Electric Objects salon

Brief

We partnered with Electric Objects to open a pop-up art salon during XOXO 2015. The salon was sponsored by Kickstarter and Dots, curated by Courtney Stanton, and featured a new work by Darius Kazemi created specifically for the EO1 (pictured above).

Implementation

For the custom artwork, we wanted to push the EO1 to its technical limits. We didn't have root access to the device, but it turns out that the EO1 runs on Android so you can plug in a keyboard. We ended up installing the excellent APDE, a Processing development environment for Android, and taking advantage of massive performance increases to render a realtime particle simulation far more advanced than the standard EO1 can usually handle.

For the full explanation, see the blog post we wrote.

Post Mortem

We had a lot of artistic freedom for designing the physical salon space, which could be considered unusual for a project with such a public profile and so many collaborators. The XOXO team and everyone at Holocene made the process of turning a nightclub venue into a home where net art could roam free into a joyous, dreamy ride. Being able to overclock the EO1 allowed us to harness its innate affordances as an internet-connected device to create art you can’t see anywhere else.

Acting as the connecting tissue between the sponsors, venue, artists, and client, plus providing creative services ended up being a lot of hats for our small team to wear, but getting to do a physical site installation was a rare treat for us. To quote Erin McKean, "I feel like this is where [the EO1s] live."