Time Transit

Time Transit was a collaboration between artist Kim Morgan and TR Labs which involved a city bus, bus stops and an interactive website. The work was intended to make people consider time, technology, sustainability, and space (the boundaries between public and private space). The components of the piece were a computer, GPS, 4 monitors, 6 cameras at various bus stops along route number 4. The monitors on the left side of the bus showed the last bus stops that the bus was at in transparent overlays in real time and the monitors on the right side shows the next bus stop where the bus is heading to also in real time. Also along the bottom of the screens was where instant messages sent to the buses would appear. According to Morgan, the experience is the art and the viewer becomes the art. I think that Morgan had an interesting concept and talked about the work really well but I don’t think those intentions were carried out as well as her idea. My reasoning for this is because of my experience with a friend who was familiar with the project (a friend from out side the art and university community who had visited the time transit website and was familiar with the work) but when she did experience it, she didn’t know what she was looking at. I think that it has a lot to do with the unfamiliar views of bus stops that you are leaving and approaching (I has a hard time recognizing the university bus stop where I have waited for 3 years) so it is hard to put the idea of past and present when the bus stops is not familiar. But on the other hand some other people that I talked to felt like there was an invasion of privacy with the cameras playing in real time. So maybe in that way the public/private aspects of the work were realized. The instant messaging part was amusing but seemed more novel and like a venting ground than any kind of consideration between public and private but did fit well in to an technological aspect of the work.