The blue states thing was one of the many that was taking advantage of the hooks built into modern cell phones and the like that allow them to be monitored. The artists asked passers by for their phone IDs, and then monitored who they were near when it was in range of their sensors. Over time it developed a map of who spent time near that person. For example, "Welcome Robot Overlords" spent little time with Andy, but a lot of time near "Nokia 6660".



This pigeon backpack demonstration was part of a project to learn about San Jose's air quality. The backpack consisted of an air sampler and a small cell phone transmitter. The air sampler would gather data on our air, and beam it down. The plan is to gather a few days worth of data and then display it on the screen behind the orange plastic guy. I gather that while I was there the artists were out harnessing and releasing pigeons. All there was in the booth was this guy and a video of people putting harnesses on pigeons and putting them in cages, and putting those in the back of a pickup truck. You could see that a lot of development effort had gone into the project.





     

That screen was attached to a big petri dish on which were some complicated looking gadgets. The procedure was first you would type your question in. Then the lights would flash and the question would scroll across the bottom of the petri dish. Then the sensors would pick up your answer and display it on the screen. The hard part was connecting the answer with the question in my own mind.

  

The blimp people spent most of the day in the lobby, vending shirts with their "Eye in the sky" logo and talking about how their blimp could watch things from above and download the images to their pedal driven vegan ice cream vending cart. Near sunset they decided to go outside and demonstrate the thing. That last picture was as close as it got to flying, because they decided it was too windy to risk letting their $30,000 Helium filled blimp fly away.