This week, I had one of those rare moments when I saw something so remarkable, I had to stop and stare. It was a true Purple Cow in Godin’s terms.
If you take a stroll down Harvard Street near Coolidge Corner in Brookline, MA, you’ll pass a black hole portal that leads to Roxbury. Just before you take your running start to jump through a la Platform 9 3/4, you’ll stop for a closer look and realize that what you see is not in fact a black hole. It’s a large screen linked to a camera that is live broadcasting a street corner in Dudley Square. A set of microphones and speakers links the two locations with audio. You’ll soon discover you’ve stumbled across a virtual street corner. The description of the “digital media public art project” from Virtual Corners.net is below:Beginning in June 2010, a storefront in Coolidge Corner, Brookline, and in Dudley Square, Roxbury will be transformed into large video screens, providing pedestrians of each neighborhood with a portal into one another’s worlds. Running 24/7, life-size screen images and AV technology will enable real-time communication between residents of the two neighborhoods.The neighborhoods we have chosen to connect are transportation and cultural hubs with rich and intertwined histories. They are only 2.4 miles apart and a city bus runs directly between them, yet very few people from either neighborhood visits the other. Using technology developed to bridge geographical distances, Virtual Street Corners instead traverses the social boundaries that separate two important neighborhood centers with significant historical connections.
I took a brief video of an encounter I witnessed:
I’ve got to give credit to the creators of the project/experiment, listed on the website as “John Ewing, in collaboration with Carmen Montoya, Kevin Patton, Christopher Robbins and Minotte Romulus.” They’ve created something really cool that’s centered around the human connections we can make when geographic boundaries are torn down. No, it may not directly serve a business purpose. Sure, it uses technology that’s been around for ages. But it got my attention (something increasingly more difficult lately) and got me thinking about the invisible partitions we live with every day.
I saw this! I was wondering what it was.
What a great idea! That really is out of the box thinking. I love it.
Paul
Yes. I just walked by it again tonight and they took it down. I’ll have to look up the results of the “experiment.”