Conflux Festival 2010: Sunday October 10

Stephanie McCarty and Andrew Siu designed a musical instrument that responds to simple physical interactions between user and device to create a musical loop or score, allowing for those who use it, to physically experience the wonder of musical composition. The Interactive Audio Device produces tones and looping compositions dependent ... (More)

Sculpture 1.2 is a autonomous multimedia object aware of her location in space in time. During the festival, Sculpture 1.2 will be installed as an administrative desk in the Conflux headquarters. Every hour Sculpture will take a picture of her surroundings and send it as a tweet to @iamsculpture along ... (More)

Barcode Cinema is a collaborative project of Kristin Lucas and Lee Montgomery.

Lucas and Montgomery will travel to the geographic locations of several geotagged images in the vicinity of Conflux Festival and physically tag each site with custom designed 2D barcode stickers. With the use of a ... (More)

Tompkins’ Ghosts is an audio-visual excavation of the layers of human experience in Manhattan's East Village. A map, available online or at Conflux HQ, will mark locations throughout the neighborhood. At each location, participants will use their own smart phones to stream corresponding audio narratives from the project website.

Just ... (More)

The installation that I show combines a large-scale drawing with a drawn animation. The animation will be projected into the drawing and together they will simultaneously undergo a metamorphosis. This metamorphosis will show the development of people into robot-like figures and their environment from nature into cities. The animation, showing ... (More)

Contemporary geographies have come to be overlaid, augmented, and reimagined with the introduction of digital information networks. What does it mean, then, to apply the notion of psycho-geography amidst this new information-infused reality? We propose to challenge city inhabitants to an informational derive. Unplanned, unregulated, with out clear intentions, abandoned ... (More)

From 12 noon on October 9, 2010 until 12 noon on October 10, 2010 I will stand in Times Square holding a sign reading, “I cannot compete with this.”

The texture of our urban environment is dominated by an escalation of competing advertisements. At the height of this escalation, Times ... (More)

Flora Legium, emulating the practice of an 18th century botanical illustrator, will compile a florilegium of plants of the East Village. Working with her assistant, Marie Ucci, who will locate and collect specimens, she will draw the plants in their native habitats: a crack in the sidewalk, a community garden, ... (More)

Nathaniel Lieb and Sarah Nelson Wright will leave 33 (the average circle of friends) anatomically correct hand-cast plaster hearts in public places around the East Village, hidden at points of interest in the built environment. Some of the color-coded hearts will be given away at headquarters as well.

Each heart ... (More)

Driven to create public artworks that occupy mobile space, I plan to use QR Codes installed on sign posts as a gateway. I'm interested in using cell phones as a venue for exhibiting art. I view this venue as a virtual space.

Toying with the idea of artworks as virtual ... (More)

The World Is My 8th St. will relocate historical, personal and shared narrative within the confines of a single neighborhood in Manhattan. A collection of urban stories from history, literature, pop culture and personal accounts will be commingled and re-presented as an interactive tour that will explore the presence and ... (More)

The Test Dérive project is an experiment in urban remapping and creative psychogeography, looking to bring art as experience back to Soho.

As part of Test Dérive, artists remap Soho by creating experiential "nodes" as jumping off points to alternative pathways and ideas.

Nodes may ... (More)

Love Box, a free iPhone app, lets you explore the sexual politics of the East Village both by listening to and recording site-specific audio.

The East Village has always been a place where people have experimented with sex and struggled for sexual liberation and identity. Love Box allows you to ... (More)

This project uses 2D barcodes, which can be read by an ordinary smartphone. These barcodes can be used to trigger web links on the phone, such as opening a browser to a specific web page or opening a youtube video. Placing a 2D barcode on an object in NYC has ... (More)

For 24 hours, starting at 9am on Saturday October 9th, we will conduct an investigation into perceived neighborhood boundaries around the Conflux festival area. We will repeatedly ask the same question: "what neighborhood is this?". Each response will be mapped, and immediately uploaded to an online map showing color coded ... (More)

Riffing on the idea of the hobo as part of a collective of migrant entities, Urban Hobo is the presentation of communicative symbols to a privy few who may use these symbols to their benefit. In the city, advertisements made with street chalk pop up on sidewalks, walls, and streets. ... (More)

This project explores the ways we navigate the social terrain of our urban environment. Conversacube is a small box that forms the centerpiece of any conversation. The box sits in the middle of all conversants, with one face facing each person. Each side has a small screen and a hidden ... (More)

Locus Solus is an auditory work examining the contrasting sensations of private and public space through the practice of listening.

Collecting field recordings from the Conflux Festival territory boundaries, a series of pieces will be created in the studio reflecting on the hidden, unusual sounds that can be ... (More)

This is an installation on the sidewalk that invites passerby to stop for a moment to open up the possibility of engaging in a brief, yet deeply meaningful conversation with a complete stranger. Question cards can be picked at random from a table that a stranger can sit at. Examples ... (More)

Public Utility Trail Network re-interprets the marks ConEdison and other public utilities paint onto sidewalks around the city as trail markers in a network of hiking/walking trails for pedestrians. For Conflux, this project will map out trails around the HQ and in the East Village. Small, temporary signs will be ... (More)

Freespace is collecting spaces that have meaning to you. May it be the site of a first kiss, an odd meeting of spaces that you think is interesting, or a rethinking of a space that is familiar to all. We are interested in the everyday space, the space that once ... (More)

Tektonomastics is the study of building names. At www.tektonomastics.org we have begun locating and documenting named residential buildings. For Conflux we will carry out our first field workshop, to conduct an in-depth study around the festival neighborhood. On Oct 9th we'll train and lead an investigation to catalog all named ... (More)

Using QR Codes(magnets) I will add layers of information to specific geolocations w/in the designated 5-block radius. Participants can use their smart mobile devices to decode each tag to access additional information associated with their location. In some instances this will be a simple text note which will prompt the ... (More)

Spare Room will explore the designated community by monetarily contributing to unsuspecting people's unexpected parking tickets. If the ticket is in an envelope we will open the envelope and insert cash money into the envelope and discretely flee the scene. If the ticket is a single slip of paper we ... (More)

Cities are constantly being erased, rewritten, and demolished. Rapid gentrification has become almost mythic in the Lower East Side. This elusive need for improvement surrounds the urban pedestrian on a daily basis. A nagging sense of loss, along with living in a constant construction zone, has become the state of ... (More)

Datascape is a vehicle-based augmented reality storytelling platform that enables artists, researchers, community groups and others to narrate their communities and physical spaces through interactive virtual worlds that are laid on top of the physical world. At Conflux we invite festival goers, artists, and the general public to step inside ... (More)

[here][now] is an ongoing exploration of the real and the virtual in the context of urban space.

We begin with workshops. We ask people to draw their personal perceptions of space. In groups, we overlay these ways of seeing to find shared experiences. Participants extract common elements and translate them ... (More)

Sign up to play the game “City Board Game”- from the performance art book Living Exercises. Rolling a die and following a few simple rules, participants will embark on a fun journey that transforms the east village into a life size board game. Through a mix of strategy and chance, ... (More)

Fire Escapes reveals and revels in the timbre of one of the most ubiquitous structures in New York City. A unique and enveloping soundtrack is generated through a fundamental element of the urban fabric.

6 drummers will play two fire escapes on E. 7th as instruments. Performers will be ... (More)

I will walk through Tomkins Square Park with cymbals, a painted crutch, and a 100% copper whiskey still discussing the original Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and how it relates to our current economic, environmental and social conditions.

Following I will be raffling off a whiskey bottle at the barney ... (More)

In Speak to Me, we created a locative cinema game in which urban storyteller creates a storyline with the mindset of being each object encountered in the a street. The success of the game relies on the ability of the storyteller to creatively answer how can he embody the space ... (More)

New York, full of the hustle and bustle of strangers, actually contains a lot of empty space. I propose a new use of this kind of space to create new experiences for NYers who might otherwise not interact with each other. I developed Lasergames http://blog.litstudios.com/index.php?/archives/5-LaserGames.html and plan to use equipment ... (More)

Intersection is a temporary, large scale, public urban spectacle that aims to more finely attune New Yorkers to the distinctions between their city's social and urban territories.

The project observes the relationship between urban territories; communities that inhabit them and how this relates to the use of its public space, ... (More)

When precisely does the day begin? When does all the night drain away? As the days of the year get shorter, Dawn School is a research project that endeavors to awaken the days themselves with illustrated investigations into their light and shadow-filled ways. Initiated as a part of this summer's ... (More)

The Society of Urban Naturalists {S.U.N.} is an international open collective of urban investigators dedicated to unravel the hidden relationships between nature, city and humanity. S.U.N. Has developed experimental toys using tokens found on-site and a set of rules to engage the public, protocols for observing human/nature interconnections and forms ... (More)

This project raises the issue of public vs. private space, and how monuments function to map memory onto physical forms in space. It will take place at the New York City Marble Cemetery, which is open to the public only three days a year, two of which coincide with Conflux. ... (More)

I propose to temporarily mount transducer speakers on objects and surfaces in public space. These speakers transfer sound vibrations to the surface/object and turn it into a speaker. The quality of the sound is effected by the size and density of the object. These speakers are small, desecrate and very ... (More)

Sara Mulry & Rob Davidson shall make their way from The Rover SOHO to various points such as a coffee, shop, a book store, a bodega along the path to Conflux HG. At each stop Sara & Rob will slowly transform in to their Burlesque personas Simone L'Mew & Faux ... (More)

Over the course of the three days, I will record to analog cassette tape, both the sounds of the conference and the surrounding five block zone. On the Sunday, I will perform a live collage of the sounds using multiple cassette players and a homemade stringed instrument. The collage will ... (More)

In the 1920’s, they called Second Avenue “Knish Alley.” From Houston to 14th Street, the strip was thick with Yiddish theaters and dairy restaurants that served up rich stories and hot potato pockets.

We’ll pay homage to the actors of the Yiddish stage and the humble knish with a processional ... (More)

ForwardsBackwards is a palindromic performance for 1 vocalist, VHS playback and synchronous audio which questions the impossibility of time travel, and describes measures taken which have resulted in the undeniable traversal of the temporal plane.

Over the course of about 20 minutes, ForwardsBackwards relates 2 anecdotes: one about the ... (More)