The idea of displaying SMS messages on a wall has been done many times in the past, but very rarely has it been done in a very pleasant graphical way. The SMS Memory Wall by Troika is one of those installations that uses this concept but executes it in a good way, opposed to other examples like Wireless Toronto or the Hailer Wall.
SMS walls are usually used at events as interactive pieces and offer the possibility for anyone (even people not present at the event) to share their thoughts. The community dictates how the piece will unfold, and that can have many facettes. What interests me about these pieces is the possibility for individuals to create a “story” that can be viewed by people at the event. For example, if someone writes the beginning of a phrase, someone could pick up from that and add to a communal text. Unfortunately, I have yet to find any work that takes advantage of that possibility, finding only works that enable users to write freely their feelings and thoughts without boundaries. But this isn’t so bad, just like websites like Facebook or Twitter, the SMS walls give users the ability to share with others whatever they want, be it ego-centric thoughts or other forms of messages to others.
It is also very appealing that everyone with a cellphone, i.e. 85% of households in Canada, can interact with the piece. No longer do you need to be computer literate, and no longer do you need to be in front of a computer screen to interact with programming based works (Facebook or Twitter), you can do it by simply using a technology that most of us are comfortable using.
What made the SMS Memory Wall by Troika so interesting to me was that it uses all these interesting functions that SMS walls enable, but also project it in a graphically pleasing way. The text used strong typographical contrast, like negative/positive background, change of direction and size contrasts, which makes the design much more interesting than the one used for similar pieces. It also has a good amount of white space so the text is readable, and the font used is reminiscent of stencils, which fits with the brick background.
The piece also created boundaries for the participants to the piece, asking them to only write “their memories of their favourite live concert”. By doing so, they integrated the wall to the event, and kept with the theme. This can also enable deeper text, that connects people together, more than messages like “hello!”. Of course, people can “break” the theme and go for something else, but that is part of the beauty of interactive pieces; the community breaks or makes the work.
My only issue I can find with the SMS Memory Wall is that it didn’t push the concept further than it’s predecessors. Visually, it was a feat, but conceptually, it offered very little to make it stand out from other similar work.
The next work I analyzed is the opposite than the previous one. Visually, it isn’t very appealing (for a reason), but, conceptually, it is a very strong piece. 33 Questions per Minute is a piece that generates from sentence fragments different questions like “What is life?”, “Who am I?” and “Where do we come from, and where do we go?”. A user from a terminal can also input his own questions, taking further the interaction for the piece. People can therefore ask questions to others within the exhibit, and if no one does so, the computer will generate its own set of strings.
Like previously mentioned, this piece is very strong conceptually. The audience is destabilized and overwhelmed by the amount of questions asked within a minute, and cannot go from one little screen to the next, as well as think, fast enough to answer all of them. Also, the audience doesn’t know whether the question was asked by the computer or a human, which adds ambiguity to the piece.
The questions generated by computer are inspired by a long line of automatic poetry. The questions are randomly generated, and so they will make no sense most of the time (for example: “Will you bleed in an orderly fashion?”, “Is the creator always being born?” and “Do I snip the marriage bed without rhyme or reason?”). Sometimes, though, the computer generates valid questions like “Who bribes the artist?” or “Why did computers become so self-congratulatory?”.
Design wise, the piece uses very basic concepts. The LCD screen displays are simple but effective means to communicate the message, especially since this completely hides any trace of whether or not the question was asked by a human or a machine. It would have been nice to see a less striped approach to this project, but it’s simplicity is charming and makes a strong statement.