using Yahoo’s Weather API and a Where-On-Earth Id. The current temperature reading for that location is translated from a number to a corresponding descriptive word (for example 77 degrees Fahrenheit would be translated as “warm” and 24 degrees Fahrenheit would be “frigid”) from a set of words I defined. The program sends the word to the Flickr API, where it searches for and retrieves the latest user-generated photos tagged with that word. These photos are displayed in a grid on the screen, with a new photo added every few seconds to show the current local temperature in images. When the user rolls over an image, the descriptive word appears. The Semantic Thermometer invents surprising and baffling new metaphors, as it works in the gap between a specific physical experience and the imprecise, complex language we use to describe it.
]]>Twigster is an concept design and prototype for an iPhone app and associated website to help urban users discover and explore the often-overlooked natural world in the city, and connect with others doing the same. The project plays on the basic human impulse to collect and categorize— whether a collection of specimens in a herbarium, or a catalog of friends on a social networking site. This project is a collaboration with Rodrigo de Benito.
While moving about the city as usual, Twigster users are on the look-out for trees on the street and in parks. They use Twigster’s interactive, step-by-step visual key on their iPhone to identify an unfamiliar tree. The key calls out certain features– leaf shape, twig arrangement, etc– in helping users make an identification. The result, along with GPS data marking the tree’s location, can be sent from the iPhone to the user’s personal Twigster account, and to a collective interactive map. Users may choose to add a photo or notes about the tree they’ve found.
Some users may chose to interact with Twigster like a game, trying to identify the most trees, or seeking out the rarest, most unusual, or farthest flung trees in the city. Since identification can be tricky, users can mark a tree as a “mystery tree,” add it to the map, and ask other Twigster users for help in identifying that tree. Some users may be interested in monitoring the health of particular local trees, tracking seasonal changes in foliage, or observing bird and animal life associated with the trees, and sharing this information with other users: they can add tags and notes to the map for all users to see.
Twigster’s streamlined, online social networking component makes sharing information, experiences, and stories with other users easy and satisfying. Twigster aims to create a community of users fully engaged in exploring, understanding, and sharing nature with each other.
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All the Dairy Queens, Melting from zannahlou on Vimeo.
]]>As a critique of our culture of constant, instant contact and ubiquitous spam, we updated the voodoo doll for contemporary forms of communication. A human presence can be contained in an image, or in a three-dimensional representation: a statue or doll. These forms abstract presence, condense it, symbolize it. The power of representation is in this concentrated “second” presence, extracted and separated from the original. In Voodoo Buddy, presence is (mis)placed into a miniature physical form, a doll. This usually friendly, cuddly plaything becomes an agent of misery and annoyance. Users enter the email address and phone number of their victim into the web interface. When the Voodoo Buddy is pricked with a pin, and the output is annoying spam, disturbing email images, and disquieting text messages and phone calls channeled to the victim. Users beware! Your Voodoo Buddy could turn on you– prick too often and the doll might take your picture and send it to your victim, revealing your identity. The handmade doll integrates an Arduino microcontroller, a BlueSmirf BlueTooth unit, and a wireless camera with php and asterisk phone server coding.
A schematic shows the inner workings of Voodoo Buddy. The doll contains a microcontroller, conductive padding in several areas, and a tiny surveillence camera. The doll essentially acts as a switch. When users hold the doll in one hand, they make contact with a metal pad at the back of its head. When the user pricks the doll with a pin held in the other hand, they close the switch and complete a circuit– a very small, imperceptible current (or “curse”) runs through the user’s body. The microcontroller inside the doll registers this current, and wirelessly sends signals to the Voodoo application running on a nearby computer. Feedback (which is randomized) is then sent to the victim– it may be an emailed image or message, a text message, or a phone call (mediated by the Asterisk server) that plays a disturbing recording. Excessive pricking of Voodoo Buddy increases the chances that the camera in the doll’s eye will be triggered, taking a photograph of the user and sending it on to the victim. In this way, the doll takes revenge.
Click to see Voodoo Buddy in action. Video courtesy of Gizmodo.
]]>Building Communities is an augmented reality activity developed for the exhibit “Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination.” In “Building Communities” visitors create and manipulate a virtual, 3-D environment (visible in the virtual mirror of the screen) by moving objects (“glyph” cards) in the real world. The challenge is to create sustainable, livable communities in the harsh environments of the Star Wars universe. Visitors are encouraged to think about the community as a system, to evaluate the costs and benefits of resource use and growth–what are the potential technological and environmental limiting factors on a population?
This exhibit was developed at the Museum of Science, Boston in collaboration with programmers from the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington. I did all content research and worked with Ed Rodley on the concept design of the project. Case Design: Mike Horvath.
]]>“Your best pals are happy to listen to your rambling, romantic sob stories once, maybe twice. But don’t be tempted to go on and on… Channel your obsessive thoughts, weepiest self-pitying moments, and bouts of vengeful fury into the concise, elegant Japanese poem form HAIKU. Submit your haiku here, your comrades in frustration and devastation and misery and rage will read them… and you might even feel better.”