Last summer I described my experience of “playing the building”, an installation by David Byrne which was taking place in NY. When I moved to London this summer, as I was walking nearby Camden Town, I saw a big poster advertising “Playing the building”. Byrne had revived his work in the Round House, a building in Chalk Farm, close to Camden Town.

When  Aileen visited us in London, we went together - interested by this attempt to inhabit a material space allowing others to interact with it. I was also curious to see how similar and how different it will be. The concept was the same “a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of a building is converted into a giant musical instrument” (David Byrne, 2005) and people were invited to interact. Yet, the feeling was very different. The space in New York was an old factory, the infrastructure was visible. The Round House is a beautiful building, also quite “raw”. However, the “infrastructure” seems less visible and thus it did not feel so much like “playing the building” - “building space with sounds”. Moreover, the round shape of the building made the wandering through the space more difficult.

the blog is really fun to post on because you can type and then see your words on the maze and everybody can see it.

But it’s really hard to see because sometimes it goes fast.

Jyoti

To continue our discussion about making things visible, I wanted to share a project by Ever Mosher: HighWaterLine

It’s a public artwork aiming to “materialize”, “make visible” the potential impact of climate change (and thus developing an understanding of these effects on our lives).

” I marked the 10-feet above sea level line by drawing a blue chalk line and installing illuminated beacons in parks. The line marks the extent of increased flooding brought on by stronger and more frequent storms as a result of climate change.
During the summer of 2007, I walked, chalked and marked almost 70 miles of coastline. As I was out in the public creating the work, I had a chance to engage in conversations about climate change and its potential impacts.”

HighWaterLine makes visible, materializes very simply - with a chalk line - the (possible) future of the city: drawing a city in the city. In some ways, it adds another layer (temporal?) to the other layers discussed by Latour. She questions a definition of space as what is now and here, by adding the possible, the future.

Aileen and I contacted Eve last year to come and work with the second graders in our children’s school in preparation for  the earth day celebration. She very nicely accepted the invitation and they participate in another of her public art work, Insert_Here (some photos on  Little Grassroots  see post of April 19).

‘Insert ____ Here’ is a project which invites community members to post signs recommending things like “insert a green roof here” “insert solar panels here” “insert a park here” “insert porous pavement here” - this project is capitalizing on community awareness of place/environment and optimism in the face of climate challenges. After the participant has added the sign (each with a unique url), they are asked to photograph the location and upload the image. I will then add a rendering of the proposed insertion and post the before and after images at the unique url.  ‘

As HighLineWater, Insert_Here aims to make things visible (suggestions, dreams of the community members). Once again she’s exploring space and the future but here the possible is not “what might happen”, but “what could happen”. The use of labels is also interesting to me: building our dreamt space with words?

Hello, everyone. Anne-Laure recently invited me to join this conversation and recommended that, for my first post, I say a bit about my website, wordsinspace.net — which obviously bears a semantic similarity to the Building Space With Words project — and my relevant teaching and research. I bought the wordsinspace domain name and built a very rudimentary site six years ago to house my teaching materials and some of my early research. At the time, I was designing a new course, “Textual Form,” that I was to teach at the University of Pennsylvania; the class examined ways in which textual presentation – including how words are arranged on the space of the page, screen, landscape, etc. – offer layers of meaning in addition to those carried in the words’ denotations and connotations. Hence “words in space.” (The site’s in dire need of a redesign; in its current incarnation, it certainly doesn’t live up to the creative potential of its title!)

Much of my work examines media form and materiality and the spaces in which people make and consume media – the design of media companies’ headquarters, libraries, reading rooms, archives, pedagogical spaces, etc. Of course all are examples of words – in various formats – distributed throughout space.

A few years ago I began teaching, with my New School colleague Barry Salmon, a graduate seminar called “Sound and Space.” This class introduced me to the growing field of “sound studies” and helped me to appreciate the non-visual dimensions of texts and media reception. I began examining the sounds that media texts make, and how those sounds reverberate throughout spaces of media production and consumption. In addition, I’ve been exploring the non-audio-visual textual experience: how words, and their embodiment in books, on records, in digital form, etc., are experienced haptically, kinesthetically – and perhaps even olfactorily. This multisensory and material experience is important to consider even in regard to immaterial words in virtual spaces — and there’s some recent interesting work addressing these issues.

I look forward to the conversation and exhibition.

Yesterday I went to Madison Square Park to “see” the installation Pulse Park I mentioned on October 27. I had understood from the article that people walking through the park were registering their heartbeat and that each light represented one person. I assumed that the point was to make the space “alive” and to represent through the light beams each of the visitors.  Another person with whom I went thought there were sensors and therefore as soon as you entered the park, your heartbeat was measured and “represented” by one of the light beams.

In fact, “Pulse Park” is more “individualist” as the light beams represent the pulse of one individual.When you arrive, in front of the entrance there is a machine with two handles that you have to hold. It registers your pulse and the lights start going up and down. People in the park experience your heartbeat and you can see your pulse represented, “choreographed in lights”. My kids run like crazy before registering their heartbeat, as they wanted to see how fast the lights will go. They also try each holding one of the bars, and then separately. Between each individual, the park goes dark and then it starts lighting, vibrating again with a new individual.

As I was standing there in the middle of the lights, with other people walking around, kids running, I remembered that in the NY Times article Lozano-Hemmer explained that his inspiration came from listening to the hearts of his twins in his wife’s womb and he wanted to “expand that into something that could be appreciated visually”. Indeed, being in the middle of Park, you could feel in someone’s body… experiencing her or his heart bit. Despite the public nature of the experience - in a park, with other people - it could also become something quite private.

Re-reading Lozano-Hemmer’s quote, I could not prevent myself of thinking of a topic which came up in several of my posts and comments recently: this attempt to make “visible” something audible… to make it more public in a sense… to share it with a public. We were talking about this point last Thursday with Aileen. I was wondering if art - more specifically interactive type of art - was not about making visible, audible, uncovering in some ways perceptions, interactions and embodying them in a different modality or medium to make the public aware of them. She was not completely convinced… I am not sure I am right either, but I keep thinking of this attempt to “make perceptible” as I read about, watch, listen to, and experience these different installations.Yet, in the case of “Pulse Park”, the aim is not to make the interactions visible; it is not to put in light the bodies, the heart beats of the different people in Madison Square Park, but it’s about making visible one’s heart beat - both for the individual and for the public. The body, the heartbeat becomes part of the instrument and the lights in the park the music… 

Last, it’s interesting that the picture in the NY Times is taken from above: it’s very beautiful, but it’s not at all what you experience as you come in the park… You are in it, not above it… Here are a few pictures taken yesterday… from the ground level… :-) al 

A link to Camille Utterback’s interactive installation ‘Abundance.’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkOrX9WC-N0

Hi, I like this installation by Natalie Jeremijenko, the “Dangling String”. It’s a long plastic spaghetti attached to a small motor on the ceiling and the motor is connected to an ethernet cable. Depending on the business of the network, the motor vibrates more or less. It’s located in a corner of the hallway and people can hear “in the periphery” how busy the network is.  http://interactionthesis.wordpress.com/2007/02/14/dangling-string/ “Dangling strings” aims to make visible, or better to say audible, the virtuality of the network. Sitting in your office, you can hear how busy the network is, i.e. how many bits of information are sent to, transferred to on the network. This attempt to make the virtual  visible and audible is also at the core of  Hansen and Rubin’s work.  In  ”Listening Post” (presented at the Whitney in 2003) they present on a multitude of little screens the content from Internet chat’s rooms. Sounds and voices are also accompanying the presentation of text.  Hansen and Rubin highlight the “cacophony” of the web but also create for the visitor an experience where the individual is surrounded by the multiple voices going on online. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/museo/6/hansen_and_rubin/index.htm  Discourse is more central in their recent piece, ”Moveable type”, an installation in the lobby of the NY Times focuses on discourse - the discourse of the news produced by the NY Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/arts/design/25vide.html  In this interactive installation, Rubin and Hansen present on a multitude of screens the “memory” of the  NY Times as excerpts from articles, letters, blogs, etc. collected from 1851 are displayed on the screen. The material is discourse and this discourse is made visible…”Moveable type” embodies the “organizational memory” of the NY Times and displays it. As for “Dangling Strings”, the aim is also to show the “live” nature as many of the excerpts come from real time comments of readers from around the world. Our project, Building_Space_With_Words, also aims to “make visible” “the virtual” by materializing a virtual space with the maze and by creating “walls of words”. We also aim to make audible as the visitors will be surrounded by a soundtrack composed of sounds from physical and virtual spaces - making us reflect on the “silent and solitary” experience of online interactions. Yet, our purpose is not to show “real time” how much discourse is created and shared (although the discourse projected in the installation are searched “live” from our blog); our project is more “symbolic” as it focuses on the “fabric” of which online interactions are made of - words- and explore the metaphor of the virtual space. We also wonder how language - through the development of discursive practices and language games - can allow us to reenact some of the affordances of physical spaces. Hence, it’s not only about making the virtual visible, audible, but it’s also about exploring the relationships between the material and the virtual.al  

http://www.mam.org/act/index.htm