Urban Interactive Postcards

Greetings, Pipsters et alia....

In preparation for the events at hand, I have been planning an installation. I wanted to post a notice about it so that the info is available to all. Please feel free to give me any feedback/ideas you may have that could improve the project. Also, anyone who happens to have free time and/or video/digital media skills and wants to jump into this with me.....!

Last fall, JohnJ and I spent a lot of time wandering around the Woonasquatucket River, trying to find out how the largest piece of nature in the city has become a forgotten, overgrown, polluted dragstrip surrounded by empty lots and crumbling buildings. More importantly, we attempted to strategize ways to bring it back into focus at a potentially vital area of the city and ways in which the public could participate in this redevelopment. Our ultimate solution was to create a Mobile Urban Research Lab (MURL) consisting of shipping containers and scaffolding that travel from city to city, gathering information and sponsoring workshops/installations. A significant part of this plan was to enable local citizens to record (via sound and video) their stories about the city and have them projected onto large screens for public viewing.

Although largely theoretical at the time of its proposal, the project is moving into a more plausible stage of being. My intention is now to take the video aspect of the program and implement one facet of it in conjunction with a digital media sensing class.

Here is the plan: A 16'x16' "playpen" will be set up on site which will be monitored by a single video camera overhead. This camera tracks the motions of 4-5 individual participants. At the same time, a projector plays selected clips from a database of prerecorded videos onto a nearby screen. Each participant controls one aspect of the video playback (rate of play, color adjustment, portion of video displayed, soundtrack controls...) via their motions in the playpen. These manipulations are performed in real-time with the playback and simultaneously recorded as a "video postcard" created collectively by the participants.

The source material to be recorded ahead of time will be clips of the river and its surrounding neighborhoods. It is possible that one of the participants will be speaking into a microphone, telling a story or responding to the images being produced as a narrator. In this way, we collect unique perspectives on the city as a result of interactive play.

-elijah