Post-Quarantine Machines: Public Air

Early on in school for me, my second year actually, the pandemic hit. I believe a lot of this project is in direct response to that. While things were a little closer to normal in 2021, they weren’t completely.

When given a more representational and “out there” project where we focused less on tangible and feasible concepts I found myself subconsciously processesing the events of the year prior, and the on-going year as well. I would not call this project my best work, but I believe this semester was a huge turning point for me. We drew slips of paper out of a hat, and each one had a job type but ones new to the scene so to speak. One of my friends go “bitcoin miner,” another “gig worker,” and one even got “fart app developer.”
I drew “click farmer.” With this we were tasked with researching this role, and then connections we made to that.
A click farmer is an individual who is paid to “farm” ads by clicking on as many as possible, generating revenue for the advertiser as well as showing underlying algorithms to websites that the ads generate interactions and should be promoted more.

Immediately I was reminded of annoying pop-up ads which seem to be on every website, constantly intruding. With this internet pollutant I drew the connection to pollution in the real world and the prominient issue it is. Now most projects, the goal would be to fix it, but in this we were called to speculate and imagine. So, inspired by these two things, and dystopian futurescapes like that of BladeRunner and Coruscant in Star Wars, imaged a world where the internet pollution seeped into the real world.

Now holographic ads were on every street, promoting mindless, worthless things.
Companies bought entire streets to promote their products., adding to the onslaught things begging for attention, public places now commercial. While the project was sited in NYC, the site existed in this timeline.
That was my starting point for this project. Faced with this, and in this context of a mind-numbed society, with the adage “the only thing truly public is the air.” Connecting air and information, both things that I felt had been tainted with pollutants, ads, and false information. I came up with a design for a library inside a pneumatic structure, which is shaped by a net-like cable frame - furthering the choking of valuable information narrative.