For those who’ve attributed my recent silence to Sidney, she’s only part of the cause. I’ve also been doing a gig for OCAD recently — The Mobile Experience Lab was looking to showcase some of the cell phone technologies they’d developed over the past two years in public spaces. I started as a consultant on narrative and then I was kept on to implement the scenarios I’d written. It was a lot of fun working with a bunch of talented folk to figure out how to make these whimsical and odd things happen on John Street. They’re hoping to launch it this summer, funding and situation willing. Below is some documentation we got during the alpha and beta testing.

Cycling Erasure was installed in the window of Urbane Cyclist and encouraged people to wave their hands over the digital wheels to make the real wheel turn, surreptitiously taking pictures of them as they flailed.

Camera Hunter [2:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Camera Hunter sent people on a safari to find cameras in ground floor windows. Their clue? A photo sent to their phone taken seconds ago from the camera they’re looking for…

In Grange Cicadas, the player gets a plea for help from electronic insects who’ve been trapped in a wicker cage.

Unlike the other newspaper boxes at Queen and John, the Your News box allowed the public to write the headlines and cover photos by texting and emailing them in.

Geoffrey Shea, one of the principle investigators, put together this vid after the alpha that shows most of the scenarios, including the two musical ones I didn’t work on.