iSkyTV
A networked art project that detects the user's location and animates the Google Street View sky above their heads. The project is a reimagining of SkyTV, Yoko Ono's famed video work from 1966.
SkyTV by Yoko Ono, 1966.
In SkyTV, Ono brought the outside space inside the gallery. In contrast, iSkyTV brings the interior space of the database outside and invites viewers to reflect on a world in which our natural resources and landscapes have been digitized, databased, copyrighted and archived.
iSkyTV is currently online for web & mobile users and installed on 32 screens at the MIT Media Lab
iSkyTV is designed for use in many contexts including web & mobile devices, desktop screensavers, and gallery installations. It premiered at SXSW 2013 and is currently installed at the MIT Media Lab where it debuted as part of the Other Festival. In this installation, iSkyTV serves a timekeeping function and appears every hour on the hour on screens throughout the lab.
About the artists
The Institute for Infinitely Small Things conducts creative,
participatory research that aims to temporarily transform public
spaces and instigate dialogue about democracy, spatial justice and
everyday life. The Institute’s projects use performance, conversation
and unexpected interventions to investigate social and political “tiny
things”. Our membership is varied and interdisciplinary.
For this project, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things was led by
Catherine D'Ignazio, a.k.a. kanarinka, who is an artist, educator and
software developer. She is the former Director of the Experimental
Geography Research Cluster at RISD’s Digital+Media MFA program and
currently a graduate student at MIT's Center for Civic Media. Her
artwork has been exhibited at the ICA Boston, Eyebeam, MASSMoCA and
numerous public street corners around the world.
Sophia Brueckner, born in Detroit, MI, is an artist and engineer.
Inseparable from computers since the age of two, she believes she is a
cyborg. She received her Sc.B. in Computer Science and Applied
Mathematics from Brown University, worked as a software engineer at
Google, and earned her MFA in Digital + Media at the Rhode Island
School of Design. She feels an urgency to understand and bring
awareness to technology's controlling effects, and to encourage the
ethical and thoughtful design of new technologies. She recently joined
the MIT Media Lab as a graduate student in the Fluid Interfaces
research group.
iSkyTV is a 2012 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for presentation on its Turbulence web site.
It was made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
