Park View Hotel is an environmental artwork stretching between the Cesar Chavez plaza in downtown San Jose and the neighboring Fairmont Hotel. Using specially built pointing devices, audiences in the park can access interior hotel spaces, by “pinging” them optically. Once found and hit, the interiors release their properties into a wireless network… and so the color of the interior propagates stochastically, leaking out of the building skin, jumping across the street and into the street-lighting system in the park below. In this way, the park enjoys a certain access to the hotel, inverting the normal construction of their relationship.

For this project, as part of a residency at Sun Microsystems Labs, I was working with SunSPOTs – small programmable object technologies that are a simple-to-use prototyping platform for embedded technologies – towards the so-called “Internet of things”.

In the park, the audience comes across tubular, scope-like devices mounted on tripods, pointing at the hotel building. These are “fenestroscopes”, specially designed, focused optical transmitters. Actually, these fenestroscopes (from fenestre: window, and to fenestrate: make holes in surgery) are modified “laser tag” guns that are used in military training and hobbyist war-games. The scope has no magnification, only an aiming ring, and as such does not change the technical definition of “looking” at the hotel with an unaided eye. The active optics have a range of up to 500 meters in the dark. Their beam is invisible infrared, and these particular ones have two possible commands: spot and shoot.

The “spot” mode is used for spotting the SPOTs, and is a “find” function. You look through the targeting ring while holding the spot button down, and pan across the hotel facade. The scope is sending out optical packets of the “find” signal, and hotel rooms that are instrumented respond to this by lighting up (they are otherwise dark). When lit, the colors of these interior lamps slowly change across an red-green-blue spectrum, evoking different moods in the interior.

When a room is “found”, you can shoot it, i.e. send a different instruction using the “shoot” button, along the line of sight. In response to this, the current color of the room jumps out of the window, and through a number of small displays (a total of 40 SPOTs are used) finds a route down into the streetlights in the park. So you see, say, the orange “mood” of the room, a peculiar interior property, travel down via a number of little displays (which also count the number of network hops required), taking a couple of seconds, until the streetlights turn orange too. A total of six hotel rooms were instrumented (with the hotel’s permission), and the route down from each of these is calculated by the nodes themselves, with a degree of randomness, evoking the “infection” of in-between spaces. The displays count each hop with numbers. The audience watches the network “count itself”, or in other words, display its own behavior.

This work was developed in collaboration with Sun Microsystems Labs, Menlo Park, using SunSPOT programmable object technology, as part of a residency project commissioned by ZeroOne San Jose and the Sally and Don Lucas artists’ programs at the Montalvo Arts Center.