A New York Times inter­ac­tive fea­ture run­ning today cap­tures the moods of its vis­i­tors. It’s sim­ple and typo­graph­i­cally beau­ti­ful, and reminds me of Simon’s emotion-related projects. You can even fil­ter by McCain and Obama sup­port­ers, to com­pare their states of being. (I’m the “exhausted” one at lower right.)

I recently had the good for­tune to visit the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at MoMA. It’s on exhibit until May 12, and I rec­om­mend that every­one inter­ested in dynamic media and emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies go see it. If you are read­ing this blog, that means you. (The image above is Jim Lambie’s instal­la­tion on the first floor of the museum -- lit­er­ally, on the floor -- and is not part of the design exhibit.)

I found out about the exhibit in a round­about way. I was doing some research on the Make Controller Kit, an open-source hard­ware device that I’m con­sid­er­ing for future projects. That site points to a num­ber of great projects made with the kit, my favorite of which is Lightweeds by Simon Heijdens. Heijdens’ site men­tioned that his work was on dis­play at MoMA, so I went to the museum sim­ply to view his project, with no idea that I’d also see a num­ber of other phe­nom­e­nal projects.

Lightweeds is a bril­liant con­cept: Project life­like “weeds” onto inte­rior walls of a space, or what Heijdens calls the “arti­fi­cial” space of a gallery. Collect live data from the envi­ron­ment out­side the build­ing (tem­per­ate, sun­light, wind veloc­ity), and make the pro­jected weeds grow and behave in response to that data, thereby estab­lish­ing a con­nec­tion between the nat­ural and built envi­ron­ments. Here’s a close-up of one “weed” blow­ing in the “wind”:

Another high­light is the piece I Want You To Want Me, by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, who I rec­og­nized imme­di­ately as the same folks who brought us We Feel Fine.

I Want You To Want Me mines the Internet, look­ing for peo­ple who them­selves are look­ing for some­one else: a date, a part­ner, a spouse. The touch-screen inter­face rep­re­sents each indi­vid­ual as a bal­loon which can be tapped to reveal some­thing about who that per­son is (e.g. Mike, age 29, in Philadephia) and what he’s look­ing for (e.g. “a hot babe” or “a man my age I can really set­tle down with”).

The project is extremely engag­ing. Users’ innate voyeuris­tic instincts make the con­tent inter­est­ing and relat­able, and the bal­loons (data) can be manip­u­lated through mul­ti­ple views and fil­ters, which enables the dis­cov­ery of peo­ple who may want each other in real life. Both of these char­ac­ter­is­tics were inher­ited from the We Feel Fine project, but I Want You To Want Me employs far-superior graph­ics and a touch inter­face. (As an instal­la­tion, it doesn’t have to strug­gle with the lim­i­ta­tions of a web-based dis­tri­b­u­tion platform.)

The absolute high­light of the exhibit, though, is Shadow Monsters, an instal­la­tion by Philip Worthington. You enter a small room with a very bright light on the wall behind you, and your “shadow” is “cast” on the oppo­site wall. The shadow, how­ever, is aug­mented in real-time to sug­gest how it would be seen in the mind of a child who’s been told to sleep, but can’t stop wor­ry­ing about mon­sters under the bed. While your pro­jected shadow grows horns, teeth, scary eye­balls and shaggy hair, the space is acti­vated with growl­ing, grunt­ing, and gar­gling -- the sounds of hun­gry mon­sters prepar­ing to devour lit­tle chil­dren. My favorite moment was when I made an alligator-like shadow pup­pet with my arms, and it grew large teeth and spat in dis­gust toward the oppo­site wall. (There was audio for the spit­ting, too.)

Not to brag, but that last bit of com­pu­ta­tion­ally enhanced per­for­mance art drew a brief stand­ing ova­tion from a crowd of onlook­ers. You see, with Shadow Monsters, there are the shad­ows, and there are the peo­ple cast­ing the shad­ows, both of which could be con­sid­ered per­form­ers, since they both con­tribute some­thing to the space. And then there are the peo­ple out­side the space look­ing in, watch­ing the performance.

But, in real­ity, the onlook­ers are part of the per­for­mance, too. They unwit­tingly play the part of the lit­tle child, peek­ing out from under the cov­ers, afraid and con­fused, unable to explain what’s real and what’s not, and unwill­ing to get out of bed (and into the space) until they can fig­ure out what’s really going on. My the­ory is that I drew a few claps because I wasn’t afraid to “get out from under the cov­ers” and really explore the sys­tem. (I was fairly con­fi­dent that it would not actu­ally eat me.) I raised my arms, stuck out my legs, made enclosed shadow-spaces (which is how to trig­ger eye­balls, I dis­cov­ered), and did a num­ber of other phys­i­cal actions that would have got­ten me kicked out of the museum, had I not been within that instal­la­tion space. But I didn’t care, because I wanted to know how the algo­rithm worked, and besides, my atten­tion was on the large pro­jec­tion in front of me, so I wasn’t think­ing about how silly I looked until peo­ple started clapping.

I will end with the begin­ning. Most vis­i­tors to the exhibit won’t even notice the first piece, Genomic Cartography by Ben Fry. It’s a sequence of human DNA, visu­al­ized as extremely small, pink and gray let­ters, printed on a white wall. But the exhibit title and intro­duc­tion are set on top of the piece, so it looks like just an inter­est­ing background.

I took away three pro­found insights from this exhibit:

1. The fact that the Museum of Modern Art, a ven­er­a­ble insti­tu­tion, staged this exhibit com­pletely val­i­dated my deci­sion to study dynamic media. This is absolutely the future, and absolutely what I want to do.

2. About half of the dynamic instal­la­tions, includ­ing Shadow Monsters, were built using Processing. Awesome. Again, I feel like I am totally going in the right direc­tion here, and I am inspired by the high qual­ity of work that can be done with the Processing environment.

3. Most of the exhib­ited artists and design­ers are within a few years of my age. And they have stuff in MoMA. That gives me hope and also scares me. I bet­ter get crackin’.

I can­not rec­om­mend a visit to this exhibit highly enough. If you can’t make it to New York, the exhibit’s web­site is a night­mare to nav­i­gate, but at least you can read about all of the projects there.

As part of my research, I’m look­ing into the psy­chol­ogy of crowds, and what makes some “crowd” expe­ri­ences pos­i­tive, and oth­ers neg­a­tive. I had an expe­ri­ence recently that Joe sug­gested I doc­u­ment here.

In line at Boston Logan, I waited impa­tiently with hun­dreds of other peo­ple, brac­ing myself for the mad rush that hap­pens just before and after the metal detec­tor. You used to be able to put your bags on the con­veyor belt and walk through, but now get­ting through secu­rity involves no fewer than 13 sep­a­rate steps, depend­ing on how you count them:

1. Remove any liq­uids and lap­tops from your luggage.
2. Place your lug­gage on the con­veyor belt.
3. Place your lap­top on the con­veyor belt, in its own bin.
4. Remove your shoes.
5. Remove your jacket.
6. Remove your belt (if any) and empty your pock­ets of every­thing -- wal­let, keys, change -- except for your board­ing pass! You will need that in a moment.
7. Place your shoes, jacket, belt, and pocket con­tents in a bin on the con­veyor belt.
8. Add to that bin a small plas­tic, reseal­able bag which con­tains any liq­uids or lotions that you want to take on the plane with you. Oh, and of those items, not one may exceed 3 fluid ounces. (Note that this step requires exten­sive prepa­ra­tion prior to arriv­ing at the airport.)
9. Wait until a TSA agent gives you a blank stare, which is your indi­ca­tion to pro­ceed through the metal detector.
10. Get scolded by the TSA agent for not hold­ing on to your board­ing pass, as instructed in step 6.
11. Deflect nasty looks given to you by the 8,000 trav­el­ers in line behind you as every­one waits for your board­ing pass to be retrieved from the gray bin.
12. TSA agent now allows you to pass, hav­ing ver­i­fied that you are in pos­ses­sion of a lit­tle scrap of paper that any 5-year-old could have mocked up in MacPaint.
13. Collect all your belong­ings, repack your bag, apply anti-fungal foot cream (aerosol vari­eties pro­hib­ited), get dressed in front of strangers who now hate you, and pro­ceed to gate.

That would be stress­ful enough. But add to it gen­eral anx­i­ety about flight, lack of decent food, sleep, hydra­tion, and other phys­i­cal and emo­tional stresses asso­ci­ated with travel, and most people’s gen­eral mood at this point, in the secu­rity line, is one of unpleas­ant anticipation.

So I’m back at Logan, it’s early, and I just want to make sure I don’t miss my flight. I have pre­pared for all 13 steps the night before. My lotions, liq­uids and gels are appor­tioned and sealed. My shoes are untied, ready for instant slip-off. I’m try­ing not to make eye con­tact with any­one, assum­ing they all feel the same way -- grumpy and dis­tressed -- but it turns out they don’t.

I only know that because Mr. TSA him­self decided we needed a lit­tle refresher course. He approaches, walk­ing along­side us, lift­ing a num­ber of large bot­tles of ver­boten sham­poos and sun­tan lotion into the air. He is lit­er­ally yelling: “THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO YOUR LIQUIDS. YOU MUST PUT ALL YOUR LIQUIDS INTO A SMALL PLASTIC BAG.” He is five feet away from my face and yelling directly into it. The cor­ri­dor is about 20 feet wide; I think he could use his indoor voice and com­mu­ni­cate more effec­tively. But he con­tin­ues down the line, hit­ting all 13 items on our to-do lists at full volume.

Finally, hav­ing reached the last pas­sen­ger, he shuts up, turns around, and starts head­ing back to his post. And that’s when the hor­rif­i­cally mag­i­cal moment hap­pened: Someone said “thank you.” Thank you! This ver­bally abu­sive author­ity fig­ure has, in my eyes, been noth­ing but rude, obnox­ious, and insult­ing, lec­tur­ing us about things that we should already know. But some­one thanked him for what I inter­preted as abuse. And then another per­son thanked him. And another. And soon, once about ten peo­ple had said “thank you,” he felt oblig­ated to respond with “you’re welcome.”

Did this peo­ple think he was doing them a favor? Did they think he was a hero? Have TSA agents been ele­vated to the myth­i­cal level of fire­fight­ers and first respon­ders? “You can do no wrong. You are keep­ing our coun­try safe. Thank you for everything.”

It was fas­ci­nat­ing to me that any­one would respond this way, and that after the first “thank you,” that oth­ers fol­lowed. What does that say about the crowd’s dynamic relat­ing to this author­ity fig­ure? How can the col­lec­tive emo­tion be so dif­fer­ent from my own? And how can this sort of inter­ac­tion inform our approach to emo­tional designs?