Proposal
Introduction
All over the world, people are producing and organizing information. Blogs, online photo albums, social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us - all provide an infinite variety of data feeds. No Place is a strategy for creating paradise on earth by exploiting these feeds as the raw material for living utopias. As the feeds produce data, they cause the architecture to grow autonomously, eventually cross-fertilizing to create a shared vision of paradise.
Context
“They wander through the sectors of New Babylon seeking new experiences, as yet unknown ambiances. Without the passivity of tourists, but fully aware of the power they have to act upon the world, to transform it, recreate it. New Babylon is the work of the New Babylonians alone, the product of their culture. For us, it is only a model of reflection and play.”
Constant Nieuwenhuis
No Place is inspired by various advanced architecture projects from the 1960’s. Examples are Cedric Price’s Fun Palace and Constant’s New Babylon. New Babylon is a proposition for a postindustrial utopia where people are freed from tedious labor. Instead they pursue a form of creative play. Creative play has driven our own collaborations, and is the basis for this project.
The notion of architecture created from information has been a theme of ours since the earlier works of WonderWalker and Apartment. A physical environment in which your movements and gestures create a constantly evolving information space is a natural progression for our work. A browser in physical space.
Website
No Place is a website and an installation. The website locates numerous utopian inputs from ‘feeds’ including photos, structures, places, games, online events etc. - anything using the popular RSS standard. Architectural structures are then created to house the data produced by these various located objects. These structures expand, literally and figuratively, as more heavenly data is created by the feeds.
Feeds
Hundreds of feeds are aggregated and classified according to various categories:
Arcadia, dreamland, dreamscape, ecology, Eden, fantasy, heaven, hell, limbo, nightmare, nirvana, paradise, Shangri-la, utopia, wonderland. Each category has its own architecture, continuously growing to create environments of paradise.
Installation
Utopia is not immediately graspable, it is an abstraction that nonetheless exists in real-time. The installation section of No Place is a 3D immersive environment that uses projectors that cast ‘data-shadows’ of the architecture of No Place. As people wander through the installation, they see their own shadows on the walls, together with projected “shadows” of the virtual architecture of No Place. Viewers can manipulate and transform the shadow building using gesture-based camera recognition software.
Interaction
There are several types of interaction that people can have with the installation. As you walk, you appear to go into the structures, which come forward or recede as people walk towards them. When you gesture with your hand, the structures unfold to reveal their texts and visuals in a form of physical browsing. Lastly, if you stay still, the new posts gather around your shadow, forming a physical/data tunnel around you.
Timeline
2006: Creation of a blog for two purposes:
- A dataset for testing potential inputs for Noplace
- The testing of various datafeeds and how to utilize them
Winter 2006/2007: Specifications
- Specification of physical installation
- Specification for the final website
Spring/Fall 2007: Prototyping
- Testing of camera recognition system and tracking of hand motions/gestures.
- Creation of virtual models to be used in the installation, and testing of projecting their ‘shadow’ into physical spaces with projectors
- Construction of the website backend
- Building and testing of various website components
Winter 2007: Trial Runs
- Beta version of website ready for testing and evaluation
- First installations as small performances at various venues
Spring 2008:
- Final website installation
- First physical installation
People & Resources
We have a fantastic group to create this proposal. These include Jakub Segen, a scientist, who is a leading programmer in camera recognition systems, Martin Wattenberg, an artist, mathematician and programmer, who will create the 3D shadow programming and design, Marek Walczak, an artist and architect, Chuck Crow, an engineer and programmer who will create the back-end feed programming, and Johanna Kindvall, an architect, artist, who will take care of all graphics and promotional material.
Once the programming has started, testing of the system will take place in New York City and other locations. We have already started this process by creating a blog where people can describe their moments of paradise on earth…
“New Babylon ends nowhere (since the earth is round); it knows no frontiers (since there are no more national economies) or collectivities (since humanity is fluctuating). Every place is accessible to one and all. The whole earth becomes home to its owners.”
Constant Nieuwenhuis
Objectives
Concepts of paradise
We will create a visual catalogue for concepts of paradise, from Utopia to Shangri-la to Dreamland. Once we catalog these types, we will create linkages and connections between apparently oppositional forms of nirvana. These paradise types are essential components to understand ideological constructs, whether they are a terrorist’s vision of heaven or a scientist’s vision of a sustainable environment.
These visions however are always endgames; the present is but an opening. It is for this reason that we present them in an installation as shadows, tendencies without reach.
Software
Written by Jakub Segen, the gesture-based software used to create a physical browser will be open-source. This means that other artists can use the software to create their own physical browser.
The computer vision software will continuously scan the output of the video cameras for presence and movements of people. The program will track the motion of people in the active area, to detect predetermined dynamic gestures, and to compute extremities of the body projection. The computed information will be sent to the visual effects programs using a TCP/IP connection. The computer vision software will be designed as a general-purpose system, to be reusable. The software created in the course of the project will be “open source” and all effort will be taken to use only open source libraries and device drivers. The software will be written in C/C++, and it will operate under Linux OS.
Recipient of Creative Capital Foundation Grant 2006
