Bus.Tops: an Arts Council and London Olympics funded
project under the Artists Taking The Lead fund, a major
project of the Cultural Olympiad.
PROJECT
SUMMARY
THE CANVAS
Bus.Tops provides the canvas that allows London to tell its stories. These can
be small, intimate stories of a neighbourhood or citywide adventures that
draw us into a London we never imagined; or simply moments of beauty,
wonder, questioning, critique, comment and exploration. These stories unfold
on a canvas made up of networked Installations of programmable objects
containing LED displays situated on the roofs of bus stops across all of
London.
Bus.Tops is an installation of at least 33 approx. 2.1m x 1.6m x 0.35m public
art installations which will house LED/LCD panels on the roofs of bus shelters
across all London boroughs (at least one in each). The display housing and
its affixing to the shelters will be fabricated with the view to minimise the
effects of the elements and vandalism, whilst reflecting the nature and
character of the borough that it is in.
The Bus.Tops installations will display work created by the public as well as
established artists. The installations are intended to delightfully and
provocatively disrupt commuters’ experience of riding on buses. It will jolt us
out of our commuter habit and inspire joy and wonder in the last place you’d
expect it – on the roof of a bus shelter.
THE DISPLAY BODY - VIZITERS
The installations are referred to as Viziters, and are analogous to being
temporary residents of London during the 12 month run-up to and including
the 2012 Olympic Games. Over their period of stay in the capital each Viziter
will develop a unique Character and Persona, Tastes and personal
Preferences through their relationships with each other, members of the
public and participating artists. These characteristics will be dynamic
expressions of an Artificial Intelligence that mimics emotional intelligence.
Each Viziter will ‘talk’ to its neighbours as well as the world at large via a
variety of social platforms, emulating the human social behaviours. The LED
display will be housed within each Viziters’ body at a maximum dimension of
2.1m x 1.6m x 0.35m. This unit will contain the computing device and
wireless connectivity required to receive and display content on the screen.
THE TOOLS
The installations will be creatively accessed via a web site and web based
toolset either on a computer or on a mobile phone. The site and the toolset
will provide all artists with the means to create their Viziters installation piece.
This will include provision for text, graphics, video and animation. Also
included will be scheduling and Bus.Tops location tools to enable artists to
create multi-location and/or multi-temporal installations.
THE WEBSITE
The website will also provide a virtual window onto the installations.
Audiences will be able to view the installations in our virtual Bus-Tops viewer
in real time or they can choose to catch up on installations they have missed.
They can also choose to string together particular installations based on
location, theme or artist.
Audiences can also help critique works to ensure that they reflect the values
of the bus-tops project and reflect the diversity of participants.
THE API
A critical feature of the website is the provision of both content and toolsets
via APIs. This allows those artists more comfortable working in bits and bytes
to create new visualisations for a web audience as well as create new tools to
maximise the creative potential of the network of Viziters, together forming a
London-wide canvas for creative expression.
Figure 1: A stylised representation of Viziter installation locations
Figure 2: An example of content on a display. In this case, a real-time game of Pong being played