Documentation Video
see/saw is an interactive installation in which visitors' manipulations of a real see-saw control the fluctuation of power and emotion in the story of an intimate relationship. A pair of words are projected on the walls behind the people on the see-saw—one word from each pair on the wall behind each person. As visitors see-saw up and down, new pairs fade in and out based on the angle of the see-saw. Participants' motion also causes an audio track heard through speakers embedded in the see-saw to advance. When participants stop moving, the audio fragments into an ‘up' and ‘down' segment heard by the ‘up' and ‘down' participant respectively. The audio clips relate to the projected word that each person can see, and the ‘up' or ‘down' position in the narrated relationship. This piece, along with Come to Pieces —an interactive video portrait, were created during Chapman and Utterback's month long residency at Grand Central Art Center in 2001.
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February 21st, 2006
I have just been reminded of a project Ralph de Rijke of the Waag showed me a year ago called ‘ Amsterdam RealTime ‘. The website for the project hasn't been updated in some time unfortunately. Essentially the piece was made for the exhibition Maps of Amsterdam 1866-2000 at the Amsterdam City Archive. The Waag Society together with Esther Polak set up the project which included developing a GPS tracking system that traced the movements of participants who carried portable tracing devices around the city with them.
Videos of Map's Growth
“Every inhabitant of Amsterdam has an invisble map of the city in his head. The way he moves about the city and the choices made in this process are determined by this mental map. Amsterdam RealTime attempts to visualize these mental maps through examining the mobile behaviour of the city's users.”
The data was mapped onto a black background as the GPS data was gathered a map of the participants paths through the city slowly grew creating some really lovely images as well as a few unexpected results including people attempting to draw images over large parts of the map without any idea how accurate they looked. Ralph told me about some guys who got on a boat with the tracking equipment and did some drawings off the coastline free from the confines of the street layouts. It immediately reminded me of the ancient biomorphs and geoglyphs of the Nazca Desert that have puzzled scientist and historians ever since they were rediscovered in the 1920's.
February 21st, 2006
