Alone Together, Tove Kjellmark, Stockholm, Sweden

[Airicist]

Author - Tove Kjellmark (https://pr.ai/showthread.php?t=15315)

[Airicist]

https://vimeo.com/103161317

Alone Together short documentation before installed.
August 11, 2014


Alone Together is a new public art commission for Stockholm Central Station. A mimicking and talking sculpture in bronze that randomly catches live tweets from Stockholm and speaks them out loud. The digital public room gets a body and a voice.

[Airicist]

https://vimeo.com/117663936

Alone Together (Installed, documentation from Stockholm Railway Station)
January 24, 2015


A creaking bronze sculpture catches live tweets from the citizens of Stockholm and gleefully recites them aloud. In this way random, anonymous, public chatter finds its body and voice. Installed Jan 2015 in the big entrance of Stockholm railway station. Handmade in bronze.

Made in collaboration with Yours and with financial aid from Pernod Ricard Sweden AB

[Airicist]

https://vimeo.com/119262723

Alone Together
February 10, 2015


"People of all ages were drawn to Alone Together – many were charmed, some confused, others delighted. And then someone took it into their head to break it.

I put something into the world and I then observed how people reacted to it. In the process I learned something about the interaction between my intentions, the realisation of my intentions, and how people react to this fragile, but feisty bronze creature that emerged from my workshop.

It is as if one can learn about fear and intolerance by introducing alien artefacts into everyday spaces and routines."

Alone Together, project description:

A mechanical and speaking bronze sculpture designed with inspiration from a smaller model in plastic. The model is a stripped and hacked electronic toy that Tove Kjellmark previously exhibited at LEAP in Berlin, after an Art Hack event. The bronze sculpture describes both a constant flow of the city, and also creates a unique type of spoken digital poetry that captures the viewer with its short and concise messages. You can take part of it for a few seconds or you can stay and become entranced by an endless stream of information. This work is unique in that it is a robotized bronze sculpture that, through movement and words, is controlled by the public via social media. The piece is something of a digital exorcism of the traditional sculpture. The digital public space becomes embodied in a physical public space. The sculpture was unveiled January 21 2015 in the large hall of the Stockholm Central Station where thousands of people pass by every day on their way to their destinations.

MATERIAL
Reclaim the bronze! Each piece is modeled by hand in wax and then cast in bronze. To get the proper fit between the parts a CAD and 3D printed model in the proper size was created. The piece takes the historically pretentious material, bronze, that for centuries have looked down at you from a higher ground and presents it on a more sympathetic level with focus on communication and humor.

DATA COLLECTION
The technical part of the work consists, amongst other tings, of data collection, synthesis and geo-tagging. We wanted the sound to create a dynamic and authentic experience so instead of using pre recorded material the piece uses a speech synthesizer coupled to geo-tagged real time data from Twitter. Geo-tagging in this context means that we pick up tweets sent from a defined geographical area, in this case Stockholm. The sculpture then recites tweets with a carefully selected voice. The voice may be affected by factors such as smileys and words indicating joy or sadness in the form of laughter and tears. We have adjusted the voice so that it resembles Kristina Lugn (a Swedish poet and author with a characteristic speech pattern.). The digital flow of the voice input also controls the robots motion patterns. All this combined creates a piece that is directly coupled to a digital urban reality