Public Transport Screens
Today I took public transport over to Museum of Science and Technology. I couldn’t help notice how screened up it all is, and I took notes. I am very, very tempted to add the public transport system in as a research object… But probably I need to try and restrain myself. I did not take any pictures on the way over to the museum.
I left the guesthouse on Guofu Road at about 11.30 and walked down Guoding Road to the bus stop on Siping Road. There are quite a few little shops around there. The screens on the bus stop are there but they are not working. I don’t know if that’s because the stop is very new (as it appears to be) and so they have not been turned on yet, or if it’s because there is no interest in advertising to the kind of people who wait for a bus here!
I took a 61 down to Dalian Road, where the new Siping Road station on the no. 8 line is. I noticed that above the driver there is a tickertape LED with red characters. (Red seems to be the uniform colour for these, and maybe it now signifies to everyone that this is an announcement of some sort.) The screen runs a “welcome on board, hold on tight, next stop is….” Etc message, which is also announced by a machine voice in Chinese and English, with the English confined to the “next stop” bit. This last bit also appears in English on the tickertape screen. On the bus back, I noticed that the LED was advertising itself also, and that the Chinese term for these tickertape style LEDs is 走字 LEDs, or “walking word LEDs”
Inside the buses, there were 2 LCD (I think) TV-sized screens, one at the front behind the driver, the other at the exit halfway back, mounted perpendicular to it and facing towards the back seats. On the screens was the legend “上海市公共信息平台” (“Shanghai Municipal Public Information Station), which suggests this feed for the buses might be operated by the city. On the way down it seemed to be a variety show of singers performing in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. The sound from the singers was interrupted with the destination announcements and so forth needed to be made.
At Siping Road MTR station, I noticed how screen-free it was, and how there were not even lightboxes on the way down into the subway. OK, it’s a brand-new station (opened within the last 12 months, I believe), but it’s hard to believe they haven’t thought about this, or that advertising space is an add-on later. On the platform (as on all lines I have been on) there are LCD screens that both run some kind of news/advertising channel and (on the right hand side of the split screen) information about when the next train is and what its destination is. I did not have to wait long enough anywhere to pay real attention to these. (If I spend a day on the MTR later I can do that.)
On the trains on line 8, even though it’s a new line, there are no screens. I changed at the main intersection, People’s Square, which has been thoroughly rebuilt to accommodate extra lines, and is all screened up, with sequenced LCDs and all sorts of stuff (as noted before). On line 2, there are screens in the carriages, and this time I got a seat, so I could take notes. First, the company advertised itself: DMGTV (Digital Media Group TV), www.dmgtv.com, 21-6288-4255, a local Shanghai number at least if not a local shanghai company for certain.
After their own ad, there was an ad for Pantene shampoo; Little Sheep restaurant (a hot pot chain) Camay Soap; Cadbury’s chocolate; Expo 2010; DMG again; 4 x Expo ads; DMG again; Expo again; New Zealand; Vidal Sassoon shampoo; Camay again. Then it was my stop to get off.
Shanghai Science and Technology Museum
Wu Dan and I spent 2-3 hours in the museum before meeting the Deputy Director of the museum’s Research and Design Institute, Xin Ge, at about 4 in the reception area of the office building.
Possibly because it was a Thursday afternoon, the museum was not heavily patronized. However, when we went up to the AV Paradise and the “Light of Wisdom” exhibit next to it, they were comparatively full of active kids running around all over the place. We spent a bit of time on a boat simulator that takes on a ride on Sydney harbour. Even though the apparatus does not move an inch, the images on the big screens trick your body into thinking it is bobbing about and you find it hard to stand up. We noticed that only the museum volunteers were permitted to drive the simulator, and that museum patrons could not operate it, even though it seems to follow pretty much the same route and always ends up crashing into a the big black hull of a freighter.
We also noticed how it was clear that people liked exhibits that were interactive, whether or not they involved screens or levers or pulleys. They liked to be able to do things and watch things happen as a result. Those exhibits that were static and did not allow for interactivity tended to receive less attention.
We bought extra tickets for a 4-D film. This took 18 minutes and was called “The Haunted Lighthouse.” Presumably it came along with the auditorium, as it was Western (white actors dubbed into Chinese). The 4th dimension meant things like water being sprayed on you, wind effects, the seat vibrating or dropping a bit, and so on. Dan especially didn’t like the effect of something flapping around her ankles when rats appeared on the screen, and I can’t say I loved that idea, either! So, this was a Disneyland ride, really. I can’t say I learnt anything scientific from it. But there was plenty of magic, I guess, especially in the 3D visuals, with various things seeming to poke in your face and so on. How do they do that? Etc.
While we were waiting to meet Xin Ge, we went up to the “Information Era” exhibition hall on the 3rd floor, and I took pictures of the tree of screens. Of course, given our topic, I’m interested in this exhibit, but it’s a classic example of an exhibit that gets ignored because there is nothing to push, pull or twist. Most people just walk straight past it.
The meeting with Xin Ge was, I think, successful. She asked penetrating questions (e.g. if you’re interested in public space and so on, why do you want to know about what we’re doing with the exhibits and how we research the visitors? Isn’t that a different thing?) and I appreciated that a lot. No false politeness, but a real sense that I was talking to another researcher. She even said she’d like to work with us on it as a cooperative research activity, which is just about the best outcome I could have asked for. Since then, the man in charge of deciding if we can take photographs has told Wu Dan we can just go ahead and do that without even waiting for official permission — how cool is that? I’m delighted.
The conversation with Xin Ge was a sort of dress rehearsal for a more formal interview that will take place next week. We had heard they were going to update the AV Paradise exhibit. What we did not know until we spoke to her was that they plan to disband it more or less altogether. I was very surprised to hear this, because it is such a popular exhibit. She explained that the exhibits are old and the technology they use is dated (some of them are even DOS-driven). But even more significantly, this is the only technology exhibit in what is otherwise a science museum, and she felt it did not necessarily match their mission. This is clearly something to explore in more detail next week, and it fits into a developing interest I have in the issue of “decay” that has been raised in our meetings, and also screens that do not quite work. In this case, they work very well, but not in the right way, it seems.
I expressed my desire to photograph the exhibit now and then to see what takes its place, which bits of it they keep, or how they address those issues in the new space that takes its place. Although I think she found it a bit hard to understand why we’d want to work on something that is going to disappear, she also seems to be fine about it and can see how there’s a story for us to follow.
At the end of this visit, I found myself thinking about magic and publics. If the screens at Pentagon Plaza are part of a seemingly magical nighttime lightscape that seems to draw the surrounding population to it for consumption and leisure, the here the magic of interactivity is part of telling the story of science. This is one of the main themes of Michele Pierson’s book, Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonders (Columbia, 2002), where she talks about how science uses magic to generate appeal and explanations, legitimating our fascination with the seemingly magical by reassuring us that there is a rational explanation after all. Similarly, we know all that light down at Pentagon Plaza in the night has a rational explanation, but most of us probably don’t know exactly how it is generated, and so all that energy itself seems sort of magical. If “secular enchantment” is one of the things that interests me, both of these seem in their own way to be examples. The Science Museum seems to be about using magic to constitute a public of believers in rationality and science, whereas Pentagon Plaza is harnessing the appeal of the light to generate the transformative magic of consumption (as promoted by advertising etc).
On the way back, at dusk, I noticed that the screen at Pentagon Plaza is visible even from as far away as just north of Dalian Road. It is a beacon.
