Counting Cars

Filed under Open Workshop, Ongoing Event, projects

Event Information

Artist: Will Pappenheimer + Chipp Jansen

Counting Cars is an interface Web site and consulting station which connects Manhattan traffic cams to local New York RSS Internet news of the moment via the vernacular consultation practice of “counting crows.”

Counting Cars is an interface Web site and consulting station that connects Manhattan traffic cams to local New York RSS Internet news of the moment via the vernacular consultation practice of “counting crows.” As a performance, I will assist participants to seek the moment’s situational wisdom for a question they might entertain. With the aid of computer equipment, we will consult a webcam from a number of live traffic cams and initiate a programmatic process that utilizes motion detection and frame comparison to count cars and movement within a certain period of time. A number between one and ten is generated as the “car” or “crow” count. This number corresponds to reading from the counting crows rhyme but it will also be used as the key number to search local Manhattan RSS news feeds. The car number is counted down the list to determine the designated story. The first few lines of this news caption is retrieved for the user as the understanding of the counting crows reading. It functions as advice or mood of the moment, both for the participant and for the city. The participant will be given a printout with the relevant text overlaid over a still of the selected traffic cam. The project is meant to explore a reinvented cultural form of prediction and situational consultation. Industrial and institutional practices of surveillance are redirected towards a sense of personal conditions, the portent of city events and the visual enchantment of a vigilant psychic watch.??

http://www.willpap-projects.com