Hotels ‘Bleed’ into the Neighborhood

Park View Hotel– by Ashok Sukumaran–stretches between the Cesar Chavez plaza in downtown San Jose and the neighbouring Fairmont Hotel. Using specially-built pointing devices, audiences in the park can access interior hotel spaces, by “pinging” them optically. Once found and hit (two different modes on the scope) the interiors release their properties into a wireless network… the color of the interior propagates stochastically, leaking out of the building skin, jumping across the street, and entering some street-lights in the park below. In this way, the park enjoys a certain neighbourly access to the hotel, inverting the usual character of the relationship.

This project was the result of a residency at Sun Microsystems Labs, where the artist was (according the residency brief) working with SunSPOTs, small “programmable object technologies” which are a simple-to-use prototyping platform for embedded technologies, or the so-called “Internet of Things”. [via]