Mike Lawrie  

Pipe Dreams at the Ontario Science Centre

For the experience analysis assignment I chose Pipe Dreams, an interactive installation  by Bruce Shapiro at the Ontario Science Centre.

What is most striking about the work is it’s scale. Stretching from floor to ceiling it is easily the most physically imposing object in the room. It was not, however, initially clear how the operated worked or indeed what it was intended to do. As I began to explore the work, these details were slowly revealed to me.

To begin with I was fascinated by the mechanism. Small bubbles were being generated at irregular intervals by servo or solenoid-controlled valves near the base of the piece. When actuated, the valve would push a single pocket of air into its respective tube. The bubble would then begin its slow ascent to the ceiling. It was clear that the tubes themselves were filled with some sort of clear gel or oil which substantially slowed the rising bubbles.

Almost immediately I recognized that the bubbles were not random: this installation was a sort of graphic display. I was in fact looking at a depiction of Albert Einstein, rendered in variable-density bubbles. As the face ascended, it became increasingly distorted. An inherent limit of the mechanism, apparently, was that the bubbles in tubes with many other bubbles tended to ascend faster than those with relatively few. Some effort, obviously, had been made to combat this. The result is that at the beginning it was difficult to determine what, if anything was represented by the bubbles. Only after about half of the graphic was emitted it began to coalesce. About a minute after that Einstein’s visage had mostly disappeared.

A few moments later I was met with the bubble-depiction of a grinning child. Up until this point I was unaware that the installation was at all interactive. I had assumed an entirely passive role. Turning around I discovered the other half of the installation. This had gone entirely unnoticed by me up until this point, as there was a significant space between the two parts. It was a small photo booth with a touch screen and a digital camera. This makes it possible to produce your own image to display in bubbles.

I had noticed at this point that graphics, whether pre-programmed or user-driven were geared towards faces. To break with the monotony, I took a picture of my open hand in the booth. However, it was not particularly obvious what the image was a representation of when rendered in bubbles. The exclusive use of faces was obviously a design consideration. Our brains programmed the way they are, are extremely adept at detecting faces. Even given the low resolution and gradual shearing of the image, it was easy to recognize Einstein and the child. Had the installation been more broad it would have certainly been less effective.

Though I had now discovered that the installation was interactive, I feel it was still missing something. While there was a compelling reason to favour faces over other body parts, what constrained the display to portions of the body? The title, Pipe Dreams, implies an interpretive depth that was apparently missing. Given that, I would have liked to see a greater variety in the means of creating graphics for the display. Being able to paint or otherwise construct a graphic in real-time as it was drawn would be quite compelling. I suppose this was a conscious choice as well. The science centre is after all a family-oriented place, and the ability to render expletives in thousands of bubbles would perhaps be too tempting. If nothing else, geometric patterns would have been interesting.

Upon writing this I discovered in the photographs I took that there was an arrow on the ground in front of the display pointing to the photo booth. Had I noticed this, my interpretation would have possibly been quite different. Nonetheless, it is somewhat unfortunate that an indicator like that is required. It would be wonderful if the full character of the piece were innate, that it could be understood without direction.