xDesign Hub

Silent Observers:
Visual Observations & Streaming Media Practices

Eyebeam in association with Silent Observers exhibition at CALIT2, 4th Screen Cell Phone Video festival, and the NYU Environmental Health Clinic presents:

[t0] Time Series:
a streaming discussion on realtime media practices and promises

Friday June 15: 5PM-8:30 PM New York/Eyebeam

2PM-5:30 PM San Diego/CALIT2

Fri/Sat June 15 / 16: 11PM-2:30AM Venice; Amsterdam; Stockholm; Kassel; Brussels

In the face of environmental and political crises we demand not just more information but more immediate information. We are witnessing an explosion in the forms of realtime monitoring and reporting: air quality data to your cell phones; incessant blogs; streaming images of war zones and conflicts from which we might prefer to be historically removed. A consortium centered at CALIT is launching the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) developing cyber-infrastructure that will allow extensive realtime monitoring and event detection.

Is this a perverse cultural impulse that sidesteps considered interpretive processes and analysis, or does this urgency seize attention and generate diverse sense-making, with its own immediate interpretive demands? Alternatively, might it allow sustained attention to issues that are otherwise under-represented or unrepresented? How do we collectively manage these data streams? Are they an opportunity for changing who attends, and how we respond? Can …

Sparrows deliver the morning news at intersection of W.4th and W. 11th Streets in NYC

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/junglestream/20070601 051307.wav

A wind study for the San Francisco World’s Fair of 2007.

The robotic goose visits Stockholm for the show at Mejan Labs.

Instruction for the Birds:

* land on perch-> trigger sound file-> wait for human response (they
are a little slow)
* try a different perch-> it might work better

Instructions for People:

* Pretend you are a bird-> see above

In retrospect I realize that all testing and sizing of the floating clinic was done with women:. Caroline, my beautiful assistant is over 6 ft. The compact desk and seating accommodated her easily but I had not accounted for the male body mass. The first man to have an appointment on the floating clinic, Christian Croft, was almost catastrophic. Moreover ….

Special effects: weather.

The NYU environmental health clinic Grand Rounds is a series presenting and podcasting design interventions that change or improve the envrionmental performance of local urban systems. Modeled on the Grand Rounds of hospitals and medical schools, Grand Rounds of Environmental Health covers direct actions, remediation projects, public experiments and other material tactics.

The invited speakers present evidence-driven interventions, action based research projects and heroic engineering that have demonstrable environmental effects, and yet have not lost something of the wonderful, fantastical, surprising and/or suggestive. Unlike medical schools, whose grand rounds are typically not-so-grand powerpoint presentations, these rounds will take us out and about in the urban ecosytems, examining ills and discussing the effectiveness of hands-on remediatory actions.

Lana Bernberg works between clouds off of solar arrays in the jungle

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/junglestream/solar.mov

Lana Bernberg’s work in progress video of building at the source of the materials, in this case, the wood used to build furniture for a botanist’s lab and residence in Belize

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/junglestream/forestfloortofinishedfurniture.mov