Conflux Festival 2010: Saturday October 9

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)

INVESTIGATION: An investigation of a journey around the perimeter, into the confinements and curiousity that is Manhattan. This is a walking investigation into place, through the practice of displacement. A feat of amateur endurance, a journey of some 60,000 steps that take me back to where I started, I attempt ... (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)

Participants will use GPS units to track their passage to, from, and around Conflux installations. The paths people take will be downloaded from their GPS units and translated into line drawings layered on top of one another. The resulting line drawing images will be projected onto a wall to create ... (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

NYC's urban forest needs you! In this workshop, you will learn to identify the city's top 40 species, then go out and map a block using our rolling tape measures and field sheets to collect highly accurate location data on trees and treebeds. We will experience a shift in perspective ... (More)

Happy Day addresses growing urban poverty by asking residents to donate gently used children's clothing that will be redistributed to anyone needing it. At the Happy Day booth, I will collect clothes and redistribute them both from the booth and through community organizations working with low income families.

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)

The Animal Broadcasting System is an interactive, networked service designed to help facilitate meaningful interaction between human and non-human urban dwellers. Through a variety of interdisciplinary, inter-species programming, The Animal Broadcasting System (TABS) hopes to promote greater understanding of urban ecological systems (BiodiverCITY) and more equitable, harmonious relationships between their ... (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)

DAYDREAM is an evolving dispersion of solitary nighttime dreams into urban daytime realities. Dreams submitted online by the public, prior to and during Conflux, will take form in the streets and public spaces of the marked Conflux area. Their manifestation might be blatant (a smiling man dressed as a crocodile) ... (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)

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)

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)

ULS is a collective of urban observationists who are driven by a wide range of research questions investigating human behavioural patterns within the urban fabric, extracting detailed pleasures that are unique to city life and are the sources for non-linear urban story telling. The ULS will employ situationist strategies and ... (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)

Wetlands are critical in combating climate change; they store more carbon than any other habitat. Yet, we continue to bury these vibrant ecosystems to serve the flight of capital. All three airports in NYC, for example, are built on filled in coastal marshland. Also, Tompkins Square at one time consisted ... (More)

The Architectural Theatrical Tales seeks to challenge the dissemination of architectural discussion by unifying public performative activity in the form of architectural theater and real-time responsive work. The participants will engage in a series of exercises in the form of sketches and discussions. These exercises will enable the group of ... (More)

In a Generation X community garden on ( East 4th street between B&C) a fantastical, generative model for a city composed of re-purposed art,building blocks, and recycled materials all painted silver will be built and re-built in and around new and existing plant life by children who live in public ... (More)

Messages come in many forms. An embrace, a whisper, a folded note, a text message. Sure you can hug someone with your eyes closed. But can you write a letter... to a stranger?

Participants will sit down at a table with a pen, a sheet of paper, and a postmarked ... (More)

As we psycho-locate ourselves through the streets of Manhattan, our senses are tuned to take in what is important, and leave out stimuli that are not. Our project focuses on the coincidental conversations that are typically ‘left out’ of our perception of the city by presenting performative, narrative voice to ... (More)

"To map unknown terrain, to create new places, to defer perception, we need fantasy, imagination and a joyful technology of foolishness."

Ryan Ringer's Let’s Get Together for Coffee (aka The l'il Coffee Truck) is a mobile coffee house, performance stage and vehicle for urban exploration which takes the form ... (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)

Developments in the field of phychogeography advance rapidly and radically. In former times the discipline required mental capabilities such as concentration and imagination, nowadays mobile phones provide us with easy-to-use viewing tools to percieve a multitude of fictive realities, anywhere we are, instantly. The technique causing this 'progression' is called ... (More)

This project will involve participants in a mapping excursion that will result a collective time-based drawing. Using the boundary of Conflux as a limitation, walk anywhere within the contained space for exactly 30 minutes, thinking of your path as a drawn line. When time is up, take a picture of ... (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)

This “Ministry of Walking” event is a participatory walk in the East Village, Tompkins Square Park area. The project offers an experience that leads to participants’ increasing attentiveness to the physical action of walking, in conjunction with awareness of sensory and (meta)physical attributes of the site itself – sound, geography, ... (More)

Mobile Pep Squad is a rolling-skating group of five women. Wearing purple shorts and carrying a boombox, they skate together through Tompkins Square Park, rolling up to unsuspecting people and cheering them on in their daily activities. This random and spontaneous burst of positivity and pep will change the both ... (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)

Goal: Identify areas of energy use that require collective action in NYC. Context: I was an author on the NY Biofuels Roadmap 2010, which determined NYS sustainable fuel production. The results are humbling - the most intensive harvest of biomass across NYS can sustainably produce only 5% of NY energy ... (More)

Indeterminate Hikes involves a custom smartphone app that guides participants on urban hikes & encourages them to navigate, question, and document the possibilities of hybrid ecology—spaces for “nature” or wildness—in a globalized, urban space. Users assess their approximate coordinates in relation to "Lookouts" embedded within IH maps that indicate points ... (More)

Pathos/Pothos is a streetside ecological intervention. “PLEASE HELP my houseplant clean the air. Donations of carbon dioxide appreciated.” That's Beitiks sitting there, on that bucket. The houseplant, a pothos, has been determined by NASA to remove pollutants and toxins from the air. Don't be afraid to approach. Exhalations met with ... (More)

Curb Exchange is a mixed reality audio- and print-based storytelling project set in New York City’s Wall Street financial district. Inspired by the 2008 stock market crash, New York City history and experimental narrative forms, Curb Exchange uncovers forgotten or lost stories from Wall Street’s past that may provide clues ... (More)

This two hour ride will begin in Washington Square, head west to the Hudson River, south to the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, then north along the East River, returning to Washington Square Park. Along the way we will stop to examine the geology that is just under the surface ... (More)

Chopstick Antenna is a workshop for making an RFID reader sniffer. Participants will create a short-range RFID tag made from easily obtainable materials (which will be provided), including magnet wire, an LED, solder, glue, and a chopstick. They will be able to use it to scan readers around the city ... (More)

We live with nature all of the time. Too often we ignore, or more harm nature. How can we express our affection, rather than our cruelty? The Huggable Nature is a workshop for community to create kinetic, audio, and robotic interfaces from craft materials and hacked toys that allow them ... (More)

The project is a stroll using dogs as the medium through which participants’ routes are determined. Each participant is paired with a dog and instructed to let the dog lead them through the city. The participant must follow the dog’s cues, in order to determine the path. Participants are asked ... (More)

Within the space plotted out for the festival, we as the three dancers in JerKiLaNa, will create a spontaneous dance that maps our experience of the outlined urban landscape. This will include structures, people, space, witnessed interactions that we observe and discover while traversing the areas.
Over an extended ... (More)

The Hip-Hop Word Count is a searchable ethnographic database built from the lyrics of over 40,000 Hip-Hop songs from 1979 to present day.

The Hip-Hop Word Count describes the technical details of most of your favorite hip-hop songs. This data can then be used to not only figure out interesting ... (More)

Reverend Billy and Savitri D of the Church of Life After Shopping discuss their use of prophetic language, religious imagery and mystical shape shifting in their efforts to rewild the commons. Outdoor pilgrimage to follow. (audio/video presentation, lecture and pilgrimage)

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)

Many Conflux events explore the city through crowdsourced data collection. The DuKode Studio’s CONFLUX COMPOSITE workshop will show how to combine crowdsourced data with infrared satellite data to create a multilayered, composite map from soil to atmosphere. Participants will learn about: • obtaining infrared satellite data from sources like the ... (More)

Medium: live radio broadcast from WBGO Jazz, 4 actors as pedestrians, approx. 6 cars and participating store fronts all playing a live jazz broadcast on the radio. For approx. 1 hour during the Festival. I'm proposing a performance in which a group of volunteers in approximately 6 cars, drive around ... (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)

“Soft Soft Cat Cat” is a public installation of video of Jackie, the cat, in the act of being petted and purring. “Soft Soft Cat Cat” takes the co-evolution of animals and humans and places the benefits of this reciprocity into the public sphere. As long-time New Yorkers, we want ... (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)