Datagrove: Future Cities Lab

San Jose, California, 2012

Nataly Gattegno and Jason Johnson’s design practice, Future Cities Lab, is tackling twenty-first century issues of social, cultural, and environmental performance through a preoccupation with the challenges and opportunities of the information age. Many of their projects operate at the scale of interactive installations incorporating lighting, sound, robotic, and sensing technology and involve specialists from a wide range of fields, including interaction designers, architects, technologists, digital craftspeople, and urban ecologists.

The project featured here, Datagrove, was a commissioned installation for the ZERO 1 Seeking Silicon Valley 2012 Biennial, and installed in the courtyard of the historic California Theatre, home of the San Jose Opera. Datagrove “feeds” on information from its urban environment, transforming virtual data and atmospheric phenomena into variable intensities of light and sound. The installation’s luminescent fibers bend and move with the force of surrounding breezes and respond to the proximity of visitors with seemingly murmured sonic cadences. It aggregates local trending Twitter feeds, translates them into light and sound, and redistributes them through an array of audio speakers and LCD lighting displays. To this extent, Datagrove functions as a form of social media, or what Gattegno and Johnson call a “whispering wall,” retrieving the invisible data of the Internet via smart phones, translating that data into light and sound, and then redistributing it into public space. Produced using advanced digital fabrication technologies as well as custom electronics such as sensors, text-to-speech modules, LEDs, and LCDs, Datagrove is capable of sensing and responding to its users in real time.

Datagrove aspires to deliver on the prescient predictions of Norbert Weiner in the 1950s and Gordon Pask in the 1960s by inventing a human experience defined by the dynamism and contingency of information networks. In this way, Future Cities Lab operates at the vanguard by exploiting advanced technologies, social media, and the Internet itself with design provocations that challenge the conventions of how we work and how we play in twenty-first century public space.

Datagrove installation at ZERO 1 Seeking Silicon Valley 2012 Biennial. Courtesy Future Cities Lab. Photo: Peter Prato.