iTea
On September 25th - 29th, the cross media week picnic07 took place in Amsterdam. I was invited by Mediamatic to participate in a RFID hacking workshop. The goal was clear: put a bunch of hackers, t(h)inkerers and interaction designers together; let them play with rfid chips and readers and make an installation for the picnic event.
It turned out to be a lot of fun. Together with David Kousemaker (Blendid.nl), Don Blaauw, Dirk Oosterbosch, Vlad Trifa, and Esther Weltevrede we tought up and made iTea. iTea is an interactive installation in the form of a coffee table. 
In the coffee cup on top of the table, you can place your rfid tag - which is given to you at the entrance of the conference and linked to a social network - and the table will start to display information about you. At first it gets your name, description and keywords from the picnic network. Then it will start to Google your firstname and lastname. Then it just googles your first name but substitutes it by your full name. The result is visualized by a projection from within the table to the surface of the table, in the form of drops of information.
The idea was to make people aware of data mining, profiling and rfid chips. This turned out to be exactly what happened. People would drop in there rfid tag and started reading. At the beginning the information was correct. 
Some people would already be amazed (”How on earth can this table know who I am by placing a little key chain in this cup?”). After that the table started gossiping because of the substitution of the first name by the full name. Most of the time the table was surrounded by a lot of people and the person who put in it’s rfid tag would now say “this is not true”. However, people around the table reacted “yeah, that’s what they all say”. Mission accomplished.
The algorithm which gets data from Google has been written by me previously for govcom.org and has also been used for the Oracle Machine.
A little movie when there was still an error in the algorithm:
More information about iTea can be found on our project page.
Linkdump:
- A movie from a speaker in the main hall who presents all mediamatic projects
- iTea in the news
- Don’s pictures
- Anne’s pictures
- we-make-money-not-art’s photostream
More pictures:
Our Team:
Marco de boer
Cup on the table
The whole story of the hackers camp, written by Esther (the first is very long, then it gets shorter and shorter:
- http://www.mediamatic.net/article-22777-en.html
- http://www.mediamatic.net/article-22841-en.html
- http://www.mediamatic.net/article-22841-en.html
- http://www.mediamatic.net/article-22878-en.html
- http://www.mediamatic.net/article-22925-en.html
- http://www.mediamatic.net/article-22942-en.html
- http://www.mediamatic.net/article-22979-en.html
- http://www.mediamatic.net/article-23143-en.html
All photos on this page are by Anne Helmond.
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[...] last year @ mediamatic’s hackerscamp I made iTea, an interactive installation in the form of a coffee table. In the coffee cup on top of the table, [...]
Hi - I am currently working on my final year university project which is investigating rfid and surveillance and the the idea of real world people having a “digital signature” built up of their online persona. I was very impressed with the iTea installation as it covers the same areas in a playful and engaging way. I am wondering if you have any advice on enabling the searching of information from the net?
I assume you have a database of basic details from the rfid number of each user and this is the base of the search criteria, but how do you extract pertinent info from the search? Any help would be greatly appreciated…
Hya,
the RFID tag was linked to a person in the picnic social network. Therefor we had some basic information like a person’s name and some keywords. The script then did a Google query for “personname is” OR “personname has” OR “personname will” OR “personname does” OR … and got out sentences from the Google descriptions with a simple regular expression looking for Capitals followed by a couple of words and a dot. I thus looked for telling/strong sentences. If nothing was found for “firstname + lastname” we would just use the first name of the person to produce gibberish. We then shuffled the resulting sentences and fed them to the iTea visualization. If you know PHP you can use these (old and ugly but working) scripts I submitted to the Mediamatic svn repo: http://trac.mediamatic.nl/picnic/browser/camp08/TractoricalPerformance/googlescraper