A performative celebration of city life and activity incorporating physical and virtual activity into one cohesive spectacle, Plug-In-Play was a response to the theme of the 2008 San Jose Biennale, “Build Your Own World.” Rockwell Group’s LAB built an interactive urban-scale projection environment at Richard Meier & Partners Architects’s San Jose City Hall building.

To create a space that responded to and was defined by a large network of connections and interactions, the LAB developed software to track virtual and geo-location (Twitter feeds, Foursquare check-ins, Flickr postings) as well as physical activity around existing and placed objects in the city hall. The physical objects—from traffic lights and picnic tables to bird feeders and hopscotch squares—were connected to the building via 4-inch-thick colored wires running to oversize versions of electrical plugs. All the activity was filtered and translated into an abstracted version of a cityscape projected onto the facade of the building, suggesting a new type of environment where the vitality and complexity with which people engage with their urban environments is more dynamically reflected. Read Less