NOW!
Visual form is being read by smart machine
scanner and app release eye and mind
we can leave the page
and step into space and time NOW!
our face is scanned and indexed
acknowledging us on the street it locates us NOW!
and we compose ourselves as portable living form NOW!
June, 2018
Montréal has hosted two major international sporting and cultural events in the last forty-five years: Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympics.
The Expo was hailed a success with the site remaining a popular destination beyond its planned closure. The Olympics, while a successful event, proved to be an expensive real-estate and development misadventure for the city. Both sites are currently under-utilized and in need of additional investment and development.
- Photograph by Margo Halverson
More recently Expo 17 was an effort to initiate a second expo in the city, but failed to receive the necessary private and state sponsorship. Montréal now has a vision plan for 2025 focusing attention and development on the post industrial—and reemerging–waterfront. The plan calls for partnerships between state and private enterprise and once again, large-scale land and property redevelopment and redeployment.
- Photograph by Florian Sametinger
Olyp/osition 2025 is a proposal for an alternative city event, combining the human physical aspects of the Olympics (movement, speed, endurance) with the technological and cultural interests of the exposition (scientific, digital, visual and literal culture). The proposal–a sketch of an idea–hopes to be a catalyst to conceptualizing a new kind of city/global event in a hyper-connected mobile digital culture.
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Olyp/osition 2025: A proposal for a typo-geographic event covering the land, sky and water of Montréal
Benefits
- needs little capital expenditure
- involves no construction and no land or property redevelopment
- merges the human physics of the Olympics with the cultural and technological ambitions of an exposition
- will attract national and international attention
- crosses language and cultural barriers
- favours participation over spectatorship
Scanning
- uses facial recognition and smart phone (QR code) scanning software joined with the security camera infrastructure of the city
- to become participants, the public register and have their faces scanned
- individuals select a language and choose to become one of the characters/letterforms from that language
- once registered, participants go about their normal business in the city
- the recognition software identifies their location
Actions
- people may wish to form subgroups and initiate ritualistic actions or they may choose to wander and recompose the city
- scores for organized performances will be published each day in the press
- compositions involving participants may be randomly formed
- participant movements are mapped and published
