I believe in Philadelphia I often tell
people my attachment to Philly is
visceral. When I'm downtown or a South
Philly restaurant, I feel remarkably
connected. "Should I compare thee to a
summers day? Thou art more lovely and
more temperate.
"Open air is a large scale interactive
installation, where very powerful
spotlights are actually controlled by
the voices of participants. Most of the
time when you see a show, a light show in
the sky, it's actually following a score
of music so the lights are moving to the
beat. Instead here in Philadelphia, what
we're doing, is if those lights move it's
because they were reacting to the voice
of someone who has sent a message either
through a special iPhone app or through
a webpage. That message arrives into our
servers, we analyze it for volume for
intonation for frequency, and then when
it gets played back in the Parkway the
lights react to those parameters. So in
position and and in intensity." (music)
"The project is in a way it's kind of
like a rant line or maybe like a
voicemail system, where you send messages
but instead of sending them directly to
somebody, first they go into the night
sky. People can listen to those messages
through the phone or through speakers
that are any consolable in Logan Square.
So the idea is, create a platform for
communication, but that is visualized and
that takes over the entire park. "Baby, it looks like you never felt sky before, well let
all rhythm read the fine morning before
you go blowing out those stars of
tomorrow and I'm Ray by the way. Then
yeah". "When your message appears in the
night sky, the system notifies you it's
like.. 'hey it's your turn here comes your
message' and all the lights actually find
you with GPS tracking and all the lights
are oriented toward you. So in a way you
become part of the show, you're part of
in the limelight so to speak but it's
also a little bit awkward or violent
because you feel like all of these
lights are actually tracking you over
the park where you can't get away from
them, so it's a project that has a a
sense of seduction and participation but
then also a sense of tracking and of
policing and just making people aware
that these technologies have very
accurate information about where we are
and who we are.
What I'm interested in is in
self-representation, the idea that it is
the people who make the decisions about
what the contents will be. What you're
actually seeing is what people have said
and you too can be part of that dialogue