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Come Out & Play 2006 in New York City
You Are Not Here is an urban tourism mash-up. This persistent game takes place in the streets of New York and invites participants to become meta-tourists on an excursion through the city of Baghdad.
Location: Around New York City Passers-by stumble across the curious You Are Not Here signs in the street. The YANH street-signs provide the telephone number for the Tourist Hotline, a portal for audio- guided tours of present day Baghdad destinations in NYC. Through investigation of these points and with or without the aid of a downloadable map, New Yorkers are transformed into tourists of contemporary Baghdad. Site-specific access codes entered through the Tourist Hotline provide visitors with access to audio guides to the current site that they have discovered and instructs them how to further explore the city by referring them to YouAreNotHere.org. Through the website, visitors can get their own mashed-tourist map of Baghdad, NYC with a full tour guide to all of the must-see locations. You Are Not Here tries to expose the contrasts and the similarities between two mashed cities - an active representation. We are consuming global information on a daily basis: a tourist visit demands a higher level of commitment and identification with a place than a habitual commute. YANH provides participants with a fragmented tourist experience, which provokes a critical view of urban space and it’s subjection to media and politics. YANH is not a classic psychogeographical project, though it does refer to Situationist ideas and to the tension between different methods of urban exploration. A contemporary reading of Situationist texts will question not only space itself but its mediation. In a reality in which urban space is deformed by smart bombs and distorted through information technology, YANH examines options for a distant dérivé as a counter- action to passive information consumption habits. Tourism becomes the platform to explore the vast distances between a guest and a colonialist, between a visit and an occupation… and walking becomes the medium through which to explore such a distant space. Through such exploration, YANH hopes to return a human scale to current Designers: Thomas Duc, Kati London, Dan Phiffer, Ran Tao, Moshe Zer-Aviv Thomas Duc is an artist and an engineer From Marseilles. His work explores the virtual simulacra inducing real-world events. He has a Masters degree in Computer Science and Computer Engineering. He is currently working towards his second Masters at the Interactive Telecommunication Program in New York. His past experience include working for the CNRS in France and other brain development labs in the USA. He has also been media consultant for several news agencies in Brazil. He is currently working at the Hemispheric institute of performance and politics. Kati London is an artist, cultural events and interdisciplinary arts curator and developer. Her work explores social interaction within public space. She has a BFA degree in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently working towards her Masters at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She has been an artist in residence at the Bildwerk Eisch Glass program in Frauenau, Germany. She has exhibited her installations, paintings and sculpture in Providence, New York, Rome and Germany. She was awarded the Caroline Palermo Schulz Scholarship in Landscape Architecture for a project at the Coliseum in Rome, Italy that re-imagined the historic site transformed as a green performance space. As a cultural curator Kati has organized several outdoor art exhibitions and produced large-scale outdoor events at cultural institutions such as an annual participatory dance and storytelling series, interactive tours in botanic gardens, an annual reading series, concerts and overseen several artist-in-residency programs. As a developer, Kati managed the first online fine art auctions at Artnet.com and is a co-founder of the International Archive of Children’s Art, a digital archive of over 40,000 historical and contemporary images. Dan Phiffer is currently pursuing a master’s degree at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Dan is a programmer from California who finds great pleasure in exploring the technical boundaries of online media, physical exploration and the opportunities created when the two compliment each other. Since graduating from Harvey Mudd College in 2003, he has applied the pragmatic scaffolding of his CS degree within a creative/artistic context. Since his first project building a content managed website for the elementary school he attended, Dan has found the web to be a fertile medium where aesthetics and code intermingle comfortably. After graduating from Mudd and a year of working as technical lead at a web design consultancy called Hello Design, Dan has moved on to freelancing, enjoying the opportunity to work as a generalist on both user interface design as well as its technical implementation. Dan has a continued interest in the hacking and re-appropriation of spaces, online and offline. His Greasemonkey script called Wikipedia Animate was chosen from a number of entries visualizing change to entries in the popular online encyclopedia and was published in O’Reilly’s Greasemonkey Hacks in 2005. Recent work on several apping-based projects have sought to bring the relevance of the physical into the digital realm and the greater depth of online participation into the physical. Charles Pratt is a student interested in the infusion of the fine and performing arts with participatory and interactive techniques. He has an Associates from SUNY Delhi and a Bachelors in History from SUNY Binghamton. He is currently working on a Masters at NYU in Interactive Telecommunications. Ran Tao is an engineer and an artist who is interested in social interactions in both the real and the virtual world. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree at ITP from NYU. She was born in China, but grew up in Minnesota. In her free time, Ran loves to paint, read and go dog watching in the park. Mushon Zer-Aviv is a designer, a teacher and a net artist, interested in exploring new concepts of territory and borders and the way they are shaped through politics, culture, globalization and the world wide web. In the past 15 years Mushon have created projects involving design, animation, new media and comics. He holds a Bds degree from Bezalel academy’s Graphic Design department and is currently working on a Masters in New Media from NYU. He is active in the Israeli & international new media scenes, as a desk member for Maarav and Concept magazines, and as a contributor to Pixelsurgeon.com magazine. Mushon curated the BD4D (By Designers For Designers) Tel-Aviv event series through 2003-2004, and have initiated the Upgrade Tel-Aviv new media gatherings series as part of the Upgrade international network. In early 2005 Mushon took part in forming ‘The Israeli Designers Community’, a part of the ICOGRADA. His work has appeared in several publications among which, The Venice Biennial’s Gluebalize Magazine, and in exhibitions in worldwide, like Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, 2001; OFFF Festival, Barcelona 2003 and 2004; and Europrix Top-Talent Award Festival 2004, Vienna. He has been speaking in several venues about his work and about new aspects of media awareness. Both his creative work and his contribution to the community have awarded him several prizes. Since 2002 he’s been teaching design and new-media in the Shenkar college. In 2002 he opened ‘Shual’ (Shual.com) design studio. Mushon currently lives with his wife and cat in New York. |
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