Tim: You should tell people who you are and what you’ve been working on lately.

Celina: Who am I? Celina or Bombonia?

SignalFive Conversations #2: @bombonia from SignalFive on Vimeo.

Tim: You tell me! Are you both?

Celina: This is Celina Alvarado and Bombonia.

Tim: Ok so this is an interview with 2 people, cool..2 interviews

Celina: Like 2 interviews in one.

Tim: Who’s Bombonia? Who’s Celina?

C: It doesn’t matter…They are very close lately. It’s always been the same person.

T: What about your friend in the background?

C: Behind me is one of my pictures, one of the biggest prints I’ve ever made. This is the alien that’s been with me for over 10 years now, and even more. Ever since I got it I have started taking pictures of the world through his eyes.

T: What does the alien see?

C: Right now the alien is just looking at us, but usually you see his back. I do it to put the viewer in his point of view. That’s the way I see the world, through his big and silent eyes. Aliens are intelligent and foreign beings. At the same time it is just a model what brings out the child we all carry within, right?. And that is also the way I see myself in the world: as a stranger,  Eventually you don’t know what is more stranger the alien or what he’s watching. Of course there’s a certain humor added to all of them. The figure also creates a wonderful thread to bring all these photos together. Check them out at my flickr account.

T: And has the photo been in gallery shows?

C: Yeah, I have been showing slideshows, installations and a couple movies. The movies went very well, I got the Best Experimental Award at the Coney Island Film Festival which I’m very happy about. It also got me another Award as Best Documentary at Cinemad Film Festival in Spain, both with the movie ‘I Live in Brooklyn’ shot in super8, about the arrival of the alien to New York.

T: Just after you got here to New York?

C: Yup.

I Live in Brooklyn from bombonia on Vimeo.

T: So one thing I wanted to talk about, or have you talk about, is the project using Twitter. You went to NYU, to the ITP program which is world famous..a lot of very popular and smart people came out of it and are now doing great things, like Foursquare, and other great things, so it’s obviously one of New York’s’ greatest academic, in my view, programs, for this field, and you just graduated from there.

C: It is a program that focuses in everything interactive: from storytelling-based work to the more sophisticated technology wise ones. We love technology, right. We want to know how to make things interactive. In the program we think first if we want something to be interactive and then what ways to do so, what media etc. So yes, I designed an interactive garment or wearable called ‘Try Me’ that consists in a t-shirt that rates hugs and sends it to Twitter: It says whether it is a ‘hi’ hug, a ‘farewell’ hug or a ‘I missed you too” or ‘ i wish tomorrow never comes’ hug and if you think what makes those hugs different you might think of time. Pressure is important, but without the time are not so meaningful.

T: So that’s the thing is obviously now a lot of people are on Twitter and everyone has an opinion about Twitter or Facebook, but yet not many people are pushing the limits or using them in new ways. Twitter, you have 140 characters and you can post a link or write to people, and that’s one aspect of it. But you took it and said, well something will be written there but it’s based on what happens in the physical world, and I don’t know anything else like that. Maybe you can talk about how you came up with this idea, or things that exist are similar…

C: What makes Twitter so attractive to me is a couple of things: first its constraint: 140 characters that make headlines rather than blogs and second: the fact that you can follow or stop following whoever you want. There’s no previous approvals nor anything. Users relate in a different way than in Fb or MySpace etc: you don’t need to be friends of someone to follow him/her. I use Twitter to communicate my hugs because is a way to get them out there out loud to be read by whoever wants to follow me, my movements, my thoughts, my links.

T: But it’s a great project so 2 questions…what do people say when they get these tweets and question 2 is..it’s a device you made, so maybe you can talk about that. You were hugging in these shows and you have to go to a special place to hug, not in the real world.

C: Well, right now the way I have it designed is that the t-shirt has a Lillypad Arduino which is a micro-controller in the back that gets the data: the time a switch in the front of the t-shirt, inside, is closed and sends it through a Xbee radio transmitter to a Xbee receiver plugged to the computer. The computer has a custom script in Processing that uses the Twitter API to post it to Twitter. If I wanted to do it in the real world I can do it through Bluetooth to my telephone, and I don’t need the presence of the computer. I have done it outdoors in Spain, in Madrid, in a square that was wi-fi connected, but I learned that it’s totally different.

When I was hugging indoors I was part of a show and people were testing my device. Even though there’s always a moment when the hug is a hug, it has nothing to do with the technology itself, and to me it was what mattered and actually after 400 hugs you become another person. To my surprise I got me 2 boyfriends from 2 of the shows. Never counted on that though.

T: But that’s because you are in a place where you, you know, tell people you have this project and you have to hug them. What’s interesting for me is, let’s say I see you and say ‘Hey Celina how are you? It’s the first time I’ve seen you in a while!’ and give you a hug, and that goes on Twitter because, you know, we always have our cellphones on us, right? So you will always have this hugging device and it becomes more natural. Giving 400 hugs is reality for a show but not..

C: Yes, and of course I have to wear that t-shirt. It’s not that this happens at anytime. Once I wear the t-shirt I am limited.

T: Right you have to wear it now, but similar to the early computers, you know, you have a computer in a huge room in the 1950s, but now we have computers in our cellphones…

C: Right, but I guess that if I had a boyfriend or husband at home he would be saying ‘Celina is hugging? Who is she hugging now? Why is that hug taking that long?’ It was amazing that the first show I was hugging I got lots of followers on Twitters and the next shows some of my friends were asking me to tweet the hugs using another account, because Twitter had 200 hugs one after the other. At the end of the day as I said above, following someone in Twitter means that you get his headlines: what he does or where he’s at. You can also get how he’s hugging.

T: Right, and that’s a special occasion where all you are doing is hugging. It’s not like you come home from work and you hug your boyfriend or husband or whatever.

C: Right, that makes it different but I didn’t want to put it in another account because it’s part of me.

T: Well do you see someone giving you money to make it into an actual shirt you wear and it connects to your iPhone or something…

C: Honestly I don’t see anybody giving me money whatsoever but I just need a programmer to program it via Bluetooth. That’s the next step, to not have it in a show but in natural life.

T: So that’s the thing about ITP…I went to one of the shows and people there are thinking about these things in a certain way that’s different than how a businessperson might think about using Twitter and send out a link to the New York Times. What’s happening is that it’s becoming more in the realm of physical objects, and I think that’s becoming huge for this next decade.

C: There’s a lot. Before this I had a show where people could confess their sins or secrets through a telehone number and they would be on Twitter as well. That was called ’21st Century Confession Booth‘. It went pretty well, we had a speech recognition script and you could call a number from you cellphone and confess.

T: When did you make that? 2008 or 2007?

C: 2008

T: …And now Google Voice is out there, which does the transcription.

C: Yeah, we used a software called MacSpeech, that translated the voice into written language. It didn’t work very well, I have to say, but the mistakes that came along in that process made the confessions more fun.

T: Like what?

C: I can’t tell you, like you could say something and it would understand something else. Like me, I could say whatever but it wouldn’t understand me. It would make my confessions very surrealistic.

T: That’s what happens with Google Voice now, you get your voicemail in text form and half of the time the names are messed up…It works a little, but then you read it and think, ‘Who is this person?’. What new things are happening out of NYU or ITP, or..?

C: iPhone Applications. I think through the iPhone we are communicating with each other in a way we have never done before. You can go to a restaurant now and see reviews from people we don’t know. But we read 3 or 4 reviews to go to any bar or restaurant or any other place. We share that information and even look at what they order, we don’t need the waitress to tell us what will be better. We can see the reviews of 4 people and if they are talking about something we will order that.

T: Right, and now you don’t have to ask people on the street anymore for anything.

C: And now there isn’t any reason to talk to anyone for directions, or the time, or where things are or what something means because we Google it, we UrbanSpoon it, we Yelp it… we…everything IT.

T: So what’s the point of meeting with anyone ever if it’s all just data? There has to be something else that’s more than just data….People even predict that in the future we will have even have sex virtually, people are predicting these things, but there’s still you and me and other people…

C: Well that is happening…there is tons of sex happening online..

T: Sure, all the time.

C: All the time…

T: So what’s the point of meeting anyone? What’s the point? Is it a weird thing?

C: I think that the only point of interacting with people is putting them upside down. They don’t expect me to ask them for directions. And I love to ask them and I even videotape them (God is my GPS). Giving directions in every language is totally different. Everyone is very particular with the way they give directions, and most of the time we make people a mess. That is something that we’re losing because we are walking around with our devices, but that’s one of the things that I love: not to lose the cool things in life like interacting with people, and in this country people love to talk and interact with people. I don’t know why there is this other way of acting which is through devices.

I remember 10 years ago when there were no iPhones and you had a map in your hands people would come to you and ask ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Do you need help?’

T: Well now a lot of people are in cities or heavily populated areas, and even 10 years ago I thought about friends differently. Now the reality is, I think of my closest friends now not people I’ve known for the longest but the people I talk to the most on a regular basis.

C: Do you talk or text?

T: Both. Something happens and you’re in my dataspace. I trust you because I talk to you regularly because I Skype you, or text you and there’s something that happens through all that time of doing it that somehow means something. Maybe they’re not a ‘friend’ but I have a connection with them either way.

C: Think about privacy and trust. We wind up trusting people we don’t know because we have some reviews made by them. We trust them when we ask about things. We follow their advice rather than a friend’s advice, because we don’t want to bother that friend. Maybe it is all designed for single people: single childs and single adults. A couple is 2 single adults with their own devices. Communication happens between me, my device and the www.

You may follow somebody  and see lots of things surrounding him but you don’t see what’s inside him. People are willing to put everything they do online, except what is really happening inside. So you learn that someone is going to go to school, or to have brunch in Times Square, but so what?

T: It’s interesting and we’ll see what happens.

C: We’ll have to see what we do with that because that’s another form of movement and communication. Where will Foursquare take us? Twitter is a way of advertising and self-promotion now, but Foursquare could take us somewhere else…I’m pretty sure there are people thinking of this.

T: Ok let’s wrap up the conversation.

C: There is one more thing that I am now preparing. The gallery…

T: Oh yeah, are there any links?

C: It is called 1by1. It is a space in my apartment, and I found out that in the 70s and 80s in Alphabet City galleries used to be in apartments. So, this is going to be 1by1 and it will showcase 1 thing at a time from 1 artist. So far we are 7 artists that are in the project and as soon as I have the website working I will start promoting it. We will have mimosas for the openings! And then by appointment. So it will be very interactive and will showcase video, performance, internet art, interactive objects, media installations, custom made electronic devices. One by One.

T: So website, art, and mimosas.

C: And the website will be onebyonegallery.com

T: Well if we are really fancy we can link to it..

C: Not now please.

T: Well you’d better work on getting the website up because once someone’s linked to it the pressure is on.

Links

Celina Alvarado

Try Me

Tags: arduino, bluetooth, bombonia, celina alvarado, hug, hugging, interactive, iphone, itp, lillypad, nyu, urbanspoon, wearables, xbee, yelp

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 10:38 am and is filed under Conversations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.