TacTile Field – Robson
research / Vancouver / 2008

This project instantiates the TacTile field project in the context of the pedestrian flow at the intersection of Robson and Granville streets in downtown Vancouver.

Contemporary cities from New York to Tokyo increasingly feature giant graphic screens that can occupy large areas of a buildings’ surface, competing for the attention of the passerby with intense and dynamic graphics. They typically feature advertisements, usually disconnected from what is happening in and around the building or city location itself. What if these displays – rather than broadcasting ads for TV shows, instant noodles, and tanning lotion, instead revealed something unique about the building, its occupants, or its environment? What if the screen was like a layer of the buildings skin, which could respond to the movement of people, the weather, or the whims of passersby or city artists? In Vancouver, this process has begun at the intersection of Granville and Robson streets. At the site of one of the first urban, large scale LED display screens in the city, this project imagines the installation of a different kind of “living skin”.

TacTile field is an interactive installation that utilizes a mechanically responsive, solar-powered array of translucent pixel-cells, forming a kind of “interactive ivy” which can be arrayed across a building’s surface. The pixel-cell array functions as a large, low-resolution screen which displays images and patterns created by people moving through the intersection of Robson and Granville. Images are created, changed and playfully affected by both ambient and gestural movements of people in the space through an integrated system of cameras and input nodes embedded in circulation elements of the building. changes in the pixel-cells’ position creates other visual output in the physical field, such as ripples, waves and currents.

This project is part of a wider effort that looks at the potential for interactive projects and installations to recuperate, or reinvent and invigorate our concept of public space. These projects offer a counterpoint to commercial displays, which can rapidly proliferate and saturate the urban visual field. Saturation can result in fascinating phenomena once a certain scale is reached (Times Square, Shinjuku) but ultimately suffers from a lack of potential to allow the city to “present itself” to itself - to allow the city to see itself in new ways, relatively free from commercial imperatives, and to foster social interaction, initiating shared, coherent experiences and exchange within the public realm.