Art in Odd Places aims to stretch the boundaries of communication in the public realm by presenting artworks in all disciplines outside the confines of traditional public space regulations. AiOP reminds us that public spaces function as the epicenter for diverse social interactions and the unfettered exchange of ideas.
Power Bike Parade won't be riding tonite, Sat Oct 17th due to garbage weather. So our next and last ride is SAT OCT 24, at 6:30pm along 14th street in Manhattan, starting at the Con Edison power plant on the east side & continuing back and forth for about an hour. Come join us on the ride if you have a bike, or if not, just come and see us/the rest of the festival!
Power Bike Parade is a bike-powered electronic orchestra that demonstrates the use of an alternative power source by converting the kinetic energy of pedaling a bike into electricity used to create a festival of electro-acoustic music and glittering LED lights. The two-rider parade takes this everyday act of riding a bicycle, and expands it into a visual and sonic spectacle, re-appropriating the act as a performance and a venue for expression.
The bikes are outfitted with contact microphones, speakers, and custom bike instruments to amplify the sounds the bike makes during a ride, while LED lights are mounted on the bikes to light our way, amplifying and transforming the bike ride itself into a performance.
**We really need people to document, so if anyone could come out Sat Oct 24th and take some pictures or shoot some video, that would be SUPER helpful!!** contact us at: semiotech.info@gmail.com
This is the story of our technological misadventures getting the fountain in Union Square Park to tweet out our Multiverse on 14th poems.
For some context: Multiverse on 14th consists of 3 "infinite" poems programmatically constructed by searching and pulling select "tweets" from the public Twitter feed in real-time.
Multiverse on 14th is also going to be a projected installation as a part of the Art in Odd Places 2009:SIGN art festival that will take place Th Fri Sa Oct 15 16 17 from 8PM-midnight at the fountain in the SW corner of Union Square Park. Map. You can read more about it here.
Now, onto the technical details.
Original Vision
Project the Multiverse website from a laptop via *unionsqwifi* into the fountain in Union Square Park.
In our original application to Art in Odd Places, we proposed projecting from a 10 foot tall tripod, onto the fountain in Union Square Park from ~20 feet away, almost hidden away in the trees behind some park benches.
We also proposed that we would project for 4 hours. (It turns out that committing to 4 hours instead of say 2 hours made the whole endeavor approximately 350% harder to pull off, but more on that later.)
The idea was to turn a relatively unimposing waterworks ("I didn't know there was a fountain in Union Square!") into a temporary well of musings, memories, rants and sometimes even poetry that passersby could "discover" on their own. Our goal was to not compete with the loud and insistent electrified signage all around Union Square. Instead, Multiverse on 14th's twittering fountain would be an unexpected oasis of introspection. (Yes, the irony!)
Hence, the need to stay 20 feet away from the fountain. The "set up" needed to be transparent, enabling the spectacle while avoiding turning into a spectacle in and of itself.
AiOP responded sagely that something 10 feet in the air would not escape the curiosity of certain public officials and might even pose a safety hazard. At the time, the festival was still 4 months away, so we thought: Well that's no problem, we'll figure something out.
We were both wrong and then right.
It's a matter of power...
Projectors eat a lot of power, 300 watts at any given moment to be specific. Especially if you're trying to project 30 feet in an uncontrolled space with a lot of ambient light onto turbulent, dirty water. (More on that to come as well.)
Such a projector would require a generator.
Generators a) cost a lot of money, even to rent; and b) make a lot of noise. This is Honda's "Super Quiet" 1000W generator. It's purring at 60dB, that's supposed to be as loud as "normal speaking voice." Not exactly the transparent "enabler" we were going for.
But then lo! and behold I found out about pico projectors. A new generation of hand-held projectors that are intended to be carried around in your pocket for whenever you feel an unplanned urge to watch a movie on the ceiling and will probably eventually be incorporated into mobile devices like the iPhone. Best of all, they work with the iPhone. Our power-sucking "10-feet in the air" set-up instantaneously downsized into 2 battery powered hand-held devices. We thought for a hot second, maybe we can rig up 4 of these babies, 1 in each corner of the fountain!
I got Multiverse up and running in the Safari browser on a friend's iPhone and plugged in projector. Nothing. Turns out the iPhone won't send a signal from anything other than the iPod movie player. Not helpful for projecting websites. Okay, then we'll just have to use a laptop instead. Slightly bigger, but not a problem. Wrong. The PK-101 doesn't connect to laptops. (For the geeks, that means no support for a VGA signal.)
Pico Projector No. 2:3M MPro110 Micro Professional Projector connects to laptops...Yay! But the projector's lamp (at just under 9 lumens) is too weak...Boo...Hiss.
(I'd like to take this opportunity to thank B&H for taking returns with no re-stocking fee!)
So back to the drawing board. Or rather back to finding a quiet power supply for a power-sucking projector.
On Amazon I found a giant battery pack. I'm still not clear on how to do the math but everyone agreed this bad boy would probably do the job. (Actually, I think I eventually figured out it would take 2 of these to get me the 4 hours of power I needed.) And dear Lord it weighed 60 pounds! And cost 400 dollars a pop.
Despair...followed by...
Pico Projector No. 3: Brought to us courtesy of...
3M's Serendipitous Product Release Cycle
Accidentally, I found out that 3M was about to release a 2nd generation hand-held projector, this time with a slightly more powerful lamp.
I will spare you the 2 weeks of online retail bungling that it took to finally get my hands on a 3M MPro120.
Multiverse on 14th by Katie Parlante and Mimi Yin is a set of three "infinite" poems about 14th Street, composed of random musings, observations, remembrances, rants, and self-conscious disclosures found on Twitter. None of the speakers intended to create a poem together. Instead, we created a space and collaborated for them with a few simple rules.
Multiverse is also a projected installation that will take place over three consecutive nights Th, Fri, Sa October 15, 16 and 17 8PM - midnight at the little fountain on the Southwest corner of Union Square Park, transforming the fountain into a temporary well of private thoughts.
Each of the three poems paints a vignette of daily life on 14th Street.
Transit Walking around Spinners Records makes me think of Henry Rollins hoping for a good storm just saw a man walking his turtle
Contemplation Sept. 9, 2009 @party_pizza, @colinbugbee, @moepet Relishing relish eating cheetos trying to forget what I think I know about art
Aspiration Sept. 2, 2009 @USSMeghanMcCain, @fuchsiaraskal, @karleysamantha I desire nothing without an adventure on it until we close our eyes for good
The phrases are pulled from the public Twitter feed, from all over the English-speaking world. Yet, they feel appropriate on 14th street. Everyone belongs on 14th street. Every kind of activity belongs on 14th street. And every thought, hope, secret desire and confession belongs on 14th street.
New stanzas are generated every half hour with the latest Twitter data. In that sense, the poems are of "infinite length." This also means that viewers can contribute their own tweets and see them appear in the installation.
Although Multiverse is very much a Twitter project, we wanted to see if we could create something that could stand up on its own, independent of the online data source we’re pulling from; something that could be brought out of the computer screen into the physical world. We are grateful to Art in Odd Places for the opportunity to bring Multiverse to the real live 14th Street!
We will be posting more on how we created the projection and how the website is constructed both here and on our blog.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Join a Breadline for the Unemployed, Underemployed and Low-Wage Workers of our Great City of New York!
In these tough economic times, we will revisit the breadline as a tool for subsidizing low wage employment that pervades our service economy.
Our Human Resource Department will be available to help you access your benefit of a free peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Rev. Billy and the Church of Life after Shopping will also be present to bless the line and those souls who need a raise or employment.
For those who like to give back a little, call 347-256-4429 or email commonthreadsart@gmail.com to find out how you can volunteer at the breadline.
After you get your bread, you can join the party at the Art in Odd Places Festival opening at TheaterLab 137 14th Street btw 6th & 7th Aves http://www.artinoddplaces.org/
PB&J for a Retail Economy is produced by Alicia Canary, Martin Munoz and Leah Danger. This performance piece is a part of Retailing 14th Street, a collaboration of the Common Threads Art Collective and artist Stephanie Rothenberg with the support of the Retail Action Project.
Retailing 14th Street intends to bring awareness to the experiences of 14th Street retail workers during the run of the Art In Odd Places Festival in October.
