For the winter season 2008-9, Tinker.it! decided to put its office window to good use and build an interactive display. Based on an original concept by John Nussey, Jon Hewitt & Andras Szalai, we decided to build an RFID-enabled snowflake generator.

Placed in our London office, alongside a busy corridor, passer-bys are invited to use their Oystercard to discover what kind of snowflake they are. As they move past the windows, the snowfall in the background is gently swayed by their movement, and the last person's snowflake is in the foreground.

More work at:
tinker.it

The Urbanode Project, proposed by the VURB Foundation for Digital Pioniers, will build a set of tools and services spanning mobile devices and built environments, that can transform a public space into a reactive collaboratively mediated experience.

The city is a composite of impressions. Beyond the built environment, it is a constantly changing pastiche of associations and experiences—not just of the people who inhabit it, but of the larger community. New York City, in particular, has two realities: the reality of the physical environment, and the reality of the idea—of what the city and its diverse neighborhoods signify. Inseparably intertwined, these two realities constantly continue to inform each other. Pastiche is a dynamic data visualization that maps keywords from blog articles to the New York neighborhoods they are written in reference to, geographically positioned in a navigable, spatial view. Keywords are assigned based on relevance and recency, surrounding their corresponding neighborhoods. The result is a dynamically changing description of the city, formed around individual experiences and perspectives.

By revealing the social networks present within the urban environment, Invisible Cities describes a new kind of city—a city of the mind. It displays geocoded activity from online services such as Twitter and Flickr, both in real-time and in aggregate. Real-time activity is represented as individual nodes that appear whenever a message or image is posted. Aggregate activity is reflected in the underlying terrain: over time, the landscape warps as data is accrued, creating hills and valleys representing areas with high and low densities of data.

Invisible Cities maps information from one realm—online social networks—to another: an immersive, three dimensional space. In doing so, the piece creates a parallel experience to the physical urban environment. The interplay between the aggregate and the real-time recreates the kind of dynamics present within the physical world, where the city is both a vessel for and a product of human activity. It is ultimately a parallel city of intersections, discovery, and memory, and a medium for experiencing the physical environment anew.

christianmarcschmidt.com/invisiblecities

Concept:
Dana Gingras, Amit Pitaru, James Paterson

Programming & Animation:
James Paterson & Amit Pitaru

Choreography:
Dana Gingras

Dancers:
Dana Gingras & Sarah Doucet

Music:
Roger Tellier-Craig modifying The Knife.

This is an excerpt from 'I Am A Chain Reaction' which is one of seven works that make up the dance/animation/programming hybrid project, Smashup.

Smashup is the outcome of an ongoing collaboration between artists James Paterson & Amit Pitaru ( Insertsilence ), and dancer/choreographer Dana Gingras ( Animals of Distinction, The Holy Body Tattoo ). Smashup premiered in its complete form, an hour long performance, at the Festival Transamérique in Montreal in the summer of 2008.

Others involved in I Am A Chain Reaction are:
Dancer Sarah Doucet (the other being Gingras herself).
Musician Roger Tellier-Craig (of Fly Pan Am & Godspeed You! Black Emperor) who modified the song 'Bird' by swedish band 'The Knife'.
Visual artist Jeremy Felker who helped create the animated vignette that is present in the full 10 minute incarnation of the work.

The software component of I Am A Chain Reaction is projected from above and running live during the performance. This is a raw video recording from above and involves no compositing.

related sites:

James Paterson:
( presstube.com , insertsilence.com, bitforms.com )

Amit Pitaru:
( pitaru.com , insertsilence.com )

Dana Gingras:
( animalsofdistinction.org , holybodytattoo.org )

Sarah Doucet:
( facebook.com/people/Sarah-Doucet/586001829 )

Roger Tellier-Craig:
( cstrecords.com/bands/fly-pan-am , brainwashed.com/godspeed )

The Knife:
( theknife.net )