Tag Archives: NYSCI

Climate and Urban Systems Partnership

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Guest post by NYSCI’s Michaela Labriole

CUSP logo

Climate change is not often at the forefront of people’s minds when they’re running errands, hanging out with friends, or relaxing at home, but as part of a project called Climate and Urban Systems Partnership (CUSP), NYSCI has been hard at work exploring ways to help urban audiences understand how their interests connect to systems that could be impacted by climate change. If you’re grabbing a snack at the bodega, you’re probably not thinking about climate change, but you might be if you knew how it could affect food prices. Similarly, the reliability of a city’s energy infrastructure isn’t usually cause for concern until increased brownouts during summer heat waves affect your ability to do things like use your computer.

CUSP is a partnership of four museums and two universities, funded through the National Science Foundation’s Climate Change Education Partnership program. The CUSP team includes research and educational institutions in New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C. In each city, museum partners have brought together Urban Learning Networks (ULN) made up of individuals and organizations interested in delivering climate change messages and programming to diverse audiences. ULNs not only include science institutions, but also art museums, theater groups, community centers, and more.

Here in NYC, the ULN has been working on digital tools and strategies to help deliver these messages. This includes the creation of a digital map that will allow people to upload local stories, videos, data and pictures related to climate change impacts, projects or programs. Additionally, ULN members will be generating a series of synchronized climate change messages that will be shared via different social messaging platforms. In this way, a person might encounter the same message about energy use, food prices, or flooding through a NYSCI tweet, a theater group Facebook post, and a community center blog entry. By coordinating delivery of information and tying the mobile map to social messaging platforms, we aim to reinforce our message by helping urban audiences visualize themselves as part of a larger system that will be impacted by climate change.

We’re just at the start of this five-year project, and it is never too late to join. In addition to the digital tools, the project will include the development kits to use at festivals, and programmatic resources for community and school outreach. If you’d like to join the ULN or simply want more information, email us at mlabriole@nysci.org.

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ReGeneration Exhibit Featuring World’s Fair 2.0

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This weekend, ReGeneration opens at the New York Hall of Science. Curated by Steve Dietz and Amanda Parkes, ReGeneration explores the connection of cultural vitality to sustainability, immigration, and urbanization, through the intersection of art, science and technology. Ten contemporary artists from Asia, Central America, Europe, and the US will present works on the theme of community and sustainability.

One installation—World’s Fair 2.0—was produced by Hive NYC member REV-/People’s Production House. This installation and interactive scavenger hunt bridges Queens’ history past and present with the questions: how did the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs shape the region’s geography and its collectively imagined future? What are the continuities between utopian visions from the past and today’s vision for the future?

Using your iPhone or iPad, you can experience World’s Fair 2.0 as an augmented reality mobile tour at locations in and around the New York Hall of Science. In the museum’s cafeteria, for example, you’ll encounter visions for future living, from the “liberatory” promise of the electric dishwasher heralded at the 1939 World’s Fair, to the friendly-faced food service robots of today, like Snackbot and Chief Cook Robot, promoting a more automated tomorrow.

In addition, 14 teens worked with Rothenberg and Jahn, using innovations in mobile and augmented reality technology to create an interactive scavenger hunt where zombies thwart players in their time-traveling quest to explore the history of the future.

Through the installation, self-guided tour and teen-produced mobile game, World’s Fair 2.0 stages interventions into the past and future, regenerating conceptual tools to interact with the present.

Hive NYC helped to incubate the development of World’s Fair 2.0, and we hope you’ll have a chance to visit NY Hall of Science and engage with this exciting exhibit during its run.
The exhibition dates are Oct. 27-Jan. 13, with an opening reception tomorrow, Thursday, Oct. 25th from 6:00-9:00pm. Music for the reception will be provided by Hive NYC member World UP.

World’s Fair 2.0

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This is a guest post by Anjum Asharia, Program Associate at REV-.

For two intense weeks in the summer of 2012, a team of 12 teens, three educators and artists, plus several special guests, hunkered down in a laboratory at the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) to create an interactive scavenger hunt for an installation in the museum’s upcoming fall art and technology exhibition, ReGeneration. In the workshop, entitled World’s Fair 2.0 and led by REV- in partnership with People’s Production House, we aimed to use innovations in mobile and Augmented Reality (AR) technology to ask: What are the continuities between utopian visions from the past and today’s vision for cities of the future?

In the process, we learned about the history and context of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs, which took place on the site where NYSCI currently stands in Queens, New York. We also gained critical insight into concepts that shape technology and our everyday landscapes—such as “utopia” and “the future.”

Cities of the Future in General Motors’ Futurama exhibit

Hailing from the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, the 12 teens who participated in this workshop ranged in age from 15 to 17. They came from across Hive NYC Learning Network bringing different interests and expertise. Our team included: two active members of MOUSE Corps, two Explainers at NYSCI, three from REV-/PPH’s spring program at Eyebeam, two members of REV-/PPH’s Pop Squad, and two from REV-/PPH’s spring in-school media arts training program.

The workshop was led by teaching artists Stephanie Rothenberg and Marisa Jahn and myself. Special guests included mobile applications programmer Tom Stoll, and filmmaker Art Jones, who taught us how to shoot and produce a video for the installation to entice museum-goers to play our game.

Other special Hive NYC guests and visitors included Juan Rubio from Global Kids, NYSCI’s Yadana Desmond and Anthony Negron, researcher Rafi Santo, and independent film producer Robert Winn, Board Chair at Global Action Project.

Week one began with an overview of the project, the history and context of the World’s Fairs, and an introduction to AR and how this technology can make information about our surroundings visible, interactive, and digitally accessible.

“Augmented Reality: Rogue Art Exhibition” at MoMA; “Shades of Absence: Public Voids” by Tamiko Thiel, Venice Biennale 2011.

We took tours of the museum and of its environs–Flushing Meadows Corona Park–to visit other important sites from past World’s Fairs.

A visit to the Panorama of the City of New York

We brainstormed some of our own ideas for uses of AR (besides for commercial purposes). Our favorite ideas included an application that virtually displays family portraits of those who we miss, and another that lets you “decorate” your room virtually.

Furthering our explorations of AR, we looked at LayAR, an augmented reality mobile browser, and investigated the back-end by creating and uploading our own digital image. This was paired with an activity about visions of future food and food technologies from the past and present. We drew our own prototypes for future food by hand, and then saw how to trace these drawings digitally so that they could be “LayAR-ized.”

Prototyping future food; Borden Dairy’s “Rotolactor” at the 1939 World’s Fair; Magic Meatballs, the kids meal of tomorrow

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