ConnectingTheDots

"Occupy" Wall Street

As with most recent scaled protests, Occupy Wall Street has a virtual presence. The simple wearethe99percent tumblr highlights and aggregates stories of individuals in the movement.  Moving beyond story sharing, some are also leveraging web-based networks to organize direct actions. Applying grassroots mapping and adapting an online balloon mapping kit, a few folks recently organized a collaborative aerial mapping of downtown occupy wall street. Reflecting a more distributed form of organizing, on youtube this guy is asking folks to keep wall street occupied, and to continue communicating with wall street when not protesting on site, by sending back junk mail.  His youtube call for action has a healthy thread of comments, perhaps similar to the face-to-face comraderie created on the streets. 

Visualizing Dating Data

What would a census based on online dating profiles reveal?  Love the maps Luke Dubois created for his soon to be exhibited "A More Perfect Union" project -- born of post-breakup openness to any kind of mate, willingness to sign up for every major data site, and nerdy info computation curiousity.  Text frequency visualized on U.S. maps uncover amusing geographic variations in characteristics -- how shades of shyness vary across states and how some towns should be renamed "Skeptical", "Hammered", "Compulsive", "Strapless"...  

iPad 3D Light Forms

The folks at BERG and Dentsu are exploring screening surfaces and playing with the popular 'glowing rectangles' that inhabit our world. They invented a new photographic/stop-animation technique for making media.  Software models of 3-dimensional typography, objects and animations are created and cross sections of the models are rendered like a virtual CAT scan to create a series of sliced outlines.  Those are played back as movies on the surface of an iPad and extrude 3-d light forms as the iPad moves through space.  That movement is recorded through long exposures (multiple exposures in composite to create a film like the one above). More on the method here. 

Globe Genie and Virtual Travel

Near the top of my wish list of devices that I want someone to invent soon is the human transport beam.  As a taste of how awesome that could be, Globe Genie is a simple virtual version.  Hitting a Shuffle button moves you to a different Google Street View around the world.  The shuffle doesn't favor big city tourist destinations, often landing on mundane open roads and suburbs.  On the opposite end of the travel speed spectrum, this Google Map road trip was another experiment in virtual travel (they inched along roads across states by pressing the arrow key forward).  Both projects spark thoughts about the extent and limits of our virtually travelable world (e.g. sight-seeing temporal moments as current) and the regions still unaccessible, even with virtual transport beams. 

Mixed Reality Golf: Enhancing Big Urban Games with Mobile Devices

Dropped in for playing/testing of a new iPhone game at Conflux this weekend. Created by co-founders of Come Out and Play, Gigaputt turned the East Village into our virtual golf course.  Laid over real-world maps, avenues were transformed into fairways as we picked out our clubs, followed our wayward balls, and raced to complete holes.  While I've been seeing many location-based apps in development, the type of interaction designed is typically still pretty solitary: announcing "hey i'm here", rating a venue as liked or disliked, or tagging with a personal photo.  As a multi-player game, Gigaputt engaged us with changing our surroundings and reacting to each other (not to mention the confused strangers on the street).  It was also nice not carrying around heavy golf clubs, and the hint of that matrix-like downloadable supplement brings ideas for other kinds of possibilities.    

While not networked, on the theme of augmenting physical surfaces with digital info, recent demos like Pattie Maes' (MIT Media Lab Fluid Interface Group) talk at TED on sixthsense, again points to a near future of designing experiences that go beyond twitter-like data seeding and that moves towards enabling behaviors with data as the enhancer and natural biproduct.  (A few more fun interfaces to browse like an interactive mirror and public lasergames here.) 

Real or Virtual or Both?

What's more real? what's in your mind? displayed in pixels? or what's physically in front of you?  Manifastations and manipulations of our digital selves and possessions has created efforts to confront, examine, and play with the notion of convergences into the physical world. 

Some examples that have caught my eye: 

Choreographed photos showing real people and objects engaged in virtual abilities (see "erase.me" image).  Social systems/processes/transactions that move from the virtual to real world (see Invisible Threads' real-life, custom-ordered jeans produced in a virtual Second Life sweatshop).  Products that enable people to experience their virtual identities on their physical identities (see Marc Owens' avatar suits, the contrast between real bodies and desired avatars deserves its own post.)

Design and the Elastic Mind

Enjoyed helping friends out as a filmed silhouette for a piece harvesting the Internet for human feelings and behaviors that recently opened at MOMA's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit. The 300 plus projects showcased are also viewable online and worth exploring.

Perhaps exemplifing the rapid adoption of once esoteric projects and terms mostly confined to ITP shows, MIT's Medialab, and other research communities, the MOMA exhibit was packed with tourists absorbing the numerous innovations in visualization, sensory design, biologically derived systems, algorithmic processing and mapping connecting technology, science, and design to human experience and society.   

Freezing the Moment on YouTube

Various performers, artists, and technologists have experimented with transforming our experiences of physical spaces and our experiences with others in those physical spaces.  From PacManhattan (the analog of PacMan) to less orchestrated flash mobs, it is hard to fully describe in words the experience as a participant or as the audience. Luckily there are now some YouTube videos that better share the situations.  (Below is Frozen Grand Central - crowd simultaneously freezing in one place for 5 minutes and the reaction of those who normally zoom by.)

Confluxing

A year ago, while walking down a Soho side street I noticed a baby (well, a figure shaped like a baby) peering at me through iron bars.  I marveled for a second, snapped a photo, and continued on my way.  Perhaps others rushing on their way to work, shop, or meet friends have also spotted these "abandoned" children constructed of tape. Do they stop? Do they touch? Do they pick the child up?  In creating this unexpected street art, Mark Jenkins taps into these varied social reactions.

Projects at the intersection of the physical and virtual worlds is a topic I am fascinated with and (irregularly) write about. Ways to mix the unique qualities of digital spaces (ability to aggregate immense data, bridge time and distance, create imagined environments, etc) with the social fabric of the physical world is an exciting place at play.  Many of the most prolific experiments are happening in music and art.  This past weekend a festival called Conflux in Brooklyn showcased projects similar to Jenkin's Storker Project, some with a heavier bent on on technology. 

• Using cell phones, street art, and mash-up maps, "You Are Not Here" leads participants through an excursion of Baghdad on the streets of New York City.
• People from all over the world are planting seeds and combining digital photos of their plants into a "virtual field" in The Seed Project.
• Projected at a Brooklyn space, Imagining Place's computer program allows participants to navigate through videos, photos, and virtual scenes documenting the impact of globalization on local communities.   

Across the board the projects (Under An Umbrella, Subtrak,DropSpots, etc) used physical and digital objects to make an idea and/or social interaction previously absent in a location, suddenly present.  Time-constrained, I wasn't able to fully observe first hand which projects sparked people's response versus which remained tape babies that people just walked right by.

Virtual Smart Mobs

A busy travel schedule is no longer a valid excuse for budding activists to skip a protest. (Or for that matter for anyone to skip any meeting). 

Roughly 10,000 Chinese avatars gathered to stage a protest on a popular game run by leading portal Netease.  The protestors were upset by a game graphic thought to depict a "rising sun" Japanese flag.  (Sound-bite history: a reminder of the slow reconciliation process over Japan's invasion of China in the 1930s.)

Increasingly, physical world gatherings have a mirror in the virtual world of massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs).   This past spring at Berkman's Beyond Broadcast conference, many "attended" a Second Life version held in parallel. 

Some have noted that virtual advocacy is not new.  In 2002, 160,000  protestors used software tools to simultaneously target and crash the World Economic Forum's website.  The Yes Men's parody WTO website is another well-known example of online creative redirection.  However unlike many virtual sit-ins and advocacy of the past, the mob is now visible and banking on the social cue of it being harder to say no to someone's "face."