Lifethings: Idea Tree

Lifethings completed Idea Tree, a permanent participatory interactive artwork, in the newly renovated entry plaza of the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

With a commission for a public artwork to commemorate the expansion of the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, Lifethings completed the permanent artwork Idea Tree.

Standing in front of a mural from 1989, which celebrated completion of the original Convention Center, Idea Tree demonstrates a changing attitude for public art, providing an urban space for public gathering as well as creating a self-sustaining digital ecology where spoken ideas of the citizens are gathered, remixed and evolved over time.

Idea Tree creates an artificial floating “Canopy” under which various outdoor activities, convention-related and otherwise, can happen. The Canopy mediates the large scale of the plaza by creating a human scaled space as a transition from the street to the building’s entrance. The Canopy is skinned with translucent polycarbonate panels, the “Leaves,” that provide protection from the sun. These Leaves refract the sunlight into fragments of small spotlights in a way that creates visual experience of seeing the sun through dense volume of leaves in a forest. The steel branches of the Canopy suspend an opaque sculptural volume at the center, the “Fruit”, which houses electronic and sonic equipment for interactive public participation.

The interactive programming of the artwork is inspired by the Convention Center itself as the “meeting room of Silicon Valley” where iterative innovation happens over time. Majority of events at the Convention Center are booked as recurring events over multiple years. This invisible cycle inspires the artwork to respond to a unique time scale.

In response to this cyclic context, Idea Tree creates a self-sustaining ecology of ideas that evolves and devolves over time. The public can share their ideas by leaving a short voice message into the “Seed” placed on the plaza. Seed is a freestanding sound booth where a single person can engage the artwork and participate by leaving a spoken idea, an idea gene.

When a passer by shares a spoken idea with the Seed, three messages are remixed into an exquisite corpse-style haiku. Walking under the Fruit, people hear whispers of these haikus. By measuring how much time people spend listening to each haiku, popular haikus will “live” and stay in the playlist to have a chance to be whispered again in the future. These haikus lose their literal content and are distorted into an abstract soundscape through algorithmic composition process. The ambient soundscape will be audible from underneath the surface of the Canopy creating a condition that has the potential to stimulate people’s mind and work as fertilizers of new thoughts.