"Hole in the Earth" is an installation for the public space. Concept & design by Miss Maki Ueda, and the Production is taken care of by Miss Ueda & CELL (Initiators of Incidents) within the framework of CELL’Äôs "Homeport" project for "Cultural Capital Rotterdam 2001" Technical system design and software & hardware development are done by V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam.

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The idea is to create a virtual tunnel through the earth, connecting two public spaces in Rotterdam and Shanghai, so that communication with the other side is possible. Each end of the "tunnel" consists of a steel turret with a bullet-proof glass lid, sticking about 30 cm (1 foot) out of the pavement. Inside is a good-quality SVGA display (plasma-screen), an AXIS 2120 Intelligent Webcam, speakers and a microphone.

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The screen is facing upward, so the audience has to look down (into the earth) to see the images from the other side, thereby coming into view of the webcam, capturing images for the other side to see. The same principle is used for the audio; the microphone is plugged into the server, which encodes the received signal as a low-bitrate MP3-stream, which is unicast to the other side, and played back by the other server.

Hole in the Earth