Digital gets Physical

Author: Malte Goebel

This is not about sex.

Digital drafts of contemporary art or architecture more and more find their way out of digital space and into the physical world. On the one side, digital things serve here as model for further developments, on the other side, they are used as a basis to translate artistic thoughts from one aggregate state to another.

Speakers:
• Julian Bleeker is an artist and technologist, who became famous with the development of visionary and innovative products.
• Kati London developed intelligent technologies with area/code, for example plants which call attention to themselves when they need water, and game networks, for example between Gaza and Tel Aviv or New York and Bagdad.
• Neri Oxman is a frequently honoured architect and scientist at MIT Department of Architecture.
• Ohad Eder Pressman has founded 3D3R, a software-studio which works amongst others for Yahoo! and Nokia.
• Kevin Slavin is co-founder of area/code and a leading graphic designer in digital area.

Kevin Slavin welcomes his guests. "What happens when digital becomes physical?", he asks. "What happens when the digital world interacts with the real world?" Slavin shows a mapwith wifi signals of an area.

A network looks like a wall, or like a hallroom with closed doors. A network is also a stuffed animal with a digital code, or a Nike shoe that is RFID equipped. A network becomes manifest in objects, also like the DB bikes in German cities: bikes you can rent with a cellphone. "Could a network look like a shark?" Yes, he says. Also like a plant and a pidgeon. Pigeons are sometimes equipped with small chips to measure air quaility. So they become part of the network. GPS equipped taxis are part of the network, or special shopping carts in some supermarkets that tell you where the toothpaste is.

The Allianz Arena is a symbol for the information age since it constantly changes: Its colour changes in respect to the team that plays: FC Bayern or 1860 München. Already buildings are designed to avoid urban canyons where GPS is not working due to tall buildings.

Back to the hallway: In order to open a door at Kevin's Hotel you have to press a button on the key thing which is no longer a key but an electric operating system.

Kati London talks about ditigal and physical hybridisation. She looks at plants interrupting people's routines. She made a device that allows plants to call their owners if they are dry. The system currently has 12 plants online. Each has a different voice and personality based on their biological being. Plants are excited, or a living stone that needs a three month period of dryness is more polite. The system is not only for plants to call people, but for people to call plants. Then the plant gives a small bio. E.g. plant 11, a scotch moss, which employs a Scottish accent. Then Kati explains the technology behind it: Electric devices, thresholds which are unique to each plant, then it goes to the system which launches a call file: need of water, desperate need of water, too much water...

Now she talks about sharks interrupting people's routines. "Sharkrunners" is a game based on the life of sharks. You get a boat, you name it, you get a crew and name them and you go on a cruise. The boat is moving in real time, even if you are not in the game. Then you get a text message if you are close to a shark, and then you have two hours to get online and do some research on the shark. If you are successful, you get a good rate in the team, or you might also get a shark attack. While the boat and crew are only part of the system, the sharks are real! They have a chip on them and swim in the ocean.

Next example: Baghdad. You get a map of Baghdad, on the back side is a map of New York. If you hold it against the light, some places are marked, and if you go to the respective place in New York, there is a sticker with a number you can call to get information on the respective place in Baghdad. The same thing was done last year in Gaza.

Neri Oxman: Design as Life Science. Most of everything we do can be described by gradients of energy. This way there could be the construction of a life architecture. How do we begin to think of the parallelism of digital and nature? If you look at the human body, you will find out that form has a reason. In medieval times people wondered how to make a physical object into a 3D picture. Neri did it the other way around and made pictures into physical objects, somehow using the light densities to construct physical densities.
Structure vs. surface: Neri shows an object which lets light through and other objects she made. Other photos of carthesian wax objects that you can see in her exhibit.

Ohad Eder Pressman: He asked himself, what digital displays are going to look like in the future, ebooks are just a start. What would a futuristic interactive display look like? He puts an iPhone around his neck like a necklace - and a necklace is shown on the display that stays in the right shape even if he moves it.

Julian Bleecker: He dresses business casual - blue collar worker's suit. He talks about digital games: they live beyond the digital world. Like donkey kong structures appear in university dorms, hybrid markers (street art) linking to Super Mario. Kids are going to see the real world like a digital game since they grew up with these games. He developed a game called "mobzombies" that uses the whole human body as a joystick. The player is a walking around trying to escape from zombies by walking around for real in the room.
In the near future, digital and physical will merge: no "online" or "offline" world anymore. Digital kids expect "networks" to become part of their real world.

Questions from the audience? None, so Kevin plays the audience.

Ohad: We are in the process of building the infrastructure to enable the implementation of these devices into everyday life in the future.

Neri: It's not about putting digital gadgets everywhere around us in the real world.

Kati: We need to find compelling ways of interacting. It's important to make the technology disappear.

Kevin: Is it a realistic future that all objects talk to each other, seamlessly?

Neri: If we look for the seams we will define them, even if we are going towards seamlessness right now. It goes both ways in a sense.

Question from the audience: Digital and physical has been a promise of many years. Is it realistic to have these real time tamagochis like talking plants? What's gonna take us there?

Julian: The question is: do you want a seamless interface? Do you want to talk to your door? It goes in many ways...

Kevin: What does it do to our sense of the world around us if we talk to our doors?

Kati: It's crucial to be specific about what we want to get. It's a slippery slope, we have to be careful.

 

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