LF:TK

LiveForm:Telekinetics creates experiences in transgeographic temporary performance zones. No longer tied to a terminal screen and keyboard, nomadic groups of social hackers pack mobile feasts of sensors, antennas, robotics, food, and music and head out on the town. Networked telepresence picnic parties unfold in vacant lots, roadsides, cafes, apartments, alleyways, bars and hotel lobbies – wherever bandwidth is plentiful and security guards scarce.

Jeff Mann and Michelle Teran's LF:TK project is an artistic proposition for a re-imagination of networked reality. The events are not meant as entertainment for an audience, but as experimental and collaborative acts of creativity, research and development of new social forms, and interventions in public space.


Object Oriented Codes

Our understanding of what place or situation we are in, of how it functions and how we should act, is largely signified by the collection and configuration of recognizable objects and artifacts we find there. Everyday objects such as clothing, candles, saltshakers, statues, appliances, pictures, dolls, furniture, flowers, dishes, umbrellas, and an endless array of trinkets and gewgaws, possess symbolic functions in our discourse and rituals. They are the physical 'words' in a language of social actions that communicate and make connections of solidarity and exchange between friends, neighbours, colleagues, family and peers.

Increasingly, it becomes possible to imbue and animate these material objects with microelectronic cells of intelligent behaviour; the ability to remember, to imitate, to communicate, and even to replicate, at least informationally if not physically. On the surface, this has led to mere conveniences: cordless phones, miniaturized music players, and labour-saving kitchen aids, marketed as shiny baubles in a consumerist fantasy. But below this foil of rational usefulness and brand-aware identity purchase, we can begin to see the deeper outlines of an animistic breed of electronically augmented artifacts – hybrids of thing, gesture, and thought – with psychological dimensions ever more suited to participate as narrative elements in the complex unfolding dance of social and cultural creation.


Radio Reality

On top of the social codification of objects and place, is a more recent layer of meaning and value, a signification through an invisible electromagnetic overlay on the physical terrain. A tiny fraction of the spectrum of the airwaves at 2.4 GHz has been declared an open public commons – as though the airwaves were not already public property. In many cities around the world, we find a new phenomenon: a wild flowering of free wireless Internet access points dotting the urban landscape. Unnoticed by most passersby, what seems like an ordinary cafe or park bench is, to the sharp eye of the stumblers and chalkers, a charmed patch of fertile dataland.

On the one hand, these points can be considered as convenient oases, places to stop and re-fill one's inbox. But beyond that is a structural change to the city itself. With the Internet as its root system, an underground network of data tunnels is formed – wormholes that can instantaneously collapse the distance between end points, portals that may just as easily lead to a neighbour's yard as to the other side of the planet. They create a singularity of place – providing the possibility of live, multi-situated presence. The coalescence or overlaying of socially coded situations via real-time media – the restaurant with the science lab, the hotel lobby with the farmer's market – demand new forms and imaginings about social interaction and possible ways of relating.


Wake Up, Turn On, Tap In

What happens when the ordinary objects in our daily life wake up, turn on, and tap in to this upper electronic noosphere? Using wireless technologies as nerve nets, they reach out to form hybrid colonies and cultures. By incorporating TCP/IP, the digital genetic code of the Internet, they can feed on and into the larger streams of internet work cross-pollination provided by the wireless access points.

The electronic collapsing and interfolding of place happens then not only on the level of speech-based media – instant messaging, audio chat, and video conferencing – but through a subtext of digitally activated collections of artifacts and the amplification of their function as networks of social communication devices. it is within this context that the LiveForm:Telekinetics project proposes to investigate the potential for the invention of new untried processes of interaction, alternative social customs and modes of work and play.


Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe

For a down-under spring lunch on the grass, we choose the lawn of an apartment building beside a small creek. Three of us begin laying out a picnic blanket with batteries, cables, salami, hand-made microcontroller boards, cheese, and servo motors, while another uses a powerbook as a high-tech divining rod to scan the air for the mystical sign of the “linksys”. One of the building's tenants leans out his window to complement us on our choice of operating system – he's a Mac user too – and gives us some advice on where to get dental work done while visiting Perth. Network and software trouble means we only have a minute or two of contact with our friends lunching across town in a public park. Such is the fragile ecosystem of the connected environment. As we debate the morality of reconfiguring our unseen host's router settings, we sample our freshly-made saltshaker motion sensors, the chorus of robotic singing tea strainers and dancing corkscrews, and several bottles of fine Australian wine.

December in Amsterdam is no picnic, so we meet inside our favourite café Latei, the one with the shelves full of vintage flea-market items for sale. With the experience of several other events, our culinary skills have grown, the software is stable, and the network is solid. We have prepared two identical elaborate telemechanical menus; one we bring with us to the café in our wicker picnic basket, while the other is assembled in a friend's kitchen, across the ocean in Montreal. There are four place settings at each table. The cutlery is wired to sensors, and the dinner plates have clock dials for selecting different functions. The gestures and rhythms of eating produce a kinetic choreography realized in a spread of motorized objects, concocted from household items, and set on the table. The sensor data is also transmitted live over the network, and is reflected in identical objects on the other side. As the chef hands out plates of couscous in Amsterdam, we jam with the “forks in a purse” and the twirling playing cards in front of us, moving them in time to the disco jukebox. Through a small screen, we can see their twins in Montreal mimic the moves, with only a short delay. Our Canadian friends have control of the can-can kicking scissors, bowl of looking-straws, and other delights. Overtop of the music, we chat with them through the audio stream as they cook pierogies. Although our intention is not to put on a show for the café patrons, a few of the people at other tables wander over – observing the customary protocols of joining a group of strangers in public – and we make some new friends.


In the Kitchen at Parties

The organic and evolutionary nature of social networks and systems is also mirrored in the preparation process for the outings, an important part of the social ritual. The sharing of recipes, shopping, cooking, and party-planning is centred in the “LF:TK Test Kitchen Laboratory”. Avoiding top-down design, a collaborative evolution of social and technological elements and rituals is presented as a durational performance, an ongoing event, and as an integral part of the dissemination of the work. It is set up in a gallery space, as a working laboratory for the recombinant concoction of networked devices and dishes. Inverting the usual workflow from private artist studio to exhibition space, the gallery becomes a public workspace where installation elements are built up and then brought out into “real-life” situations in the urban environment.

The lab is complete with soldering irons, hot-plates, electric drills and drink mixers; detritus and debris, discarded objects found, bric-a-brac borrowed, refuse bought at flea markets, Taiwanese toys of questionable function, fruits and vegetables, gin and tonic. Op-amps, transducers, and microcontrollers, speakers, sensors and motors. String, wire, glue, and glowsticks. Strange smells. Weird people.

The artists occupy this space and invite guests and collaborating artists to help in the social construction of connected events. Extensive documentation of the events and experiments is published in the lftk.org wiki, including photographs, blog entries, and illustrated recipes with do-it-yourself instructions – a community cookbook for electric picnics.


Experiments in Social Networks

As both research lab and public intervention, LiveForm:Telekinetics investigates and creates opportunities for collaborative play and social interaction over distance. It acknowledges the importance of embodied gesture, body language, food, social rituals, and the preparation and physical environment of a gathering place, in creating shared experience.

The process of renewing and reimagining our social behaviours cannot be discovered by an objectivist scientific method, nor by departments of marketing professionals. It is necessarily a process of experimental irrationalism, a continuous and organic recombination of artifacts and rituals, a conversation without yet a language.


© 2005 Jeff Mann – This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

First published as: "liveform:telekinetics." Connected! Live Art. Ed. Sher Doruff. Amsterdam: Waag Society, 2005. 12-17.