Science Mobilized: Bringing Up-To-The-Minute Headlines Into The Museum and Back Out Again: The Times Square of Science and Technology 
Anne Balsamo, University of Southern California, USA
Wayne LaBar, Liberty Science Center, USA
Dale MacDonald, Onomy Labs, Inc., USA
Scott Minneman, Onomy Labs, Inc., USA
Jon Winet, University of Iowa, USA
http://www.onomy.com
The Times Square of Science and Technology (T2ST) is a permanent installation going into the atrium of the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey. T2ST is an evocative environmentally-scaled artwork designed to convey the notion that science and technology is exciting, dynamic and current. To that end, Onomy Labs, working with Anne Balsamo (University of Southern California Institute for Multimedia Literacy), Jon Winet (University of Iowa Experimental Writing Wing) and John Randolph (Randolph Designs) are creating a large-scale interactive mobile that includes three thematically-relevant floating shapes and other dynamic displays that visitors will interact with from the different levels of the building structure.
The T2ST design includes twenty-seven active surfaces that display information from RSS feeds from trusted science and technology sources on the Web. In this way, T2ST provides an automatic and evergreen source of science and technology news, much as Times Square does for the topics of financial news, current events, and advertising. The installation demonstrates a new way to bring Web-based content not only into the public area of the museum but also out again via SMS and MMS subscriptions of thematically relevant content. To facilitate such an operation, Onomy Labs developed a suite of tools for directing automated searches of the Web and to manage input from staff and members of the public. This paper describes the architecture and preliminary use of this suite of tools in using the Web as an evergreen information source live and in color on the museum floor and in visitors’ hands.
Session: Enhanced Galleries [Exhibitions]
Keywords: RSS, multi-display, SMS, MMS, Fair use, content filtering
