Working with the theme of convergence, cross-disciplinary design studio Kimchi and Chips (Elliot Woods and Mimi Son) created the installation Link for Design Korea 2010. The audience at the festival was invited to record their stories, which were then projected onto a cardboard box cityscape, creating a virtual and physical representation of the multitude of people and voices who passed before it.Building off an earlier project called Coffee Kitchen, previously installed at a cafe by the same name in Korea, the designers said the original idea came from observing a sort of ’Photo Clubʼ culture, where girls in the cafe would busy themselves by taking photos of each other.The designers said:We are curious how people can make their mark on the cafe by recording themselves and applying those recordings onto their surroundings. We wondered how to adapt this activity in a playful and social way, where the output of the activity would be shared with others.While Coffee Kitchen was controlled by an HTML5 web interface (and two projectors), which people could access through their mobile phones, Link was actualized by a custom-made iPad application using openFRAMEWORKS and libmysql. The other technology implemented could stream up to 80 videos at a time, while at the same time recording two new video streams.Though both projects seem to explore the relationship between people and their environment, as well as the relationships people form among themselves within that environment, the projects yielded different results. Kimchi and Chips seem to be manipulating setting and audience as a means of comparing and contrasting how audience actions are affected by the space they’re contained in (cozy cafe vs. open gallery) and the company they keep (close friends vs. strangers). We can’t help but think creator Yeondoo Jung’s Handmade Memories videos, where he collected and recorded stories of the elderly sharing their most vivid (and candid) memories, were playing with this very concept.[via Creative Applications]
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