Online software, performance, stock market application, virtual money, networked sensors, projection, documentation video.

Two week stock market performance, which leaded up to a live event featuring sensors, live video feeds, and four connected cities: the Oklahoma City, Boston, Munich, and Istanbul. Each location had sensors mounted in the entrance, registered how many people are in the room at any one time, and constantly sent this information to the stock market server. The number of visitors defined the fair value for each place. Each location had 100 shares and gained or lost value depending on the number of people at the location and the speculations in the market.

The stock market started on Nov 20, 2006, the live event took place in four cities simultaneously on November 31, and the market was closed on December 1, 2006.

Simultaneous events took place in the following locations:

Oklahoma City: IAO Gallery (map)
Munich: Muffathalle Cafe (map)
Boston: Art Interactive (map)
Istanbul: Karaoke (map)

A Stock Market in Life was supported by Turbulence and Upgrade! International.

A Stock Market in Life was created as part of the Upgrade! A DAY IN THE LIFE happening, conceived by Horst Konietzny & Tamiko Thiel of Upgrade! International. This project was produced in collaboration with Dara Kilicoglu, Orkan Telhan, Stephan Gschwendtner, Jeff Stokes, Tamiko Thiel, and Jo-Anne Green. Special thanks to Amber Frid-Jimenez and Can Basyigit.

Online software, cellphone data, HD video, projection.

The project utilizes data gathered, in real time and at an unprecedented scale, from cell phones and other wireless technologies, to better understand the patterns of daily life in Rome, and to illustrate what ubiquitous connectivity in an urban environment looks like.

The project was created in the Senseable City Lab at MIT.

Six software-maps utilize data from cellphones to visualize crowds in Rome (images above):

1. Pulse: What are the patterns of use in Rome?
Where in Rome are people converging over the course of a day? This software visualizes the intensity of mobile phone calls in Rome at the present moment and compares it to previous day’s data.

2. Connectivity: Is public transportation where the people are?
How do the movement patterns of buses and pedestrians overlap in the Stazione Termini neighborhood of Rome? This software shows the changing positions of Atac buses, indicated by yellow points, and the relative densities of mobile phone users, represented by the red areas. If a tail on a yellow point is long, this means that a bus is moving fast. Areas colored by a deeper red, have a higher density of pedestrians.

3. Flow: Where is traffic moving?
This software visualizes the movement of mobile phone callers traveling in vehicles. It focuses on the area around the Stazione Termini and the Grande Raccordo Anulare (Rome’s ring road). Red indicates areas where traffic is moving slowly, green shows areas where vehicles are moving quickly, and the arrows represent the dominant direction of travel.

4. Icons: Which landmarks in Rome attract more people?
This software shows the density of people using mobile phones at different historic attractions in Rome. The location in green is the most popular, while the location in red is the least popular. The number beneath each landmark indicates its popularity ranking relative to the other areas. At the bottom of the screen is a week-long data comparison between the most popular site and the least popular site.

5. Visitors: Where are tourists congregating?
Where are the concentrations of foreigners in Rome? This 3-D software highlights the locations around the Stazione Termini neighborhood of Rome where tourists are speaking on mobile phones.

6. Gatherings: What does Rome look like during special events?
How do people occupy and move through certain areas of the city during special events? This software shows the pre-recorded movements of mobile phone users during important events in Rome:
+ World Cup final match between Italy and France on July 9, 2006 and celebrations at the arrival in Rome of the winning Italy national team on July 10.
+ Madonna’s concert in Rome on August 6, 2006

Software, digital print.

Diagrams of art exhibiting, buying, and collecting networks emerged in the OPENSTUDIO art market experiment.

OPENSTUDIO (2005-2008) was an experimental art economy platform created at MIT Physical Language Workshop.
http://burak-arikan.com/openstudio

Software, digital prints.

Aggregated signals from the edges of a self-organizing networked system.

Open I/O was a suite of software services and applications for composing and running distributed electronic media in a way that enables people to exchange data over the Internet. The project is no longer active.

Open I/O is initiated by Burak Arikan and Vincent Leclerc at the MIT Media Laboratory.

OPENSTUDIO was an online market for artists. It was created by the Physical Language Workshop led by John Maeda at the MIT Media Lab. Participants created and sold artwork in an online marketplace using a virtual currency. It run from 2005 – 2008.

OPENSTUDIO was a collaboration among Burak Arikan, Luis Blackaller, Annie Ding, Brent Fitzgerald, Amber Frid-Jimenez, Kate Hollenbach, Kelly Norton.

Pinkie is a network based electronics prototyping board developed as a precursor to building large networked systems around physical devices. It has been designed to easily compose sensors and actuators that reside in different locations. Pinkie boards work in-relation with a suite of collaboration-oriented software services and interfaces to program and run distributed physical media, and to exchange data and functionality of devices over the Internet. Pinkies are inherently invisible, they hide behind the structures and only serve as facilitators to interface the physical world to the digital network.

Online software, RFID tags, projection.

Auction Machine was an online-onsite hybrid art auction software for the OPENSTUDIO art market. Utilizing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to interface the auction system, Auction Machine demonstrated a participant-controlled time based auction for artworks in the OPENSTUDIO economy.

In this auction, each participant has an RFID tag that can send and receive data to the auction software through radio signals. After two or more registered participants are within the radio range of the base station, the auction starts. The Auction Machine displays the names of the current participants and the artwork that is to be auctioned. The price of the artwork changes according to the number of people in the auction. It increases slowly if there are few people, and speeds up as more people join the auction. People stay connected if they think that the art piece is worth the price, or, if not, they leave by turning off their RFID tags. At the end, the last person who stays in the auction automatically gets the artwork and pays the price. When the artwork is sold, all the related information in the database gets updated, and the sale becomes visible as a regular online transaction in the OPENSTUDIO online micro-economy. The Auction Machine connects the virtual OPENSTUDIO system to the activities of multiple people in physical space. Such an interconnected environment creates new types of scenography and spatial continuity that fundamentally affect the way we understand and use space.

The Auction Machine can be set up on any computer that has Internet connection, and its surrounding environment becomes an electronic auction space. The Auction Machine has been used by approximately 20 people (~10 people in the same session simultaneously) during the Media Lab Sponsor Week in Fall 2005.

Software, HD video, digital print.

The system of fashion is set on the continuous change of styles and speculations of the image of clothing that are represented through mass media and network of individual expressions. This work aims to explore the effect of the fashion system by creating a micro fashion network with the basic elements color and time.

A fixed camera and the custom software processed and stored dominant colors of moving people in Cambridge’s busy neighborhoods. Similar colors connected to each other form a large color network over time. As the network grow, the new vertices are connected to existing similar colors; because of this preferential attachment model, we see the power law distribution, and highly connected dense color hubs in the resulting images. In the result demonstration, three different artistic representations put side by side: captured human figures, color information as abstract boxes, and the complex network of colors.

In collaboration with Ben Dalton.