NEW YORK, NY — It’s not necessarily considered polite to speak one’s thoughts aloud at an art exhibition. But at “Past Futures, Present, Futures,” the new exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture gallery in Manhattan, it’s the gallery itself that speaks to visitors.
As pedestrians walk past the gallery’s mind-bending, revealing facade on the sidewalk outside, motion-sensing speakers send out personalized bursts of sound announcing, in clearly audible but contained whispers, the titles of the corresponding works seen on the inside.
The groundbreaking new technology, which can be easily reprogrammed as the art inside the gallery changes, wasn’t developed by any of the new exhibition’s artists per se (“Past Futures, Present, Futures” shows off 101 never realized architectural, technological and artistic massive public works projects for the city over the past 200 years, along with modern re-interpretations by contemporary artists and architects).
Here’s a photo from the opening night of the exhibition on October 6, courtesy the Storefront for Art and Architecture:
Rather, the “speaking gallery” system a collaboration involving an innovative Manhattan technology services company called “Control Group” and ARUP, Digi and the Storefront Technology Committee.
Aside from upgrading the art world, Control Group has its tentacles in everything from iPad-controlled airport lounges to smart Baccarat tables that know exactly where all of the chips are on the table at any given time.
“Clients come to us to embark on building something completely transformational,” said Control Group CEO Campbell Hyers in an interview with TPM. “We’re focusing on where tech meets the physical. What we do is applied research and development.”
Founded over a decade ago, Control Group was initially a much more conventional IT services company, providing its clientele with basic support like building them websites, apps and databases.
But in the course of the past two years, Control Group has undergone a radical shift and is now leading the push to arm clients with more immersive and advanced, yet subtle, technological experiences, many of which have begun to show up around the globe — from iPad kiosks for web-browsing and ordering food at airpot terminals in New York, Minneapolis and Toronto to its “smart,” chip-sensing and cheater-catching Baccarat tables at five major casinos throughout Asia, to gesture-based screens at the World Petroleum Conference in Doha, Qatar in November 2011.
“What’s happened is that a lot of people have seen what Apple’s done with its stores, how it’s integrated technology seamlessly and beautifully, unobtrusively into the shopping experience, and they come to us and say they want to do a version of that,” Hyers told TPM.
Apple’s iPad serves as the basis of Control Groups work for OTG Management, an airport dining company that owns 150 eateries at airports across North America: Now, if weary travelers just want to surf the Web or order and pay for food on demand while they wait for their flights, they can do so using 7,000 freely accessibly iPads tethered to tables in some of OTG’s terminal dining spaces.
The iPads run custom software developed by Control Group, which constantly displays a user’s flight status information in the bottom so a user doesn’t have to get up or crane their neck to constantly check the big screen flight-information display systems nearby.
Importantly, though Control Group strives to make all of its whiz-bang technological projects as functional, intuitive and efficient as possible, both for the company’s clients and their end-users.
“We ask ourselves ‘how can we do this in a way that’s effective but that’s not a stunt,'” Hyers explained. “We never do anything just because it’s going to be a one-time stunt. It’s not about the ‘wow’ factor for us.”
Control Group builds and tests most of its technology in its New York offices, located in the historic Woolworth Building just a few blocks away from the site of the World Trade Center.
The firm’s offices are spread out over the twenty-first floor, where a cavernous, Kubrick-esque sterile white lobby with circular archways gives way to the more common modern corporate environment of glass walled conference rooms, rows of open concept desks and endless computer monitors, broken-up every few feet by evidence of Control Group’s mad scientist-like experiments for clients and side-projects.
For example, a home-built CO2 sensor — a tiny square piece of silicon with a blinking light and wires sprouting from it — guards the wall by a row of the conference rooms, where it’s constantly sampling the air inside them.
“It actually goes up a lot when people are talking in there,” Control Group’s vice president of DevOps David Rocamora told TPM.
Allowing Control Group’s team of developers the freedom to experiment at will is part of the firm’s creative process, according to Rocamora.
“Our developers end up building stuff because they’re working on something similar, but often times they just get an idea,” Rocamora said.
In the back of the office is where one of the firm’s custom chip-sensing Baccarat tables sits. Control Group build the tables with a network of fiber optics and sensors underneath the felt tabletop itself, which track the betting chips placed on the tablet thanks to the radio-frequency identification (RFID) sensors that casinos had already been using independently to make sure chips didn’t leave.
“A major goal for us has always been about being able to deliver tech-enhanced experiences without any screens,” Hyers told TPM.
The Baccarat tables allow dealers to see if players are illegally collaborating and also gives casinos and players the opportunity to have a new betting step during the course of the game. Control Group declined to specify which specific casinos had its tables installed in them.
But the firm was planning to use the same type of technology in retail and corporate environments, both of which also already use RFID chips in security sensors on products like clothes and corporate badges, respectively.
“So in a corporate environment, you’d be able to swipe your badge and instantly have a conference room itself invite all of the right participants to the meeting and bring up the right slides on a projector screen and then log the whole conference as an audiovisual file later,” Hyers said.
Control Group’s technology isn’t all so far out there, either: The firm recently created a much more mundane software program for a construction company client, which tracks in real-time which projects each employee is working on based on keywords in employee emails. Control Group said it had a similar program running to track what its own employees were working on at any given time.
Control Group’s latest project — the motion-sensing gallery speakers for New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture gallery — is another example of the company’s attempt to give its services multiple uses: Hyers calls it a “Gallery API,” or application programming interface, as the gallery’s managers can reprogram it at will with different voices and sayings as the art inside rotates.
“What we’re basically trying to do is create the operating systems for physical space,” Hyers told TPM.
Correction: This article originally incorrectly stated David Rocamora’s title as “vice president of developers,” when it is actually “vice president of DevOps.” This article incorrectly referred to CEO Campbell Hyers as Hynes on several occasions. This article also initially neglected to mention Control Group’s collaborators in the Storefront for Art and Architecture exhibit. We have since corrected the errors in copy and apologize for them.
