DATAFIELD
Public Plaza Installation

DATAFIELD engages social behavior through data streams and individual communication as a hybridized public environment reactive to both physical and digital communal spaces. Traditional patterns merge with dynamic alterations of environment through use.
With the internet each individual becomes the center of their own universe which is the antithesis of public good. The goal should be to incite the public to take over space(s) throughout the city in ways similar to those by which the invisible streams of data, light, and sound inhabit all spaces.

How can technology be appropriated in a way that allows for the (re)creation of a public domain? Guerilla technologies allow for the parasitic use of existing data infrastructures and these technologies should become mobile place codes that allow for the parasitic reclamation of space for public use.

This new network of public spaces will allow for the dissemination and dismemberment of the invisible streams of data that network the world.

A democratization of space will be both art and commerce in this new physical internet. This will be done through the introduction of physical portals that interact directly with each person or group in a symbiotic way to re-appropriate or reconfigure the space at hand. This interactive nature will not use standard forms of data encrypted and then re-organized as electronic media, but will insert the misuse of the data cacophony to create an evolutionary space.

The internet has created a negative black hole of personal and private space. Instead of information getting sucked into it and lost, it spits it back out and re-inserts it back into the stream of data. This causes a ripple effect of how we communicate with each other. In social behaviors, what is known as "intimate space" is the distance between two people communicating with each other. The internet has reversed this intimate space.

In order to understand this new public space one must understand the discrepancy between physical proximity and intimacy as seen in digital space. In the digital, the individual identity is one that is contrived as necessary to create the possibility of intimate interaction within different communities. Not that this is different than in the physical world, however the digital allows the freer oscillation between the state of being masked and the state of being un-masked. Here digital proximity created through the use of portals and fixed infrastructures provide the framework for real or imagined emotional proximity.

Creating the ability for mass re-appropriation of public through digital methodologies will allow for the creation of a new state of physical proximity that belies the need for emotional proximity. In order to achieve this the guerilla technologies will allow for random physical proximity to be translated into a proximity of emotion that enhances the use of public space and provides an open ended framework for multiple physical communities to arise out of the digital intimacy. The key is the structuring of this appropriation must be through the creation of an open-ended and mutable concept. The malleability of the physical infrastructure will allow it to conform or reform physical space.

The new portals or DATAFIELDS engage social behavior through data streams and individual communication as a hybridized public environment reactive to both physical and digital communal spaces. Traditional patterns merge with dynamic alterations of environment through their use. The portals are reactive to their use and the data that they conduct, which then translate into their own physicality.

This incursion into public domain brings about the parallelism in behavior, communication and materialization that exist between the virtual and physical spaces. The portals intend to open the door and create the bridge existing between these two spaces.

Communication and data (energy) are the only physical inhabitants of the virtual space. By materializing this energy we are allowing that they also inhabit the physical space. More so, the energy that allows for the transformation of the environment is the direct result of the use and information that the individuals introduce into the network.

Datafields have no particular site; they could exist anywhere. The information that they process and by which they react is not linear. The network where the Datafields exist is a global one, so that they are not constraint by physical boundaries. Its information is not time restricted, for it has the capability to store and retain data and to utilize this data to (re)configure the environment at any given time. Cause and effect don't exist within the same timeframe.

The oxy masks in the landscapes of the Datafields can be used by any individual. Communication is established between different masks in the network at any given time. The data flowing through the network activates different degrees of data processing which translates in the oscillation of physicalities of the structure of the datafield.

Traditional patterns hybridized with dynamic alteration of environment and interaction with digital spaces and communities become the hallmark of this landscape as a digital/physical link.