TimeZone: Demonstration and Discussion
by New York Prize Fellow John Stuart

Tuesday, August 12, 2008
7:00pm
Reception to follow

at Van Alen Institute
30 West 22nd Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10010

Please RSVP to rsvp [at] vanalen.org

John Stuart's TimeZone proposes a series of modular, interactive pods that provide real-time video communication between people of socio-economically diverse backgrounds whose daily routines are aligned along a single time zone. TimeZone takes existing and familiar instant communications technologies - which arguably privatize our activities as they continue to expand our social networks — and transforms them into tools for public use. The TimeZone pods are designed to activate existing public spaces (or to make public those spaces that otherwise might not be) by stimulating group dialogue and revitalizing public activities across cultures and languages. Designed for maximum durability and accessibility, they are meant to be touched, climbed, even written upon, and they will employ a range of wireless sensor technologies to facilitate spontaneous interaction between users. The pods may be suspended or stacked, used individually or composed into multiple configurations.

During his fellowship at Van Alen Institute, John Stuart has assembled a team of collaborators to conceptualize, fabricate, and implement two prototypical TimeZone pods in New York City and in Lima, Peru, at the southernmost end of the Eastern Time Zone. The team conducted a series of educational workshops between teenage students in both cities, experimenting with diverse forms of interaction to further develop TimeZone for future implementation in other forms and places.

Van Alen Institute invites you to join Stuart and his collaborators on Tuesday, August 12 at 7:00pm for a demonstration of the project's development and a discussion of technical and conceptual questions provoked by TimeZone — about relationships between information and materiality, and about virtual communications, privatization, and the public realm.