Art Cloud

For the past few months I've been involved with an exciting project to bring open techniques and infrastructure to public art. I'm working with the design firm Gorbet & Banerjee, The City of San José Public Art Program, and the Mineta San José International Airport to make the new terminals a demonstration of how art programs can embrace digital tools to make the entire experience of art (and the net) more cohesive than has been seen to date.

In addition to the many players who are constructing the terminals, I'm starting to work with the first wave of artists with pieces in the airport. There are too many to name here, but here's a sample: Aaron Koblin, Deborah Aschheim, Maggie Orth, and the powerduo of Matt and Susan Gorbet.

When I was approached to work on this project I was amazed to find that they are taking a very progressive approach to development and infrastructure. Since I joined we've used agile methodologies to construct a common infrastructure for shared data and management which will underpin all of the works of art. This includes pulling in a lot of environmental data about the airport and surrounding regions (e.g. weather and flight status) as well as a comprehensive control interface for the airport staff to use while maintaining the art.

What I've coded so far:
- Django based web app for tracking art works, equipment, and artist info
- A machine health monitoring system which will run on everything from embedded systems up to massive graphics systems
- Hard power controls using the iBoot network controlled power strips
- A wiki system which the airport staff will use to persist organizational knowledge
- A RESTful api wrapping the USGS weather data
- A calendar system for planning events like art installation, opening, and closing

Upcoming work:
- Web based control of AudioBox64 sytems on the jet bridges
- Building Management Control integration for lighting systems near art works which use camera and video projectors
- RESTful api wrapping flight data like arrivals, departures, and delays

One really nice aspect of the project is that all of the code I create is licensed under the Apache 2 license, and most of it is already available in the ArtInfrastructure git repo. Once the project has been in use for a while I'll spend a bit of time polishing the documentation so that other public art projects can make use of it, but in the mean time I'm just having a ball seeing everyone's hard work come together.

Comments

[KTB SMITH]

Wow...so much fun when work is interesting.

KTB

[Fred Smith]

Cool in the extreme. I have always wanted to interact with airport art.