Incheon-Melbourne Public Screen Event
Crowd watching the screen at Tomorrow City. Image courtesy of Scott McQuire.
View video documentation of the event:
The ‘Large Screens and the Transnational Public Sphere’ project was launched on August 7, 2009 with a live telematic broadcast between the large screens at Tomorrow City, a new urban development at Songdo, Incheon, Korea, and Fed Square, Melbourne, Australia. The launch was timed to coincide with the opening of the Tomorrow City Open Theatre and media festival ‘Come Join Us, Mr. Orwell’, programmed by Art Center Nabi.
Click here to visit Art Center Nabi’s project website for ‘Come Join Us, Mr Orwell’.
Audiences at Fed Square and Tomorrow City communicated via real-time interactive works Value by Seung Joon Choi (Korea) and SMS_origins by Leon Cmielewski, Josephine Starrs and Adam Hinshaw (Australia), both of which utilise SMS technologies to engage participants directly in the production of the artwork and with each other.
SMS_origins, Leon Cmielewski, Josephine Starrs, and Adam Hinshaw. Image courtesy of Meredith Martin.
In SMS_origins a phone number was displayed on the large screen along with the instruction ‘sms your family origins’. Participants texted their own and their parents places of birth to this number and linked curved vectors were added to a public map that updated in real-time as it received texts. The map was not static; texts are displayed in real-time, and the while the map zooms in to the countries of origin animated vectors connect to the locations. As more people participated the map grew to include accumulated vectors.
Value @ Tomorrow City posed the question: ‘As a member of the future city, what do you think is the most important value?’ As audiences in Melbourne and Incheon texted their ‘values’ they appeared on the screen and if words entered were identical or similar, the symbol’s size or position changed and the whole arrangement became self-organised. Watch video of Value @ Tomorrow City courtesy Art Center Nabi:
Value @ Tomorrow City, Seung Joon Choi. Image courtesy of Art Center Nabi.
The event also included cultural exchange in the form of selected video content from Korean and Australian artists including: Cradle Song-blue fish, 2009, a 3D animation by Kim Joon; Expression / Text Abstract / Conversation / Men in Suit, 2008, a moving typography animation by Hansol Huh; aesthetica 003, 2009, a motion graphic film by Joo Myoung Song; from right to left, 2009, digital video by Keryoon Han; Pan 3 [Rotation isn’t movement], 2007, digital video by Daniel Crooks (courtesy of Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne); Twist (Edit), digital video by Sam Smith (courtesy of GRANTPIRRIE, Sydney)
View the gallery of the Incheon-Melbourne Public Screen Event
Banner image courtesy of Art Center Nabi.