Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
«Amodal Suspension»

From the 1st to the 24th of November 2003, short text messages sent by people over the Internet or by cell phone will be converted into patterns of flashing lights in the sky, turning the Japanese city of Yamaguchi into a giant communication switchboard. However, rather than being sent directly, the messages will be encoded as unique sequences of flashes and sent to the sky with a network of 20 robotically-controlled searchlights. The piece was located in the public space around the new YCAM Center and was accessible through the URL www.amodal.net
The signaling is similar to Morse code or the flashing of fireflies—the lights will modulate their intensity to represent different text characters. Each message, once encoded, it is ‹suspended› in the sky of the city, bouncing around the YCAM center, relayed from one searchlight to another. An email is sent to the intended recipient to notify him or her that ‹a message is waiting for them in the sky of Yamaguchi›. Each light sequence continues to circulate until the recipient or somebody else ‹catches› the message and reads it. To catch a text, participants must again use the cell phone or computer programs provided at www.amodal.net. To highlight the irony of globalization, the piece uses an automatic translation engine between Japanese and English—this produces inaccurate but charming results. While visualizing the traffic of information on an urban scale, the piece is also intended as a deviation from the assumed transparency of electronic communication.

(source: project information, YCAM website)