HUBBUB
Interactive installation based on speech recognition technology, collaboration with Sha Xin Wei
Hubbub investigates how accidental and non-accidental conversations can be catalyzed in urban spaces. In a Hubbub space, you will find some of the words you speak dance in projection against the surfaces of the space. This could be in the tram, a plaza, on the table at a café, or on the ocean, where the water seemingly washes your words to the shore, so that someone passing by even hours later may continue to answer to a question still floating in the water. Or at your favorite café, the words from another table flow across yours and you begin to answer; it becomes a playful conversation. Hubbub is one application of research at the Topological Media Lab, treating speech as a computational substance for architectural construction. Success is measured by the extent to which strangers who revisit a Hubbub space begin to interact with one another in ways they otherwise would not.