this is the eclipse 1/2moon pinholes

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“Urban Play is designed to take back the street… to give us the tools that let us install ourselves, our friends, our families, our games and our desires in what should be the space we all own collectively. Urban Play is the most promising experiment in not urban design, but designing the urban I […]

Throughout almost every major city in the world, individuals are taking it upon themselves to change their cities in ways that make them more creative, interactive, personal and fun. From small interventions such as a series of stickers that turn the London Underground’s Northern Line map into an interactive game to bold projects that transform chain-link fences in Chicago into public message boards, these actions fall outside of traditional notions of urban activity, and are quickly relegated to the margins, often labeled as subversive, underground, or even illegal.

Urban Play is an international project that believes this street-level inventiveness, energy and innovation is a window into a new form of creativity in the city. Launching in Amsterdam in 2008, Urban Play is a series of catalysts to inspire people to be creative in the city, to stimulate debate about creativity in the city and the way this might differ from city to city. Following its Amsterdam launch, Urban Play will continue to other European cities and will feature its own Second Life metropolis for global creative interaction.

Urban Play will launch with an exhibition that will introduce the notions that underlay Urban Play to the public: an overview of the most innovative examples of guerrilla design and urban interventions from around the globe that have manifested themselves in the past decades. At the same time the public will be addressed to contribute ideas on how to interact with their city.

These ideas from the people will all feed into a series of new commissions for interventions in the public domain to some of the most innovative designers. Utilising the infrastructure of some of Europe’s most respected design institutions, Urban Play joins the inventiveness and creativity of street-level activity with the talent of some of the world’s leading designers, architects and creatives to form a new type of creative spirit in the city.

Urban Play is Droog Event 2, directed by Droog Design, Amsterdam, in partnership with curator Scott Burnham. The first Droog Event, a design triennial, ‘Open Borders’ was launched in 2004 in the context of Lille Cultural Capital 2004 and attracted 50,000 participants during its run. Droog’s portfolio of innovative interactive projects also includes ‘Do Create’ with KesselsKramer which was presented at the Milan Furniture Fair in 2000 featuring products that were not complete until users put their personal mark on them. These projects, dealing with issues of open source, inventiveness, consumer led innovation and interactiveness, have inspired Urban Play.

Recognizing pause potential, pedestrians use infrastructure to alleviate legs from the force of gravity.

The Environmental Health Clinic’s mobile office.

GOOD Magazine: Natalie Jeremijenko

OOZ, Inc. (…for the birds) is a 1,000 square-foot garden including architect-designed bird housing projects (multi-family dwellings), water systems, and other amenities to improve the quality of life for urban birds. The installation creates conditions to observe birds’ adaptation to human-engineered technologies, testing formal and ecological theorems for high-density lifestyles, sustainable resource sharing among urban organisms, and the play of public/private division in cross-species interaction.

Date: September 2006 – October 2006
Medium: installation, experiment
Dimensions: 10,000 square-feet
Location: Postmasters Gallery rooftop @ 459 West 19th Street (at 10th Avenue) NYC

TreeLogic is an inverted avenue of 6 sugar maple trees growing upsidedown, suspended 30 ft in the air. This projects frames the trees as a dynamic adaptive system and as visual forms that display their histories. It emulates the neat regular spacings of urban street trees, often used to ‘beautify’ urban environments. However, the slow gymnastics of these trees invites interpretation and speculation on what they will do, could do, how much they have grown or changed, and what birds think of them. Trees are icons of the natural, however, uprooted, they display a logic that redefines our own.

see it at Mass MoCA

20 minute Demo

3 work samples: LAX, Bit Plane, Suicide Box

1) LAX

2) BIT Plane

Robotic Geese are remote controlled goose robots that enable participants or robotic goose drivers (aka goosers) to interact with actual geese in urban contexts. The robotic goose interface allows people to approach the birds, follow them closely and interact in a variety of ways that would not otherwise be possible without this interface. The goose drivers can ‘talk to’ the geese, issuing utterances through the robotic interface, delivering prerecorded goose ‘words,’ their own vocal impersonations, or other sounds (such as goose flute hunting calls). Each utterance via the robotic goose triggers the camera in the robot’s head to capture 2-4 seconds of video recording the responses of the actual biological geese. These video samples upload to the public web-based goosespeak database that the participants can annotate, i.e. “the goose was telling me to go away,” “he was saying Hi.” As this database of goose responses accretes, redundancy and correlations in the annotations may provide robust semantic descriptors of the library of video clips.

Natalie Jeremijenko Robotic Goose launch from xDesign Project on Vimeo.

What the goose can do

+ GOOSE = AUDIBLE: The sounds that the geese make will be channeled into the gallery to the goose cockpit from the mikes embedded in Leda; where they will be matched against similar sounds. If a translation exists the goose call will be translated into human.

+ GOOSE = VISIBLE: They can see you goosing inside the gallery they can trigger the camera in leda head pushing images to you. geese trigger the camera on by uttering something in close proximity to the Leda, or by pecking at Leda (mike triggered).

+ GOOSE = ACTIONS:

• They can follow chase, attack, push or avoid Leda, communicating how much they like or don’t like the human behavior Leda is channeling.
• They can use other (subtle) social and visible cues to communicate with Leda (ie. you); turn their back to you; or wing fluffing to warn you or scare you
• They can play with you.

What people can do

+ PEOPLE = ACTIONS:

• You can follow the geese: you can direct Leda for ward or turn left or right. (no backwards)
• You can chase a goose; you can be chased; you can drive around in circles and see what the geese think of that;
• You can chase, attack or talk to a person who is in the geese’s environment (i.e. you can provide some security services for the geese);.

+ PEOPLE = VERBAL:

• You can talk to the geese or a goose from the cockpit inside the gallery. you can recorda conversation with the geese to the public database; (you can annotate the file with an interpretation of what you think happened in the database remotely)
• You can try your own goose impersonation sounds directly using Leda ventriloquism; and you can save these to a database if you get any interesting response. Leda will open its mouth when you speak issuing; controlled by your goose mouth action shadow.

+ PEOPLE = VISIBLE: You can turn on Leda’ video camera and get a close up view of the interaction; you can save that piece of video to a database with an annotation of why it was interesting, what you thought the interaction was about. [ see Learning Goose ]

go to the project website

Goosing_ 7714: a folorn leda [robotic goose 5.6] piloted by humans ashore experiences social rejection from her biological counterparts from OOZ Goose translation database, February 15, 2004. Robotic goose, goose control system, uncaged feral geese in urban setting, and database of annotated audio and video clips, using php scripting, MySQL database on Apache webserver, dimensions variable. Collection De Verbeelding art landscape nature, the Netherlands

Hear an excerpt from the Whitney Biennialand see images of a Goose Launch here.