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 this allow higher standards of evidence in political and environmental crisis?

The time at which one witnesses something—not just the places and events witnessed—has tremendous implications for how and if we can respond. With realtime or near realtime data, intervention, response or participation become possible – or impossible.

This time series discussion includes two-and-a-half streaming panel discussions across six cities in realtime to survey projects that address the issues surrounding realtime representations. t0 x0 locations: San Diego; New York; Stockholm; Venice; Kassel; Amsterdam.

Can realtime media challenge our borders, change environmental accounts, and restructure participation, accountability or responsibility in civil society?
What is real about realtime?

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

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

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 ….

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.

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

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