Between the 21st and 30th of September the Led it Up Team from the MediaLab Amsterdam team got a spot at the Nederlands Film Festival. Between 19.00hrs and 21.00hrs people could use their smart phones to play the game Galgje with Dropstuff’s screen placed in Neude Utrecht. Using dutch film database video content, and part of the Culture Vortex and Beeld en Geluid initiative,  they aimed to their movie fans/knowers public. There was great weather and a relaxed ambient making it easy to enjoy a nice time there.

This interesting project  is product of a joint effort between Nordkapp and  Urbanscale. It attempts to build a quite interesting layer in the city for information gathering of ambient data like weather or maps and connecting people to places and/or services.This “operating system” for the city answers three main needs:  Wayshowing / finding a way through the interactive maps, What’s going on right now and where?/ which helps people connect better with the local services or events, and direct feedback to the city such as ambient media.

They are concerned about not adding noise to the urban environment but instead contributing to it by encouraging transparency, interactivity and immediatiteness for the people. “Our vision is to make the city more accessible and enjoyable for both residents and visitors through a situated interactive service. By sharing real-time data and feedback about the city, we aim to create a more efficient, transparent relationship between city administrators and citizens.”  It is also a tool with which citizens can be connected to their local governments: the ability of residents in a specific neighborhood to report if urban furniture or infrastructure such as a street should be repaired is possible through this system.

To read more about it, visit their site.

This year’s PICNIC festival  spanned the theme of Urban Futures. The question on the table was how cities of the future could adapt to deal with a global population set to hit 8 billion by the year 2030. A broad variety of talks, workshops and activities were held in Amsterdam’s northern docklands in a temporary settlement built just for the event.

Urban Screens crew visited the festival, and couldn’t miss a workshop of our special interest: “Urban Screens and the Electric City“.  It took place on the 1st day of the festival, Wednesday September 14th at the Crystal Palace. Different speakers shared their ideas and at the end of the session there was a group activity to creatively propose content for urban screens.

Matt Cottam from Telart presented Soundaffects, an experiential project by Parsons The New School for Design. It takes environmental data, like weather or traffic, or even motion and connectivity,  and transforms it or expresses it with musical sounds. The idea is to let us see and listen to our environment, from a new point of view, a different way to understand our cities. Matt  uploaded some pictures of the results of the quick workshop, you can check them out in his flickr account by clicking on the picture:

Another speaker was Maia Garau from XPlane. Their company focuses on Business Design Thinking. They combine research, collaborative consulting, design thinking, social media technology and visual communication. She made an open invite to everyone to attend their Visual Thinking School, which is open to the public and takes place every 1st Thursday of every month at their offices in Portland and Amsterdam.

Beeker Northam from Dentsu London Strategy Director was also present. Dentsu is a communication agency and they are working on various innovative advertisement projects. An interesting project by their authorship is a video which was produced using Ipad tablets to “paint” with light. You can check the make-off in the following link: Making Future Magic.

Chris Heathcote, Creative Technologist also from Dentsu noted how screens have crept into our cities. He addressed examples like the tube in London, where in a period of 50 seconds you can see 60 screens while going down or up the escalators. He also exposed the fact that there are more than 75,000 screens installed in public in the UK. Some of the characteristics that he can relate to urban screens is that they are normally silent, you can’t turn them off, they might be or not controllable, might be or not aware of you through sensors. Uses and location, he added, are important characteristics to think about, some screens are used in many contexts for many different reasons, from gyms to post offices, there are screens for information, for interaction, advertisement… some of them are even virtually unreadable because of their location, etc.  You can read more of his ideas about urban screens in the following link:  http://anti-mega.com/antimega/2009/09/30/screens-in-context

London-based Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving improvements in human and animal health. This year they celebrate their 75th anniversary, and they hold a special exhibition that introduces visitors to some of the key people behind the Trust’s achievements, including the Human Genome Project; malaria drug discovery; funding of science and art collaborations; and research to understand the human brain.

They have given the seventh in a series of annual design comissions to rAndom International, to welcome their visitors through a façade intervention named “Reflex”. This light Installation will be living at Wellcome Collection building’s windows until April 2012 and it is  located at 215 Euston Road. It now is the habitat of an organism that represents itself in the form of light, which reacts by establishing physical responses between the building and the passers-by. The behavior of the screen is inspired by an algorithm developed to simulate the collective decision making process that animals such as birds flocking, or ants, employ in the natural world. Something different from their indoor-installation “A study of time” is the location. An estimated number of 5,000 people walk past each day. While the first project is designed for an interior space, a choreography, “Reflex” stands between the public and the private, caged inside but in constant dialogue with the street.

Volumetric displays are 3d displays,  and developments in this technology remain in a very early stage. The depth of the image is perceived by the naked eye,  so no special glasses are needed to see the dimensionality.

They can be divided into two categories: swept volume displays and static volume displays. The main difference between one and the other is that in the swept volume displays use a rotating solid (usually a mirror) where many images are projected so fast to that your eyes can build up a 3d image using the ‘slices’.  The static volume displays rely on a 3d volume of active elements, which can be called voxels.  They change color to display a point in that 3d location or voxel (it is analogous to a pixel, a volumetric pixel), which will help you render the mental image. An example of static volume displays are laser plasma technology displays.

It is hard to find examples of volumetric displays which are not oriented to advertising a brand or product. Current applications tend to use them as output-only devices mainly for this purpose. One of the interesting opportunities that this type of display system brings is 3d interaction. Simple gestures can be perceived, like is the case with Sony’s  360º display. We can move and interact with the object using handmotion. It is also possible to play special volumetric 3d videogames.

An important aspect to note about the interactivity potential is that virtual reality environments conceive virtual objects that can be at a very large distance from the user’s virtual position, whereas all virtual objects in a volumetric display are always within the arm’s reach of an user.  Another example of a volumetric and interactive display system was also shown last year at the 2010 Siggraph. ‘N00tron’ is based on a spinning bicycle wheel and uses Monkeylectric display hardware.

It is a big pity that until the technology is not out of the lab and easily-affordable it remains as a long-distant possibility with a big potential for interactivity and visual artists.

Use Your Head is an interactive urban projection produced by MediaLAB Amsterdam together with the Filmwerkstatt Munster for the Flurstucke Festival. The audience can play a game where they use their own head as an avatar on the characteristic facade of the Diozesan Bibliothek. The goal of the game is to find a balance between Culture and Industry. By playing this game, they intend to make the public reflect on the use of public space for cultural or commercial purposes.

The project is developed by students of the MediaLAB Amsterdam, of the Applied University of Amsterdam (Hogeschool van Amsterdam). They worked with the creative producers Jan Scholte & Gijs Gootjes, and the project was assigned by Winfried Bettmer and the Filmwerkstatt Munster.

The students who participated in the project are:

Guido Huijser – producer

Natta Frank – producer

Oskar Moleman – graphic designer

Janek van Abeelen – programmer

Thijs Last – 3D designer

Artists:

Interaction Designer: Arne Boon

Visual artist: Felix Kraemer

Code Guru: Wouter Reckman

Sound designer: Michiel Nijhof Samplemaster

Visible Cities #04: The City As Interface

Wednesday  02 June 2010
De Verdieping @ TrouwAmsterdam | Wibautstraat 127 |
start 20:00 |
Entrance 2,50
————————————————————————

Guests: Rene van Engelenburg (DROPSTUFF.nl) and Gijs Broos (City Media Rotterdam)

Visible Cities
Visible Cities presents a revolving programme on how emerging technologies are changing the cities we live in. The widespread employment and adoption of ubiquitous computing, sensor networks and mobile media into the urban environment have unforeseen implications for how our cultures might come to use networked digital resources to change the way we understand, build, and inhabit cities.

The City As Interface
With the proliferation of screens in urban space, the city increasingly acts as an interface connecting and offering communication between the public and various forms of cultural content. Profoundly altering the urban environment and offering diverse possibilities for public engagement, urban screens can take the shape of LED signs and screens, plasma screens, projections as well as intelligent architectural surfaces, light projects and a whole collection of other possibilities that move away from traditional understandings of the screen.

Organized in partnership with illuminate Outdoor Media, the Institute of Network Cultures and the Urban Screens Association (Amsterdam), this month’s edition of Visible Cities presents Rene van Engelenburg from DROPSTUFF.nl and Gijs Broos from City Media Rotterdam, discussing their projects and sharing personal insights to explore how different approaches to screens in urban environments offer diverse possibilities for enhancing the public domain, engaging the public in designing the city space and providing a site for sharing and exchanging cultural content.

The next ‘The City as Interface’ event will be Impakt Online, which will be presented at www.impakt.nl/online and during Impakt festival 2010 ‘Matrix City’ www.impakt.nl.

illuminate Outdoor Media ::: http://www.illuminate.nl/
The Institute of Network Cultures ::: http://www.networkcultures.org/
The International Urban Screens Association ::: http://www.urbanscreensassoc.org

————————————————————————

De Verdieping is the cultural project space underneath club and restaurant TrouwAmsterdam.
http://trouwamsterdam.nl/de-verdieping

Visible Cities is made possible by the Amsterdamse Fonds voor de Kunsten (http://afk.nl/) and VURB (http://vurb.eu/).

Mettina Veenstra is principal researcher and coordinator of the theme public screens at Novay Research. Novay is a Dutch research institute for ICT driven innovation. Her presentation today at the Urban Screens conference focused on what public displays can do for public space in terms of stimulating encounters and interactions between people in public spaces. They envision the role of public digital displays as external stimuli for encouraging contact between people, with art being an important type of stimulus. But why is it important to foster social interactions? According to Mettina Veenstra social interactions lead to social capital which is important for our well being and our economy.

 The speaker identified eight functions of public displays: information, entertainment, art and culture, advertising, communication, better services, e-participation (the stimulation of discussion on environment and other local issues) and influencing (colors or imagines that can improve the mood of people). The speaker presented a series of projects for public screens which incorporate these functions and ideally aim to generate social capital. For example, a game projected in neighborhood public digital displays, the main target audience of which are youngsters, permits any individual who owns a mobile phone to play with the main character of the game, a dog, along with other people who access the game trough their mobile phones. A social networking site which links you to people whom you played the game with has also been set up. Other projects aim at encouraging the practice of performing arts in public spaces, while others are designed for public areas of office spaces with the purpose of stimulating workers to get in touch with each other by means of a constant flow of messages related to their activity.

The ‘recipe’ for fostering social capital which Novay puts in practice emphasizes the ‘locality’ of content and it’s direct relevance to the individual (personalized content), as well as allowing people to interact with the screens. The personalization of content is enabled by the integration of sensors and facial recognition technology in context aware applications.

This year’s Urban Screens conference in Amsterdam focused less on theoretical aspects and more on showing some of the actual artistic and non-commercial projects and installations which have been developed for digital displays in public space, and Mettina Veenstra’s presentation was one of them. I could not help noticing with surprise the great gap between theory and practice in what producing applications and installations for digital interfaces in public space as platforms for creation, cultural exchange and social interaction are concerned. While the growing number of such projects is certainly a step in the right direction, an issue that deserves more attention is a more informed and critical integration of new technologies, such as surveillance technologies, in these projects. For ambient intelligence enthusiasts, a recent exhibition which took place in New York, The Sentient City, provides a useful source for reflection. The Too Smart City section of the exhibition contained a series of artworks which amusingly explored potential technological failures of augmented objects, as a way to generate reflection about the transformations and effects of living in an intelligent urban environment.

Another concept which has been extensively and uncritically used today in the presentations with implicit positive and ideological connotations directly related to the applications’ potential to foster social change is the concept of ‘interaction’ in relation to media applications. However, interaction with digital environments is often not the much celebrated ‘empowerment’ of the individual now an user/participant, to replace the passive consumption of traditional media, but simply reaction and individual configuration of a technological environment with a limited number of already defined potential paths. Moreover, the participant’s agency in artistic environments is not meaningful in itself in relation to social change but only when it “sets empathy in motion toward responsible interaction and constructive change.” (Stiles and Shanken, forthcoming: 93).

I am convinced that The Urban Screens Reader which has been launched today and which will soon be available for free download on the INC website,  will be an useful tool in bridging the gap between theory and practice.

Notes:

Kristine Stiles and Edward A. Shanken, Missing in Action: Agency and Meaning in Interactive Art, forthcoming in Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, Victoria Vesna, eds., Context Providers: Context and Meaning in Digital Art (University of Minnesota Press).