Wormholes: Test your Reactions!Image copyright: Sari Tervaniemi
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Tampere City Center, Tampere, Finland 2008
Pixelache, Helsinki, Finland 2008 Wormholes was one of the two productions under a BUMPING INTO (NEW) MEDIA workshop held in Tampere University of Applied Sciences/School of Art and Media by me and artist Sari Tervaniemi. It is based on the original idea by researcher Taina Rajanti, conducted with a team consisting of a group of architecture and art students.
The idea of Wormholes is to develop means to create research tools and ways to represent contemporary structure and conception of space, where leaps from one reality into another can be made `directly`, disregarding geographical space. Wormholes production experiements with projections of virtual public space into physical public space, aiming to involve the public in free interaction over a theme relevant to the physical public space. The first concrete experiment took a shape of a simple online reaction game coded by me and projected on a pedestrian street in the centre of Tampere city at 5th of March. The game consisted of 10 rapidly changing YES/NO questions to be answered by pressing or hitting a large button installed on the street and a non-moderated web chat. People could participate to this gaming and chatting session in the Internet, on location and at the Tampere City Library where another game spot was arranged as well. The gaming session can be seen as an activist performance. It was designed as a comment to the plans of Finnish shopping center Stockmann to invade the public space by expanding it’s premises over the pedestrian street in question. The game also playfully questioned the way urban planning processes are conducted in the city. How democratic and transparent are those processes? The street act suggested new, direct ways of planning our mutual urban environment. During the evening the chatters threw ideas of the future use of the pedestrian street, criticized Stockmann’s plans and commented some technical problems of the game. All this was projected in the street. Wormholes team was: artist Mikko Lipiäinen researcher Taina Rajanti artist Jussi Koitela artist Timo Bredenberg artist Johannes Vartola architect Elina Alatalo architect Kaisu Närhi |