Tate projection installation: 3,500 messages later!

The projection installation I created for the Tate Liverpool has been live for a while now, and yesterday I was sent a dump of all the data that's been entered into it so far.

It makes for really interesting reading: I learned that for the most part my swear filter worked well, apart from a few (admittedly creative) exceptions. I also learned that people really tend to write a lot of crap into public installations.... I was obviously expecting a few posts to be hidden, but the percentage that the staff had to manually disable was far far higher than I'd ever have estimated. It was great to see however that some people seemed to take the time to write genuinely nice comments, not just about the exhibition but about the Tate and the staff, and even one or two about the projection itself, which was nice. :)

There were a few common themes throughout: unsurprisingly a lot of schoolkids tended to write things like "Dave Smith was here", and there were a lot of attempts at getting profanity or offensive content through. Luckily the staff were really on top of things and shut that stuff down pretty fast. Something I did find interesting however was the amount of "vote labour" posts: either there was one committed chap continually posting, or a few people had the same idea. Strange. Some of the comments were just completely unrelated in every way, I think it must be the anonymity coupled with the fact that the comments are going to be six feet wide that incites people into writing absolute crap.

Anyway, the full list can be viewed here. Below is a selection of the best ones I've found (for various reasons!)

• "Could somebody please give me directions to the art?"
• "I love Nancy Allen...will you marry me?"
• "SHE SAID YES!!! WAAHEEEEEEEEY"
• "It looks very hard growing up,and i dont want to grow up."
• "I felt the work conveyed the struggle between youth and adulthood beautifully. It reflected how i feel about the sudden jump we go through as people into world of responsibilities."
• "i like the sculpture on the floor. it makes me think of great things. Leo, aged 4."
• "FRIDAY FRIDAY GOTTA GET DOWN ON FRIDAY"
• "HAPPENED TO WALK PAST WITH A BAG OF SWEETS AND THOUGHT 'ART' I WILL GO AND HAVE A LOOK AT THAT BECAUSE IT IS RAINING"
• "rowan thinks this is beautiful. Age 5."
• "I enjoyed the way the pieces could be understood and interpreted differently by the different age groups, it made the exhibition almost personal. Amy-age 26"
• "All in all good fun and interesting, thanks for a great day, BOOBIES"
• "hi i am writing on a wall!"
• "art confuses and confounds me! keep it simple!!!"
• "Interesting artwork included here, I'm not sure if I like it or not. The artwork itself is slightly too wacky, however, the reasons for the art make sense. 7/10"
• "It leaves more questions unanswered than answers questions"
• "pretentious"
• "In my country, we have a saying: put computers in the hands of fools and you will experience folly"
• "What a great way of capturing people's views of the exhibitions in a way that in itself, is art."

My first installation, argh!

I've recently been asked to help build an interactive projecting installation for a museum in the UK (can't say much more about it for now, but it's a well-known art museum in Liverpool, you work it out!).

The brief is to come up with a way of letting users comment on the exhibition interactively, and to display that information to other visitors in an interesting way. The plan is to have one machine dedicated to user input (hopefully a touch-screen), and then another machine hooked up to a projector in the venue that will have an animating display showing loads of live data, that contantly checks through user's comments and displays them nicely. I'll be using AIR for both parts, and some sort of database solution to store the info (I might even grab tweets from a dedicated Twitter feed too, if there's enough interest).

This is a really nice example of what I'm seeing in my head, although this one is A) webcam enabled, and B) completely bloody amazing. Still:

Nike NO MORE TALK from seeper on Vimeo.

It's an interesting challenge anyway, and something I've got no experience in doing really. I'm quite excited to be involved though, but it means I'm going to have to really think hard about how I go about doing it. My work is usually online, or given to reps, or installed on computers. Having my work displayed in public for a few weeks where large numbers of people are going to screw with it presents it's own set of issues for me. Like these:

Potential Issue #1: Idiots. 
Idiots love to break lovely things like the thing I want to make. By this, I mean typing "cock" instead of a name, or sneakily quitting the app, or somehow trying to break it, whatever. I need to bear in mind that while writing "cock" as a username isn't the end of the world on a website, projecting it onto the wall at a busy art exhibition might be slightly more of an issue. I think that the museum setting means that this sort of sabotage is probably slightly less likely to occur than say, if it was in the middle of a street, but regardless: this thing needs to be completely twat-proof. My data will probably be stored remotely (a really simple mySQL type deal), which means that I could give staff at the museum the power to delete any offensive comments that slip through the net.

Potential Issue #2: Technology.
The program will be running for long stretches of time, which means that I really need to know that if things go wrong, I've got some sort of backup. My plan is to have the two machines hooked up to a network, but at the moment I think it'll be wirelessly. That means that if the wireless drops out for some reason, I need to know my program won't shit the bed and break completely. I think I'm going to have rolling checks at regular intervals that will grab any new comments from the database, and copy them to a local source which will then be used to power the projection content. This means that I can do a check for connection before each update attempt, and if none is found then it's not the end of the world and the program will keep running.

Potential Issue #3: Setting.
This is the first piece of work I've ever done that is location-dependent. How and where it's installed, and on what kit, is going to have a pretty huge effect on the end product. This means that I need to get in there with a camera and figure out where and how I'm deploying it, before I do anything else. There's even been talk of projecting onto a none-flat surface (maybe having raised sections to project individual quotes on to), which would be great, but is a lot more involved. We'll see what happens with that though.

So yes, I'm very excited, and can't wait to get stuck into tackling this thing. Once I get a proper working prototype down I'll probably update again with how it's going.

This should either be a really positive learning experience for me, or a massive and spectacular failure. Luckily, I'm an optimist prime. :)