VIEWS OF LINZ - CLICKABLE PUBLIC SPACE

http://www.servus.at/clickscape98

28 August to 13 September
Daily from 9:00 p.m. to midnight


Visit Linz and change the city with a mouse click.

The Stadtwerkstatt transforms the Danube area around the Nibelungen Bridge into a Clickable Public Space. A new node is created here at the crossroads of the city, where the routes leading from north to south and from east to west intersect. Interventions are made in this public space via the world wide data networks.
A space for encounters between the real world and the virtual world opens up here. Linz becomes the meeting place between cyberspace and reality.

With ClickScape98 - Views of Linz - electronic visitors online can click into this space and communicate with Linz. Lights in the EA Generali office building may be turned on and off with mouse clicks. Light signals appear on the facade. Sounds may be deployed on the bridge - an audio experience. The illuminated sign scrolling across the front of the Stadtwerkstatt serves as a display for texts sent into this space.


Creating Views of Linz

Clickable Public Space - Clickscape 98 - Electronic visitors to the city of Linz are given a new urban experience. Using mouse clicks and the keyboard, they can create their own views of Linz. As tourists they are not merely passive admirers of the local sights, but may become actively involved in creating them. The visitor's creative activity may then be viewed via live images from Webcams transmitting the results of the interventions back to the data network. This enables the Internet tourist to create his or her own personalized "postcard."

For the inhabitants of Linz, on the other hand, the electronic visitor is not just another hit in the Web statistics, but actually becomes visibly, audibly, legibly perceptible. Observers on site can experience live how visitors come to Linz via the Internet.
A large public space becomes an interface. Images, sounds, texts that are fed into the Internet do not just vanish in cyberspace. Nor do they appear merely on the surface of the computer interface. They are actually perceptible as interventions in real physical space. One space expands into the other. The little surface of the monitor expands into the three-dimensional space of the city. Physically real spaces and virtual spaces and with their inhabitants become interwoven.

- you can use: images, sounds, texts:


Image

Pixel graphics on the facade of the EA Generali office building

Every window at the front of the EA Generali office building is equipped with a light source the can be switched on and off. A Webcam is focused on the building. It transmits a live image to the Internet. When a visitor clicks on one of the windows in the building with the mouse, this triggers a switch that turns the light either on or off. In this way, the front of the building can be decorated like pixel graphics. 8 floors with 13 windows each, a perpendicular rectangle with 104 lights that can be turned on and off forms the drawing board. The electronic visitor to Linz creates his or her own picture, leaving a personal code behind on the building. Patterns, ornaments, signs appear. Even animations are possible. Several people at a time can playfully participate in developing each ongoing image composition by separately clicking on the windows. However a Web interface matrix also makes it possible to design an image for the facade and send it to the building as a whole.

Building art in the era of the information society with its digital and electronic network world.


Sound

A sound runs across the bridge

A pressure chamber loudspeaker is mounted on each lamp post on the east side of the Nibelungen Bridge. Each of these loudspeakers can be individually controlled via the Internet. A selection of sounds are available at the Web site, which may be assigned to the loudspeakers in any way that the electronic visitor desires. This enables electronic visitors in Linz to send acoustic messages to passers-by on the bridge. There is also a sequencer on the Web page. Net users can use it to write their own compositions with the available sounds and hear them during a virtual walk across the bridge before sending them off for a performance. The reactions of the passers-by may be observed by means of several Webcams on the same side of the bridge.

Net visitors can take a sonorous walk across the bridge with passers-by.

The samples were prepared by Marc Vojka, Klaus Hollinetz and Markus Seidl.


Text

"Wild Ivy" - the electronic moving illuminated sign on the Stadtwerkstatt - growing profusely.

Using an input interface in the Web browser, electronic visitors to Linz can post a text to the moving sign. A message from the Internet to the people of Linz on site. Texts entered by electronic visitors are lined up in the input field of the Web site, where all Net users can see them, and wander one after another across the sign. It is similar to a chat. Another Webcam is focused on the Stadtwerkstatt building, tracking both the "Wild Ivy" and the people in the square in front of the building.

The invisible person from cyberspace speaks up in the urban landscape of Linz.

... Team ... feedback ... Image ... Sound ... Text ... Start