Continued

Mike Mosher—The Hypertext Artist and Chronicler
I was creating the analogy of comparing this project to a bracelet made up of three shiny beads. Jim Pallas brought the first, largest and most complex one: the wooden sculptures of the pioneers. I brought one of the narrative, my personal connection to the Valley, an interest in these figures historically as well as liking to exhibit hypertexts and moralized kiosks, because my goal is to figure out the relationship between community murals and digital technology. And then Julie brought the bead of the concept of the GPS enabled tracking of the Hitchhikers and we had a lot of discussions at the front end and a whole database could be set up of our conversations, figuring out what the heck we were going to do. We consulted various technologists. I asked Tim McFadden who’s a systems programmer in the Valley; we asked Steven Wilson who, besides being a prominent artist, is a chronicler of information arts, and we had a lot of discussion about it. And then Mario brought the string that tied all the beads together and created the piece of jewelry and that was his elegant hack as Kevin Kelly in Boing Boing called it, that enabled inexpensive cell phones to broadcast to a website and we could Julie Newdoll with Dean Plummer of Stanford’s Engineering Department with Terman (see photo from Page 1) have the maps of the locations of the hitchhikers. I am impressed by the commitment to this project by Jim Pallas. Though I live in Michigan and not far from where he is, I’ve never met him but certainly I owe him a steak for his participation in this and the creation of these great, heavy, painted, wooden sculptures which he then just blesses and sends off into the world come what may. I participate in mail art projects a lot but I do it very offhandedly. It’s like a folly. And I’ll do a little drawing on a postcard while my computer is booting up and then will send it off to a project in Osaka but it’s very quick. Not anything like the amount of work that Pallas does with a painted sculpture. That trusting to fate, trusting to the universe–Pallas must have a very beautiful soul.

Mario Wolczko—The Engineer and Technical Troubleshooter
You asked for some closing thoughts on the hitchhiker project. Here’s what I came up with over the last couple of days. At some point I’ll put this on the web site, but I thought you might like to see–and comment on–the first draft. I’m afraid it’s all about technology and not about art! [Nothing to be afraid of, Mario. Without your application of the technology this art would not have been possible.]

What would the pioneers we have depicted make of the technology we used to allow the public to determine the whereabouts of their representations? It is awe-inspiring to consider in the same thought the sophistication of the systems being deployed to track the sculptures, and the ease and low cost of which these technologies can be brought to bear.

Consider what is involved:
- 24 satellites in low earth orbit carrying atomic clocks broadcasting highly precise time signals (GPS satellites)
- a portable device containing: a radio receiver capable of receiving these signals; an integrated circuit that can turn the difference in arrival time of the signals into a position accurate to a few meters; a microprocessor capable of being programmed to store and process the coordinates; a radio transceiver that can be used by the microprocessor to communicate with a cellular network
- a cellular network–one of several–blanketing most of the population of the USA and capable of relaying a signal from the low-power transmitter anywhere on the network to any other place within a fraction of a second
- a worldwide network of connected computers, with gateways to the cellular networks, allowing the phone to send data to any computer on the network (the Internet)
- several server computers capable of receiving, storing and processing the position data
- a vast cluster of computers containing maps and satellite images for the whole country, accessible to any other computer on the worldwide network (Google Maps)
- the personal computers used by the public to download software, coordinates, and map images for instantaneous presentation and interaction

The only part that would have seemed mundane, I suspect, is the large lead-acid battery each sculpture contains to power the cell phone for several weeks, which is basically technology from 150 years ago.

The total cost of the materials used to harness these systems? Cell phone: $40; battery: $50 (think about that: a device containing over 50 million transistors costs less than a fancy plastic box containing 10 pounds of lead and sulfuric acid); net and server access for a month: $50; and a computer to access the net (but everyone already has one or more, right?). And how about the time and expertise needed? It probably took me the equivalent of two 40-hour work weeks to assemble all the hardware and write the small amount of glue software (insignificant compared to the software in all the other systems), and I don’t think any task was beyond the ability of a typical undergrad in computer science with a little experience in electronics.

What would De Forest have made of GPS and cellular networks? He died less than 20 years before the first GPS satellite was launched, but would he have foreseen GPS receivers being as cheap as a pizza? Or did Noyce foresee that a cell phone with a handful of ICs (Integrated Circuits) would be so cheap that several hundred million are discarded every year? In 2003 there were something like a quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) transistors made, and in 2006 a single one of Intel’s most sophisticated ICs contains more than a billion transistors! (There are a bil- lion characters in 5000 paperback books.) What would Shockley and Noyce have thought of that?

PS from Mario: Here’s another mind-blowing factoid, attributed to Gordon Moore: as of 2003, more transistors are made in a year than raindrops fall in California. That’s also around the same number as there are characters printed annually in the whole world (on printing presses, photocopiers, printers, etc.), and each transistor was sold for about the same price as each character in a copy of the Sunday New York Times. By now, the number made annually will have increased around fourfold, and the price dropped fourfold.

Fine Art Registry — The Silent Partner

These hitchhikers of Jim’s had something new: they proudly bore Fine Art Registry tags and were all registered on the FAR website. People picking them up (or not) could read about the “shares” scheme and about the Fine Art Registry.

Noyce is still a mystery. But in due course, if he doesn’t show up, he will be listed as “stolen” on the FAR website and this will make it hard for anyone to sell him.
(Stolen art link.)

The sculptures are all listed on the Fine Art Registry, for sale as applicable.

Jim has since registered and tagged other pieces before letting them loose. It has provided a missing safety net that Jim had been looking for.

All in All

Definitely a success. Definitely brought to the fore the origins of Silicon Valley for many in a memorable and fun way that makes it so much more assimilable than a dry history lesson. Lots of people got involved (read Julie’s blog). And it even stirred up some corporate conscience and life.

Jim, Julie, Mike and Mario get a big, big hand.

Hey guys, let’s do it again!

Article continued from page 1: Hitchhikers Safely Home at Last ›

— David Charles | October 17, 2006

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