Public Displays of Interaction

This week’s readings are all examples of single display from multiple input. The BBC window display takes SMS and transfers it to the screen behind an interviewee. Blinkenlights accepts input from BlinkenPaint and makes a building-sized display or allows Pong from one or two mobile phones. Vectorial Elevation accepts commands from the internet and displays searchlights over Dublin. The single display is then broadcast to multiple viewers. The second two examples are noteworthy mainly because of the scale of their display, even though the underlying technology is ordinary. It would be interesting to turn these ideas on their head and require massive input in one spot to create minor changes on multiple individual computers. Perhaps an entire public square would need to be occupied to create a pattern that was visible on a town’s web site as a graphical display of occupancy.