CARLOS J. GOMEZ DE LLARENA
Urballoon
Date: Friday 9.18
Start Time: 8:00pm
Location: Tompkins Square Park
Tompkins Square Park’s sunset crowd is invited to witness and participate in a dialogue between the Urballoon and New York City. This outdoor media installation poses a simple question: How do you define the character of New York City in words or images? Submitted responses will be shown in real time from a video projector suspended from the Urballoon. The audience can also participate by visiting the urballoon.com website from their mobile device or from an on-site laptop connected to the Internet.
The Urballoon consists of a large helium balloon with a video projector and a wireless laptop that projects user-generated content onto public spaces. It floats above its tethers in parks or plazas and displays the video onto the ground, encouraging people to gather around a digital bonfire. It has been previously shown in New York at Eyebeam (2003, 2007) and in City Hall Park as part of the Spectropolis festival (2004). This year, the Urballoon will be part of the Conflux festival occurring in the city from September 17-20th. With the increasing popularity of smartphones and wireless devices, the Urballoon will feature a new website optimized for mobile devices in order to facilitate live participation from people on the street.
Carlos J. Gómez de Llarena is a media architect exploring the design of environments and media that shape our social relationship with space. He works with a diverse palette of tools including urban space, installations, video, sound, wireless networks, the web and programming. He is a recipient of the 2003 Golden Nica for Net Vision from Ars Elecronica. His work has been shown at Ars Electronica, Eyebeam, Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas, ZKM, ResFest and the Seoul Net Festival, among others. His background is in architecture, video and interactive media. He currently lives in New York’s East Village (the neighborhood where the Urballoon will be shown), and works as a freelance interaction designer and artist.
