David Carroll

Recent Exhibition

“1000 Cell Phones”

1000 Cell Phones, FIGMENT 2009, Governor’s Island, New York City

1000 Cell Phones, Synthetic Times 2008, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

David Carroll, Benjamin Bacon, Sven Travis and Haiyan Huang with students and faculty from Parsons (New York), Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua (Beijing)

USA and China, 2008, mobile media installation

Visualizing Invisible Identities

Emerging out of an institutional collaboration between Parsons The New School for Design (New York City) and the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University (Beijing), the interactive artwork, 1000 Cell Phones, exposes the invisible conversation that constantly occurs between the networked devices we carry throughout our nomadic urban daily life.

The installation consists of multiple displays that playfully visualize and animate discovered Bluetooth devices within its situated space. Devices are represented as abstract discs in dimensional screen space, colored by transcribing the devices’ unique identifiers (MAC address) to distinctive colors (RGB HEX value).  This simple but evocative effect emphasizes how an ID number expressed as a one-of-a-kind color not only makes visible a distinguishing feature of our portable networked device, but also reshapes its obfuscated technical datum into an aesthetic and coherent design object. It asks us if this machine identifier expresses our persona and personality, perhaps without our knowledge and complete understanding of the implications.

In addition, discovered device names animate across the screens, emphasizing the transient nature of the tracking devices we carry, unwittingly broadcasting a unique identifier for anyone or anything willing to listen. In most cases, these names are the default brand and model of the mobile device, but many users customize their device name to a moniker even more revealing and interesting to contribute towards the installation. By installing the artwork in a social space, such as a café or lobby, 1000 Cell Phones captures the unseen dialogue between mobile phones and laptops broadcasting their Bluetooth identities while owners lurk and socialize. When participants realize how their device names render on the displays, they often engage in the intervention by altering their settings to affect the textual content on the visualization. In these moments, the conversations between the invisible and visible, technical and aesthetic, surveillance and dissemination, machines and people all become intertwined in a simple but enjoyable expression.

The mobile media installation, 1000 Cell Phones, developed out of a collaborative partnership between MFA and BFA Design & Technology faculty and students at Parsons The New School for Design and Information Design graduate and undergraduate faculty and students at the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University. The Parsons team, led by David Carroll, designed the initial concept of the artwork and built the core custom software tools, including the Bluetooth scanner, device database server and Flash visualization engine, in New York, before visiting Tsinghua in late May 2008. Then, in close collaboration with Tsinghua academy faculty and students, the artwork was completed and refined for its debut in Beijing. Indeed, Parsons and Tsinghua faculty and students co-authored certain crucial aspects of the visualization and interaction software code.

1000 Cell Phones debuted at Synthetic Times 2008, National Art Museum of China, on June 6 through July 3, 2008 as part of the international new media art exhibition and Beijing Olympics Culture Project.

• High Quality Video
• Photos from FIGMENT 2009
• Photo gallery
• Synthetic Times website
• Synthetic Times Photo gallery

Student Work

Exemplary work developed by students in studio courses and special projects.

• Freshmen Programming with Processing
• Muzzi, digital pet/music player hybrid
• Info Wraps, mobile informatics

Core Studio 1: Interaction, Fall 2007

Freshmen Programming with Processing

First-year, first-semester Communication Design & Technology students introduced to compuation and creativity through Processing and simple Object Oriented Programming for visual design.

music by David Carroll & Benjamin Green © 2008

The projects on this video represent a few breakthrough experiments by first-year Design & Technology students created during their studio the Fall of 2007. This studio introduced the practice of programming at the service of visual art and design. Studying Processing as a sofware medium, these students were assigned the task of creating an object oriented interactive sketch based on particle systems, an elaboration of an in-class exercise, or an implementation of an open source based code library. As an initiation into the school of thought that software is a design medium unto itself, rather than a mere design tool, these freshmen enjoyed epiphanies, some emblematized here. Although simple and compact, these projects reveal how the class of 2011 absorbs and embraces the spirit of the Parsons Communications Design & Technology program. By harnessing basic cursor gestures, graceful key-clicks, or generative algorithms, aesthetically pure pixels dance, flutter, and mimic natural dynamics. These explorations represent only the initial birth of design futurists. Consider the expectations of graduating into the next decade.

• Syllabus.pdf
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BFA Senior Thesis in Mobile Media, Spring 2007

“Muzzi” - the interactive pet and music player hybrid

Woody Kwon, BFA Design + Technology, Class of 2007

This video clip demonstrates the concept behind Muzzi, the interactive pet and music player hybrid. As the mobile user plays music, the pet not only dances and performs the music through sound analysis, but also absorbs the qualities of the musical genre as it grows, over listening time. The Muzzi product also offers customization capabilties where owners earn new clothing and accessories for their music player pets. In addition, the mobile device software features a dancing game inspired by music-matching interactions such as Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero, adapted for the mobile interface and the Muzzi concept. This project was developed for Flash Lite and prototypes run on a Nokia N80.

© 2007 Woody Kwon & Parsons The New School for Design

Mobile Media

Info Wraps: mobile informatics research prototype

Jonah Model, BFA Design + Technology, candidate

Somewhere between a web-enabled pocket semantic notebook and a mobile social bookmarking community, Info Wraps prototypes the concept of consuming and occasionally recording small units of information, tagged for easy recall. The concept envisages an interactive tag cloud that enables associative meme storage by arranging terms in meaningful proximities. The directional and numeric pads are used to pan through tag clouds and jump to clusters, respectively.

In addition, a user's memes would be cross-referenced on a z-axis, so one could delve into a social web of interconnections.

Video clip demonstrates a working prototype in Flash Lite that provides a mobile interface for the del.icio.us API via a custom server interface.

© 2008 Jonah Model & Parsons The New School for Design