Communication in Public Space: Strings

The mobile telecommunication and the internet has been accelerating the characters of the urban experience, which Milgram mentioned, into the global scale. The characters like the disconnection between proximity and friendship, superficial and disposable relationships, difficulty in trusting, anonymity, etc, can also be found in the mobile and web communication context. These characters might seem inhuman, however, it is also true that it may be the essential condition for human to develop these qualities based on the social and cognitive efficiency in order to sustain the balanced life in the current urban setting. People may not have had the options. In order to embrace the interaction among the people in the urban neighborhood, instead of the interaction among the far locations worldwide, it is important to start from what people would not feel overloaded by others or what people would not consider themselves disturbing others.

One thing I was thinking is to install the simple and playful strings in various parts of the city in order to create the relationships among neighbors and, at the same time, to conform to the characters of urban and telecommunicational life. The strings are tied in various public spaces. The string can be plucked by any pedestrians. When it is plucked, the string trembles making playful sinusoid. And this trembling string sends the signal to randomly selected string or strings in the neighborhood in order to make it tremble. Then another person who is sitting on a bench notices that a string in front of him starts trembling. He could ignore it but he plucks back the string as well thinking that there is at least one more person in the neighborhood who is plucking a string like him.

The exchange of plucking can last short or long, or the exchange may not be achieved at all when there is no willing recipients on the other side. Recipients are much more free to disregard the signal because they know it is not an urgent or specific message they can interpret, and because the trembling signal is rather subtle that people can hardly notice when they are in the course of doing something else. But when the people are in a good mood and willing to respond, the exchange of trembling starts going back and forth, and the trembling strings become the pure interaction among urban anonymity which evokes the existence of others and the willingness to communicate, but still without having to challenge the shyness, potential danger, and the responsibility to sustain the relationship.