[ISEA2006] Artist Talk: Silvan Zurbruegg (MONOROM) – Britney: dynamic public display system

Artist Statement

Britney is the name of a system, that allows for creating simple choreographies from people?s digital material that can be publicly displayed. Individual screens can be composed out of images, movies, slideshows or texts. Multiple screen together form a play list that is preferably displayed with a beamer onto a public wall or canvas. The structure of Britney is quite simple, what makes for an almost zero training curve for content producers to get access to the system.

Abstract

Britney was developed from an emerged need of the etoy.CORPORATION. A collective of people from various backgrounds was supposed to continuously produce content that could be immediately displayed in public. In that context, Britney was conceptualized rather as a composition and management tool for ready to use content, than as an editor or for post-processing of digital material. The general structure of the output is adapted to the common concept of single screens that together form the playlists. The possibilities of britney are in the process of composing the screens and playlists from a flexible range of formats. Britney is not bound to a specific context and serves for more expressive artistical, or entertaining purposes as well as for an information screen with continously updatd text information. By the time, the superordinated focus of an instant composing-, and displaysystem shiftet towards an utmost diversity of input sources. Soon, an interface for webcams was added, and we are currently working on RSS support – i.e. to include Weblogs into screen compositions. Britney is supposed to be release into the public domain this summer.

For the presentation we would like to introduce britney as a technological solution emerged from a collective background, which was developed with a concrete usecase and grown further according to changing needs. Along with the experiences of the etoy.CORPORATION, we would like to elaborate how this tool became meaningful under the aspects of helping to communicate activities in public and the potentials for a community in bringing its contents to display. The presenters are etoy.SILVAN and etoy.MONOROM who actively developed Britney and who are both engaged in the etoy.CORPORATION.

etoy.SILVAN, Zurich, Switzerland. etoy.CORPORATION is art and invests in art. The firm represents the core and code of the corporate sculpture, and controls, protects, promotes, and exploits the cultural substance (intellectual property), particularly the U.S. trademark “etoy” and the etoy.ARTCOLLECTION. The firm shares cultural value and intends to reinvest all financial earnings in art—the final link in the value chain. By sharing risks and resources etoy.AGENTS, art collectors and fans invest time, knowledge, and ideas (or simply capital) in etoy.OPERATIONS, which focus on the overlap of entertainment, cultural, social and economic values. etoy.SHAREHOLDERS participate in a dynamic artwork that takes place 24 hours a day in the middle of society – on and offline.