Via SmartMobs, I just learned of the work of Usman Haque and have been thinking a lot about SkyEar.
This non-rigid "cloud", made up of several hundred glowing helium balloons will be embedded with mobile phones. The balloons will contain miniature sensor circuits (simple gaussmeters) that detect levels of electromagnetic radiation at a variety of frequencies. When activated, the sensor circuits will cause ultra-bright coloured LEDs to illuminate. The cloud will glow and flicker brightly as it passes through varying radio and microwave spaces.
As visitors to the event call into the cloud to listen to the distant electromagnetic sounds of the sky (including whistlers and spherics), their mobile phone calls will change the local hertzian topography; these disturbances in the electromagnetic fields inside the cloud will alter the glow intensity of that part of the balloon cloud. Feedback within the sensor network will create ripples of light reminiscent of rumbling thunder and flashes of lightning.
I also read Sky Ear (although Haque probably does not intend this reading) as an echo of the extent to which features of the “natural” landscape have disappeared into human-built structures. The lights from the Los Angeles skyline turn the night sky lavender; the lights from oil drilling platforms out at sea look a bit like low-hanging stars.
The interaction concept is very apt, very clear, very elegant. The clouds of elecromagnetic washing the earth become visible, human intervention imagined as flashes of lightning. But somehow I’m not convinced. I want some things to remain invisible, unless there’s real need. In this case, the sky is enough for me. I’ve beent rying to figure out why I responded so negatively, but somehow the physicality of the cloud disturbs me. It’s a beautiful idea, but the plastic bubbles in the air seem like pollution: plastic bags washed into gutters that strangle sea animals; city lights that occlude the stars; smog that chokes the Valley. Extra elements that cloak not clarify. There’s a glut of visual information in the air now: billboards, signs on skyscrapers, plane winglights. Even in interaction there’s an (understandable) obsession with visibility at the expense of other senses. Even if the lights are pretty and interactive and meaningful, they’re still one extra ingredient in an already crowded sky. I’d prefer a Sky Ear above my head that listens, but doesn’t talk back.
I’m more excited about Haque’s project Haunt, which uses humidity, temperatures and electromagnetic and sonic frequencies that parapsychologists have associated with haunted spaces...[to build] an environment that feels "haunted."
