[ISEA2015] Paper: Paula Levine, Lee Periolat & William Hsu – City to City

Abstract (Long paper)

Keywords: Visualization, Mapping, Internet, Interactive, Public Space

City to City is an interactive artwork that visualizes the geography of the internet, from place to place, and allows individuals to see their own unique participation in it. Users conduct their online activities and observe their own inquiries, distinguished by color graphics and sound, as messages travel from their points of origin to their destinations. Participants are able to see the visible and distinctive paths that compose the larger, collective global internet. City to City’s visualizations reveal the map of online traffic along with our dependency upon the invisible infrastructure of place to place connections; this infrastructure forms the foundation for all of our daily online activity.

  • Paula Levine, Art Department, San Francisco State University, CA, USA. Paula Levine is an artist working with locative technologies, cartography and digital media. Current work explores spaces between information and experience using networks, public spaces and mobile tools. Her work has shown nationally and internationally, most recently at San Jose’s Zero1 Garage, The Curitiba International Biennial and in unplace: a museum without a place. Her essay, On Common Ground: Here as There, is a chapter in The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies, (Routledge, 2013/ ed: Jason Farman). She is a professor of art at San Francisco State University and area head of Digital Media and Emerging Technologies.  paulalevine.net
  • William Hsu, Computer Science Department, San Francisco State University, CA, USA.
    I work with electronics and real-time animation systems. I am interested in real-time performance systems that have some of the live, tactile qualities of good human musicians playing acoustic instruments, and the non-linear behavior of natural systems. My work mostly involves using gestural interfaces to control animation and sound synthesis, and building real-time audio-visual systems that interact with human performers. I’ve built systems, tools, installations and compositions in collaboration with Peter van Bergen, Chris Burns, John Butcher, James Fei, Matt Heckert, Lynn Hershman, Paula Levine, Jeremy Mende, and Gino Robair, among others. unixlab.sfsu.edu/~whsu/art.html
  • Lee Periolat is a graduate student in the Master of Science program in the Computer Science Department at San Francisco State University, USA. Lee holds Bachelor of Science degrees in mathematics and chemical engineering from M.I.T. and recently completed
    an internship at Stanford University under Professor Vijay Pande, the creator of Folding@Home. Lee has been programming since his dad brought home a TRS-80 Model III in the early 80’s and has worked on a wide variety of projects focused on highperformance computing for the sciences.

Full Text (PDF) p. 163-168