‘Pst!’ is the surreptitious beckoning of attention and the acronym for Physical Space Tweets. It is an installation of 5 small storytellers placed in a public space giving an audience a glimpse into geo-tagged community topic feeds that unravel in real-time. For the Leeds Pavilion at Mediamatic’s Amsterdam Biennale 2009 one storyteller, the initial Pst!, chronicled life in Leeds through its twitter feed, aligning itself with the exhibitions aims to showcase a city’s local cultural scene.
The installation locates public social narrative by pulling data from Twitter’s geocode API using the open source Arduino electronic platform and the internet. The stories are printed on mini LCD screens that visually display 140 characters at a time. A ‘Pst!’ device provides a window directly into a geo-located public space. It relays a community by narrating its social activity and tells a global story by placing various cities side by side.
For the Unleashed Devices exhibition curated by TINT at Watermans Art Centre the installation relayed geographically bound community feeds from Los Angeles, New York, London, Kabul and Beijing.
Supported with a Grant for the Arts Award from the Arts Council of England.
2013
Conversations électriques, La Panacée, Montpellier, France. June – December.
2010
Invasion of Privacy, Notfamousyet, Oxford, 22/10 – 30/10
Unleashed Devices, Watermans Art Centre, London, 01/09 – 22/10
2009
Amsterdam Biennale 2009, Mediamatic, Leeds Pavillion,16/10/09-3/01/10
The original project pitch can be found here/