Urban Echo | A Collaborative Public Artwork | Participate today with your cell phone!

TONIGHT : 6 OCTOBER 2006 : MINNEAPOLIS, MN USA

Urban Echo is a collaborative public artwork that will take place beginning at dusk tonight (6 October, 2006) on the University of Minnesota campus. For directions and other info, please find your way to http://www.base8.org/urbanecho .

How can you participate?

We are asking people to answer one of more of the following questions before and during the event:

Who are you? What are you? Where are you? Why are you?

You can submit your thoughts via:

Old fashioned voice message@ 612-626-6921
Cellphone text message @ 612-501-2598
Cellphone photo or video message @ [email protected]

Show up and be a part of the event!

Where is it and when?

University of Minnesota arts quarter. Find directions here http://www.base8.org/urbanecho.
The festivities will begin at dusk on Friday 6 October and will continue into the night.

Want more information?

Urban Echo is a collaborative project between University of Minnesota graduate students Christopher Baker (Fine Arts), Laura Baker (Landscape Architecture/Urban Planning), and J. Anthony Allen (Music Composition). The project is intended to celebrate the stories that each person in a city has to tell and the ways in which those stories help to create and strengthen the places they inhabit. The viewer becomes the participant by generating what is seen or heard within the space. Viewers’ responses are heard over speakers or projected onto 6-10ft translucent plexiglass sculptures. These screen structures occupy an outdoor space in an area where viewers can interact with the text, images and sounds being projected.

Participants use their cell phones to leave a voice message or even send their thoughts via text, photo or video message. We were attracted to using cell phones as the mode of participant interaction because they have become an accessible form of communication that a large segment of the population understands. While cell phones are generally used for private conversations in public spaces, we are encouraging their use to foster public conversations in these same spaces.

Words and pictures are echoed onto the screens, becoming beacons - variable sculptures - that call on others to respond or initiate communication. These declarations dynamically transform the space into a collective narrative in. Ultimately, this project aims to excite the questions of identity tucked quietly within the folds of our common urban tapestry. We hope to glimpse and celebrate the multiplicity of viewpoints by asking the simple, yet profound questions: who, what, why and where are you?