I’m (not) there not

Interactive installation not

Abstract

Being someone has several meanings, identity and travel too.

This project explores the digital dualism under a new light, the one of a community of unaware travelers, that unconsciously escapes from its geographical isolation in the search for not just information.

Let the journey of this unique identities begins, towards multiple destinations, in a never-ending transposition from physical to virtual and viceversa.

Links

Publication (italian)

Github

Brief

The aim of this project was to design an interactive art installation for the entrance of the UniRSM Design Faculty. The installation must be based on a relevant dataset coming from the University itself, either the students or the building.

Storytelling

University is not just a building that host a service, but it must be intended as a physical community that has a virtual transposition when a member of this community access the Wi-Fi to browse the web, looking for any kind of information.

The story I want to talk about starts from that point and investigates how the users of that community start a new journey everyday, without even know that their are physically travelling and they exists not just in geographically defined domain.

Therefore, the main themes of the project are travel, identity, the transposition from physical to virtual, the journey backwards and how each theme is relevant and interconnected with the others.

While we are caught in our everyday life we always are travelling, sometimes it is a journey, others a trip, but we constantly collect informations that define and shape our believes and ourselves. That is what happens when we are connected to the web: the knowledge that we gather contributes in a relevant way in defining who we are among the others.

The philosophical production about identity has its root since the beginning of the western thinking, but a new perspective has been added when the virtual has become a fact. The concept of Digital Dualism has been ideate by Nathan Jurgenson in his Cyborgology blog in 2011 and rapidly the idea of two divided on vs offline identities has evolved towards considering the two as a one ubiquitous and fluid identity.

The same happened with the atom, standing for the analogical domain, that after the massive and disruptive diffusion of the computers in the ’90s had established a continuum with the digital domain, populated by bits (see Nicholas Negroponte, Being digital, 1995).

I’m (not) there argues on those three principles and tries to enhance their mutual relationship in order to create a journey of the identity from atoms to bit and backwards. This cycle starts when someone connects to the Wi-Fi internet access, the system assigns a unique IP address, that lasts for 8 hours, to the owner of that machine. In this moment I’m (not) there generates a unique virtual identity made of 2D pixels in a visual interface and, in real time, it is translated into movement of 3d pixels on a matrix.

Dataset, DataViz, Dataphys

Dataset

The data chosen for this project comes from the server of the University of the Republic of San Marino (UniRSM), more precisely from the report generated by the firewall of the internal internet connection service. Basically, the file is an excel table composed by 41 column and infinite rows, each one of them is respectively a different detail of a connection to an external website.

My virtual identity is translated into an unique IP address (the source IP address), it’s like my postal code. In order to go somewhere else, I pass through a border which is the NAT address (Network Address Translation) that makes my unique address international. Now that I’m ready to discover the world of information, I can reach my final destination, the Destination IP Address, in a specific span of time (Elapsed time).

Dataviz

The visual part of this work has been carried on with Processing. This power tool has made possible to retrieve the data from a .json file hosted on Google Spreadsheet, transform each Source IP address into an Identicon thanks to the Stichies_Identicon sketch realized by Martin Schneider.

periodic_table_of_stitchies An Identicon is an encrypted graphic representation of the information carried by an IP address, used to identify users without compromising their privacy. The father of Identicons is Don Park who gave them birth in 2007.

In a geographically mapped screen, the Identicon appears in correspondance of the university location and in the meanwhile the API from Telize.com (unfortunately now this service isn’t free anymore) translate the IP address into a geolocated position. Then, the Identicon moves to the final destination.

Dataphys


	I arranged a matrix of 3×3 cubes that represents the main geographical directions. The cube in the center represents the position of the university and it’s static while the external cubes move 1 mm forward every time a connection to a website reach its destination on that particular geographical location.

This has been realized connecting Processing to Arduino and the Adafruit servo shield which has been programmed in order to move 8 servo motors. The rotational movement of the servos has been converted in a linear one thanks to a toothed belt mounted on a wood stick.

I’m (not) there by Francesca Guzzini