Description
David Birchfield, Kelly Phillips, Assegid Kidané, David Lorig · Arizona State University · NIME 2006
A permanent interactive sound work installed at a public transit stop in Tempe, Arizona: a blue panelled wall studded with sensors, topped by a solar panel, with a bench in front of it. People waiting for the bus trigger and shape sound by approaching, moving along it and touching it. There is no start, no instructions and no audience — only whoever happens to be there.
The paper is a case study about the conditions rather than the interaction: diverse and unselected audiences, weather, vandalism, power, maintenance, and the fact that a public artwork has to work for someone who did not choose to encounter it and will not read a label. That constraint set is the closest thing in this collection to a real-world deployment, and the reason to keep a 2006 paper in view.
images: Birchfield, Phillips, Kidané & Lorig, “Interactive Public Sound Art: a case study”, NIME 2006 (CC BY 4.0)