Imagine this kinds technology will be utilized by people all over the world. Would we be more connected or the planet will be more exploited? Just the thought of flooding information that come along with world wide communication sometimes freaks me out.
02:00 AM Oct. 11, 2003 PT
NEW YORK -- A new Times Square art project lets people map their insider knowledge, memories and ideas about city landmarks with their PDAs and share those anecdotes online. Just don't confuse the project with the Zagat Survey -- you might get lost in a thicket of strangers' nostalgia.
Through Dec. 12, people wandering Times Square can wirelessly download a program called Personal Digital Pal, or PDPal, at a kiosk "beaming station" on 42nd Street. Once the program is loaded, users can record their wanderings by sketching the paths they took and writing commentary about the places they visited. When they get to a laptop or desktop computer, they pour all of this into a central website so others can appreciate myriad overlapping perspectives about the same sites.
"People using this will be like squirrels gathering nuts and bringing them back to the tree," said technologist Julian Bleecker, who created the project with Scott Paterson, an architect and artist, and artist Marina Zurkow. Adam Chapman, an artist and programmer, aided with PDPal's implementation.
"We want people to use their PDAs to harvest experiences and create another communal sense of the city," Bleecker said. "The initial program download is available through the kiosks, rather than online, because it forces people to go to this physical space to get started and have these experiences. Times Square may be the most tactile, vibrating and resonant place in the world."
This might sound like the vision some had of all places getting tagged with information by their GPS coordinates, but the artists decided not to use that technology. This was because of its relative scarcity and the difficulty of getting reception in Manhattan's canyons of concrete, glass and steel. The artists' decision was also an aesthetic choice.
"We wanted a more poetic application, rather than something so Cartesian," said Paterson. "People don't feel urban places in terms of longitude and latitude. One thing a lot of people talk about is the video arcades that used to be here, but they don't necessarily remember exactly where they were."
Times Square has been revitalized in recent years. New construction and a whitewash by New York's city hall replaced strip clubs and seedy bars with flashy retailers and street-level TV studios. Even landmarks aren't as immutable as they might appear: The Empire Theater on 42nd Street, known as the Eltinge Theatre when it opened in 1912, was lifted and slid on rollers 170 feet to the west in 1998.
Strollers through Times Square will be reminded once an hour to participate in PDPal by an animated mascot on the huge Panasonic screen at the south end of the crossroads. Panasonic is sponsoring PDPal along with Creative Time, a group that fosters convergences between arts and technology. An earlier incarnation of the program debuted at the sculpture garden of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
PDPal is part of a new technology thrust for the district, said Times Square Business Improvement District President Tim Tompkins. "For a hundred years, Times Square has been a showcase for huge-scale display technologies, but these kinds of micro-scale technologies have only been in people's pockets for 10 years," he said.
Tompkins said he would love to meet with technologists and artists to find more ways to use cell phones, PDAs or other devices to guide tourists through the neighborhood and give them a glimpse of the place's history. "I would also love to see how these devices could be used for interactive functions with the mega-signs," he said.
That mainstream vision of Times Square as a canvas of lights, however, drives home the artists' point. Zurkow said that before working on PDPal she remembered Times Square as a "place to get fake IDs" when she was a teenager. And the project would have been just as exciting in lesser-known neighborhoods, she said.
"Times Square is where so many issues are concatenated, but to think to say that one neighborhood represents New York City more than any other is anathema to the project."
. Imagine a life as a single attractive girl in a family-oriented compound. Imagine going into the city to meet friends and no taxi is gonna take you home after mid-nite. Imagine being drunk and not able to go home/ no one will drop you off home...Imagine...Just by thinking, it already makes me sad...
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