contact sponge	2nd Wednesdays Art Series at the Exploratorium SF, USA Co-Curated by Sponge February 13, 2002 7pm Metropolis, the physical form of the city and its inhabitants, is being altered and reshaped by teleopolis, the increasingly powerful "city" of electronic imagery, information, and experience generated by broadcast media, the Internet, and newly emerging communications technologies. The Exploratorium and the art/research collective Sponge host an evening of installations by Bay Area artists, designers and researchers that haunt the boundary between metropolis and teleopolis, reflecting our complex and rapidly changing notions of city life and urban experience in an age of electronically mediated social imagination.
	hubbub Sha Xin Wei Hubbub is an investigation of how accidental and non-accidental conversationscan be catalyzed in urban spaces by means of speech projected onto public surfaces. Hubbub installations may be built into a bench, in a bus stop, a bar, a cafe, a school courtyard, a plaza, and a park. As you walk by a Hubbub installation, some of the words you speak will dance in projection across the surfaces to the energy and prosody of your voice. The project capitalizes on recognition errors to give a playful character to the visual projection space. Hubbub treats speech as a computational substance for architectural construction, complementary to its role as a medium of communication. Success will be measured by the extent to which strangers who revisit a hubbub space begin to interact with one another socially in ways they otherwise would not. Hubbub is part of a larger cycle called Urban Ears, which explores how cities conduct conversations via the architecture of physical and computational matter.
	sauna 02 sponge The urban environment is not only polluted by solid matter, waste and the fallout ofunbridled consumption-it is also polluted by information and media. We are bombarded every second by electronic media-the average American sees over 20,000 logos per day. Meaning is firmly encoded and stamped into our collective consciousness by the persuasive rhetoric of marketing and design. In response to this over saturated landscape, the art collective of Sponge has created Sauna 02. Sauna 02 is an environmental/architectural experiment. It invites an individual to pass through a contemplative space that will act as an antidote to the overstimulating sensorial pollutants of the modern city. Using the same media that is one cause of our over-saturated lives to create a restful environment, this micro-architectural space should act as a refreshment for the urban weary. This is a prototype for a larger interactive public architectural installation to be deployed in San Francisco In the Summer of 2002.
	Icon City Erik Adigard Originally produced for Live Wired, Icon City is an interactive multimedia work that explores how cities have become media environments shifting from the physical toward increasingly electronic, information saturated spaces. Through dense, rapid-fire collages of graphic images and sound, Icon City examines the contemporary city as a space of navigation, similar to the web and the computer desktop.
	Satellite Thom Faulders + Post Tool Design The air is aflood with wavelengths. The very stuff that allows us to be 'online,' to be connected, anywhere at any time. This connectivity is afforded us by a congested allocation of frequencies under government administration, the affects of which we can only guess. The air is aflood with wavelengths. The very stuff that allows us to be 'online,' to be connected, anywhere at any time. This connectivity is afforded us by a congested allocation of frequencies under government administration, the effects of which we can only guess. Through this invisible world of wavelengths and frequencies, architect Faulders and designers Post Tool will construct a 'service ball' that will monitor a zone of space within the Exploratorium. When a line is crossed by a visitor, a vibratory sound is amplified. The "lines" indicate hot spots. As they become randomly stimulated, groupings of sound form "in concert." It is this invisible world of wavelengths and frequencies that 'Satellite' questions. www.posttool.com www.beigedesign.com
	Fauna 2.0 Adrian van Allen An interactive installation that explores our cultural attitude towards the natural and urban worlds from a biotechnological perspective. The project consists of two parts: (1) a collection of life-size models of transgenic taxidermy form creatures wearing clothing with integrated technology, accompanied by a text panel and (2) a user-controlled projection of 3-D Quick Time VR photographs of the creatures in various urban environments. Visitors will be able to view the physical prototypes of the creatures, read the accompanying text panel and see them integrated into different urban environments in the projection. Fauna 2.0 offers a forum for literal and mental; play with the concepts of natural vs. fabricated, real vs. unreal, possible vs. plausible.
	Transit Time Steve Wilson Transit Time presents an "infomatic" digital media event based on the real time movement of buses and trains at the moment of viewing. Using the Web to extract data from the Next Bus System, it tracks the movements of all Muni light rail trains via GPS and advanced signaling. The installation projects digital video and sound which change in real time based on the precise current position of Muni trains and buses. Each train and station has its own sound/video "signature" which develops with real movements in the city. The sounds include processed versions of sounds from the city, a range of spoken perspectives on the way transit affects life, and tonal compositions related to transit. The voices form a kind of oratorio. The video includes maps, city scenes, satellite maps, historical images, and other poetical reflections on transit. Viewers can pick which Muni line to focus on. The goal is to give visitors a feel for transit as the life pulse of the city. Another part of the event allows visitors to ride in a driver's and passenger seat which had been discarded from an old train. The resurrected seats vibrate in accordance with the real movements. When the real train stops, so do the vibrating seats in the gallery. The projected video matches what real riders on the train being tracked are seeing at that precise moment.
	The Tele-actor Project Ken Goldberg A new approach to audience participation where a skilled human, equipped with a wireless audiovisual system, enables an Internet-based audience to collectively interact with a live remote environment. "The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before." — Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762
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