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History
The blink project started in August
2005 during a tml meeting. The building was barely finished; there were ladders, no trespass signs and workers hurrying before classes would begin. Geoffrey Jones mentioned a bug in the Ev building: if you double click the lights they go crazy... From then I thought of how nice it would look for the whole building to flash... The project proposal was met with some resistance and a lot of support, a list of key people can be found in the people section. So there was an initial test, you can find sparse documentation here. At first the idea was to compare a centrally controlled light choreography with a horizontal decision-making structure. Only horizontal control proved possible, which is really what I was interested in to begin with. In the first test some users pointed outhow they tried to synchronize with other floors by looking at the reflection of neighboring glass-windowed buildings. This was the birth of trying to provide the blinker with more context. The project became really interesting when issues of human agency within a horizontal structure became central to the project. On top of that were the constant negotiations with different levels of power and decision-making entities. We tried to have a procedure through which we would ask room inhabitants first - a trickle-up effect... Although this was not always the case. At any rate, the Blink project went from a gorilla performance to a PR operation -with its deal of shortcomings.
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