(By Kelly Goeller — http://www. kellotron.com)
A wonderful instance of hybrid realities. Here, of course, the pixels are materialized through some medium that is not electronic and the hybridity is more about a semantic cross-over from pixel worlds of electronic games to the real world.
Why do I blog this? We normally think of first-life/second-life hybrids, or mixed realities or virtual-physical cross-talk, as connected mixes. For example, augmented realities wherein you see digital overlays through glasses or a screen that are perfectly registered to first-life. As in — hold up this special augmented reality viewer and see digital “heads-up display” indicators of data that has location or place-specific relevance to whatever you are looking at. Hold it up to a supermarket and you can see what the price of milk is inside, or hold it up to an historic building and see tourist information about its historic relevance and stories.
In this example, the cross-talk is completely non-electronic, non-databased, and is all the more compelling for that. It evokes immediately the 8-bit aesthetic and this aspect is whap makes it a “digital” incarnation. Simply wonderful.
If anyone finds out where this is in NYC’s Lower East Side, and who did it — I would be glad to know.
Updates
This just in — evidently it was at 9th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.
Tagged!
Gone!
This is doubly interesting here. Now this spigot — which I think is an exhaust for an underground furnace or boiler, or perhaps a way to off-gas fumes that might accumulate under the sidewalk — is a completely different object — not even what it was before. It looks like a drained tap, not an exhaust vent (or whatever it is “really.”) This is the transformative part of that little provocation. Not to over think this street intervention, but it was truly transformative in the sense that it took a mundane, very ordinary, barely existent object and made it resonant. It was a real disruption — not in the sense of causing consternation or harm, but disruption in the sense of opening a hole in space and re-writing reality.
Brilliant.
Okay, back to the usual grumble..