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Start-up ideas straddle worlds of art, technology
To experience ”Invisible Ideas,” you first check out a PocketPC handheld computer and a pair of headphones from Copley Society of art on Newbury Street. Then you start roaming around the Boston Common, the Public Garden, and the Commonwealth Avenue Mall. As you walk, pictures will appear on the computer’s display, and voices and sounds will emerge out of thin air. This ”art and technology project,” part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival 2003 going on through next week, is a mix of artistic ambition, global positioning satellite, or GPS, technology, and handheld computer programming — the kind of thing you expect to find at a cyberarts festival.
By D.C. Denison, Boston Globe Staff
But below the many artistic layers of ”Invisible Ideas,” there’s something else: a start-up technology that’s getting a workout in the hands of artists and patrons. In this case the start-up is SmartWorlds, a Cambridge company built around wireless technology that it hopes will eventually find a place in hospitals, schools, museums, and retail operations, particularly retail operations.
”We want to bring together wireless technology and bar codes to create new ways to shop,” Giuseppe Taibi, SmartWorlds’ chief executive and founder, said when I called him at his office.
But selling futuristic wireless shopping systems to major corporations is a long-term process. In the meantime, Taibi is happy to get his technology in the hands of artists, in particular, the five Boston artists who have created 147 pieces of content that now ”hang as if invisible” — in Taibi’s words — throughout the Back Bay.
”The art project has a very clear benefit for us,” Taibi said. ”For one thing it gives us a very large installation in the real world. We are learning how robust the technology is, how much support we have to provide for it. We are learning in which details the devils are hiding.”
”Invisible Ideas” has also raised SmartWorlds’ visibility with possible partners. The company has been working with Hewlett-Packard, which provided eight PocketPCs to the artists. Taibi is hoping that he’ll be able to build on that relationship as he seeks to launch his technology into more mainstream applications.
Taibi has also learned a few lessons the hard way. He discovered, while programming the project, that the real-world locations on the GPS grid are not as consistent and sharply focused as he had expected. The coordinates often splay over a surprisingly large area, more than 50 feet in diameter, and sometimes the signals bounce off buildings in unpredictable ways.
The battery life of the PocketPC units is also a limiting factor: 2 1/2 hours is about as long as the unit can go without a charge, and that time will decrease if the artists add more audiovisual features.
”We’re now working on how to compensate for those constraints,” Taibi said.
This kind of overlap, between artists and budding tech start-ups, is not surprising, according to George Fifield, the director of the Boston Cyberarts Festival.
”The innovation process is improved immensely when the technologists interact with artists,” he said. ”Artists are often very comfortable working with new technologies.”
Fifield cited the earliest computer animation originated at Bell Labs in the early 1960s. Local contemporary movie-effect creator Karl Sims also started out creating art projects.
Karen Pfefferle, gallery manager and curator at the Copley Society of art, was also not surprised at the mutual interests of technologists and artists.
”Both Kodak and Polaroid offered their products to artists to jump-start the development of more commercial ideas,” she said.
And SmartWorlds is not the only Cyberart contributor working out software bugs in an art context.
SkyBuilders, a Cambridge company that is building a small enterprise information system, is providing an events database for this year’s festival; it also created similar databases for the first two festivals, held in 1999 and 2001.
”Working with the festival pushed our envelope,” said SkyBuilders CEO Bob Doyle. ”Our product is stronger than it was because of our work with Cyberarts.
”Many cyber artists are in fact technologists who cannot put their technological skills to work,” Doyle said. ”The current business climate is not giving them the opportunity to try out new ideas, so they are launching them as art projects.”
Both Doyle and Fifield said there are probably many more start-up ideas lurking inside electronic art pieces, and with the downturn in the tech economy, many more to come.
”Let’s face it, there are now a lot of very smart people with very good ideas who have more time on their hands,” Fifield said. ”I bet we’ll see more art that shows off what they are able to do.”
D.C. Denison can be reached at [email protected].
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