AOV4

Five laws of library science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Urban Observatory project is an exploration of the unstable relationships between physical environments and mediated environments. A secure sense of place and direction develops around tools we use for navigating through spaces: maps, guidebooks, photo reference, GPS, etc. At the same time, those very tools are competing representations of those spaces. In the networked and media-infused cultures of the world, the representations of places modify, conflate, or completely replace the experience of those places. The Urban Observatory works to examine this dynamic through an intertwined articulation of the two modes of experience. The sense of being in a public space, and being subject to the physical constraints of that space will be contrasted with networked, mediated representations of both near and distant spaces.

The visitor listens to a conversation on an old fashioned telephone installed on a desk. They hear a recorded conversation between Cardiff and a scientist on the nature of space and time

Translation Map by Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks tackles two very different but oddly related problems. As they write: "While there is great hope that the Internet will one day truly be worldwide, mutual understanding and worldwide communication cannot be accomplished simply by running fiber optic cable across international borders. Right now on the net, discussion is dominated by the English language. If we hope to include most of the Earth's population in a global conversation the means will need to be found to connect people across languages and cultures."

FREE TEXT: The Open Source Reading Room (2012) is an installation that functions as a physical archive, public reading room and actual production site for collected texts dealing with the thorny issues of digital copyright, open source culture, and the state of the intellectual commons in the 21st Century.

Here are a few installation setups I was playing with. I'm thinking there will be more sculptural elements relating to the videos in the space, and I also want more interaction with the existing Soap Factory structure itself.

I found this passage and thought of it in relevance to our conversation concerning art getting in the way of life. When the question was posed, I thought of it less financially and more internally. These words don't provide a solution, but perhaps a method of coping.

Just a little sample of what you can do with a Kinect sensor and some coding.  This is voice activated, and responds to your skeleton. 

(via Backstage: My Barbarian)