October 15, 2003
Amodal Suspension
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's interactive installation, Amodal Suspension, will be presented by the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media from November 1st through the 24th.
Short text messages sent by people over the Internet or by cell phone will be converted into patterns of flashing lights in the sky, turning the Japanese city of Yamaguchi into a giant communication switchboard. The piece will be located in the public space around the new YCAM Center and will be viewable at amodal.net. [From Josh Rubin's Cool Hunting].
"The signaling will be similar to Morse code or the flashing of fireflies, —the lights will modulate their intensity to represent different text characters. Each message, once encoded, will be “suspended” in the sky of the city, bouncing around the YCAM center, relayed from one searchlight to another. An email will be sent to the intended recipient to notify him or her that “a message is waiting for them in the sky of Yamaguchi”.
Each light sequence will continue to circulate until the recipient or somebody else “catches” the message and reads it. To catch a text, participants must again use the cell phone or computer programs provided at www.amodal.net . To highlight the irony of globalization, the piece will use an automatic translation engine between Japanese and English, —this will produce inaccurate but charming results.
Once a participant reads a message, it will disappear from the sky and it will be shown briefly on a large projection on the façade of the YCAM center. The author of the message will be notified by email, as will the intended recipient. All submissions will be logged at the project website using an online virtual environment that will show them in three-dimensional patterns of Brownian motion. Visitors will be able to search, sort and navigate through the archived messages". [Amodal Suspension Press Release]
Other greater than life SMS projects: Hello World Project, Hello Mr. President and a high tech billboard which responds to Text Messages.
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