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MetroCode: Vancouver Biennale

  • Integrated Voice Response (IVR), Interactive Content, Interpretive Media, Learning, Location Based Content, Mobile Devices, Website

About the project

As MetroCode, an offshoot from Ubiquity Interactive, Leora and I conceived the idea of a cellphone tour of the Vancouver Biennale outdoor sculpture exhibition. 

Client location:

Vancouver, BC

Working with ideas to address how a casual audience could experience cultural content in busy public spaces, we created content designed to feel like eavesdropping. The notion that “less-predictable speech is more distracting for a listener” explains why we find the conversations of strangers, whose speech we can’t easily predict, fascinating. The cell phone tour leveraged this effect. Leora worked with a pair of well-prepared actors with a background in comedic improvisation to capture these playful conversations. The conversations were edited and formatted to fit inside the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) framework

Click on the clips below to hear clips from the audio tour and the interactive prompts.

Sculptures

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From May 2006 to May 2007, anyone with a cell phone could access interpretive content about works by some of the world’s most renowned contemporary artists, such as Dennis Oppenheim, Sorel Etrog, and Yoko Ono, on display in the public walkways, parks, and open spaces of Vancouver. People could access audio commentary to learn more about the sculptures, leave comments via audio, text, or picture/video messaging, and vote for their favourite sculpture.

MetroCode received a Gold Canadian e-Tourism Award.

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Big ideas

The skill of the twenty-first century could be said to be the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn. Unlearning is required when the conversations we revert to no longer work, or the world has changed so completely that they are now holding us back. There is no right place to begin, and we may not know what to do or how to do it, but the pull is there to move what we see or imagine as possible into action.
Landmark Insights. Book 2.: Redefine What's Possible
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Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.
Pablo Picasso
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By defending your circumstances as they are right now, you are actually making a case for being where you are. Give it up.
Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life by Gary John Bishop
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“Reality” is a phenomenon that arises in language. Language is both the ultimate reality and the medium through which reality is brought forth—there is no reality “per se,” no fixed reality. There’s only how we see it, how we say it is—it’s interpretation all the way down. It’s language—what we say (with and about others, ourselves, and the world at large) that constitutes who we are.
Landmark Insights. Book 1.: Live a Life You Love
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In simple terms, the language you use to describe your circumstances determines how you see, experience, and participate in them and dramatically affects how you deal with your life and confront problems both big and small.
Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life by Gary John Bishop
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We construct realities and then forget we were the ones who constructed them. When our relationship with reality has a kind of “is-ness” or “fixed-ness” to it, it limits what’s possible and allows only for options like explaining, trying to fix, resisting, or accepting.
Landmark Insights. Book 2.: Redefine What's Possible
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"In Sanskrit, there is a word—vichara: to develop insight into how things are. And that insight sets you free. Not so much faith in a deity, not even extraordinary mystical experiences."
Swami Sarvapriyananda
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"Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know that this is a mistake. Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience—self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light—constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work."
from "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion" by Sam Harris
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"Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride."
Anthony Bourdain
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Reality is only a consensual hunch.
Lily Tomlin
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