Park View Hotel

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  • sukumaran
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Description
Park View Hotel stretches between the Cesar Chavez plaza in downtown San Jose and the neighbouring Fairmont Hotel. Using specially-built pointing devices, audiences in the park can access interior hotel spaces, by "pinging" them optically. Once found and hit (different modes on the scope) the interiors release their properties into a wireless network... the color of the interior propagates stochastically, leaking out of the building skin, jumping across the street, and entering some street-lights in the park below. In this way, the park enjoys a certain neighbourly access to the hotel, inverting the usual character of the relationship.

This project was the result of a residency at Sun Microsystems Labs, where he was (as per the residency brief) working with SunSPOTs, small "programmable object technologies" which are a simple-to-use prototyping platform for embedded technologies, or the so-called "Internet of Things".
Keywords
Technology & Material
Installation Requirements / Space
There are two non-technical questions around wireless transducer networks that this artwork and its choice of interface can be seen to address (and perform).

One is the question of WHERE ONE MAY PLACE THE NETWORK, i.e a question of permissions and property, physical access and propriety.

The second is the question of addressing, of how to FIND, or rather RECOGNIZE something in the network, once the network is in place (or mobile, and so on). This may appear trivial, but it is a question about how information travels through the network, and in what context one "sees" a node within it.
Exhibitions & Events
Bibliography