tags:  mobile  installation  exhibition 

Movable Feast/ Fête Mobile is a 6-meter blimp equipped with surveillance and communications capabilities. The project debuted at the ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA 2006 Festival from August 7th-13th 2006. The flying interactive sculpture was intended as a "theory object" in the tradition of the inflatable art by the likes, for example, of the 60's radical architecture collective "Utopie".

At its most conceptual level, the Movable Feast/ Fête Mobile project extrapolated current techno-political issues into a possible future scenario in which communities are locally connected through peering protocols while disconnected from Internet as a whole. The project was thus presented as a prototype for an arts satellite for a world in which the digital public realm is increasingly corporate and surveillance is ubiquitous, in which participants would remotely view their surroundings via an onboard camera, as well as exchange media files through a wireless local file server.

Architecture historian Marc Dessauce considers the movement of pure air as having played a vital role in the dawn of the modern project, particularly in France, where "ventilation became a cause as lofty and as intrusive as the revolutionary ideal of universal equality it was to serve during the hospital reform of the Enlightenment." In terms of design, one can see the influence of what Dessauce calls "the equalizing power of airflow", in the streamlined aerodynamic aesthetics of "futuristic" mid-century modern design as well as in the "blobjects" of the 21st century. This pneumatic delirium stands in contrast with what Dessauce calls the pneumatic imperialism of the automobile, which he holds accountable for having stretched the fabric of the city to the point where, like a balloon, it exploded, littering its scattered remnants at the periphery of a disappeared centre.

In the late 60's the pneumatic art object emerged to address this problem. From Piero Manzoni's Placentarium, to Frei Otto's enclosures, to the "structure gonflables" of the Parisian design collective “Utopie”, artists became interested in addressing the pneumatic problem in the form of monumental spectacle. Extreme demonstrations of pneumatic living, such as air houses and furniture were put forth as techno-utopian solutions to the confined atmosphere of the bourgeois household, and the slow pace of its modernization. At the same time, however, Dessauce notes how they could also be read as staging a fictionalized conquest of the family threshold in order to expose its most insidious and cumbersome conclusion: the pod people, if you like. Thus beyond the fun and play of the inflatable ethos in these projects, lay another, often irreconcilable discourse against urban alienation as well as the devastating ecological impact of modernization.

Similarly, the Movable Feast/ Fête Mobile, in its ISEA incarnation, was conceptually concerned with a paradox: as urban space becomes increasingly networked in the midst of the volatile political landscape of the post-911 world, we must question some of our underlying beliefs in the invincibility of the Internet. While the popularly held belief is that the Internet is a distributed system, in reality, it is merely decentralized. What this means is that catastrophic failure targeted at key switching stations along the Internet's backbone could, in fact, sever communication between whole regions of the globe, almost instantaneously transforming the Web into a fragmented archipelago of networked sub-regions. The likely response to safeguard the net in the wake of such a disruption would be to install a type of martial law increasing surveillance and security at the expense of individual liberty. In a world where communications over the Internet has become either impossible or unsafe, the Movable Feast/ Fête Mobile was thus intended to function, at least theoretically, as a kind of lifeline, an autonomous mobile media system for programming public space through non-disruptive intervention.

With this project, we wanted to design a technology for communication and surveillance that could be controlled by regular people. The original idea was to create an autonomous floating computer, which people could control from their laptops. We came to think of this as a kind of prototype for an arts satellite. We thus custom-built a blimp and a mobile base station from scratch. For the blimp, the process involved creation of a CAD model of the blimp and other components, and then the fabrication of the custom components in fiberglass-reinforced balsa wood. In order to communicate with the blimp from the ground, we also had to build a "mobile base station". For this we custom-built a 7-foot "ice cream tricycle", equipped with AC power, a sound system and freezers filled with custom designed blimp-shaped popsicles! The entire project was conceived of within the broader scope of a distinct brand identity that was informed by the aesthetics of government-sponsored Canadian culture in the 1970’s.

Jean-Paul Jungmann, a former member of Utopie, stated of his work: "we wanted to create theoretical projects that were avant-garde [pneumatic furniture, new programs with light, mobile and dismountable structures...] and at the same time sustain a theoretical reflection and radical political writings, coherent with our formal practice.” “This complexity," states Jungmann, "was... cumbersome for careers that had just started. It was neither easy nor necessarily happy." Without detracting from politics, which informed the project, following ISEA, like Jungmann, we felt that Fête Mobile laboured under the weight of theory. In other words, we found ourselves constantly explaining the project to our audience. Consequently, we have decided to develop future iterations of the project more explicitly in terms of experience design, in which the blimp functions as a gravitational node for a reality-based video game.

The rules of the game itself will be simple. Teams, situated on playing field, vie for control of the intelligent blimp, much as they would a ball in the sport of rugby. Participants thus attempt to control the blimp’s navigation on the field by organizing themselves, on the fly, into shapes and patters of movement recognizable to the blimp’s onboard vision system. While the latter may seems a departure form the more high-concept approach we developed for ISEA, at its core it remains theoretically informed by our interest in exploring new forms of collectivity in urban space. The phenomena of emergent self-organization is as central to terrorist networks as it is to popular democratic uprisings. As artists, we have thus settled on "play" as our chosen approach to explore facets of our individual and collective relations within the space of networked art.

VIDEO
Fête Mobile outing in Vancouver. Video: Adrian Sinclair + Mihai Peteu. Artists: Marc Tuters, Adrian Sinclair, Luke Moloney. Production: Fête Mobile.


LINKS
01sj.org/
fetemobile.ca/
research.techkwondo.com/blog/julian/173