Elisa Lee and Adam Hinshaw are a creative partnership formed in the mid 90’s era of CD-Rom multimedia. Together they collaborate to create innovative and interactive digital media projects. Their complementary skills in interaction design, visual communication, systems design, and software development make for a strong creative, conceptual, and technical partnership. Their work has been exhibited at Kaohsiung Design Festival, Taiwan, Art Futura, Barcelona, the Sydney Design Festival, Vivid Sydney and the Chinese Museum of Digital Art, Beijing.
Their residency was centred around the Library Retrieval System (LRS), UTS Library’s state-of-the-art underground storage system, which stores books, journals, and objects in 11,808 steel storage bins, hidden five stories below Alumni Green. The artists posed the questions: what happens when you visualise the interaction between organic human behaviour and a rigid mechanical storage system?
11-808 is a playful visualisation of the movements of books and objects requested and returned from the LRS. Each time an item is moved we see its “catalogue card” fly in or out of the bin where it is located, with the bin adopting the colour of the subject area that the item belongs to. The colours build up on the sides of the display, showing the accumulation and order of all transactions for the time period. Current LRS activity is overlaid in real-time, as items are requested and returned. Over sixty minutes, the visualisation displays LRS activity across the last three hours, twenty-four hours, three days, one week, two weeks and four weeks, with the vantage point shifting every four minutes. The visualisation displays the title of objects, their subject category, and the time in which they are requested, building an intriguing picture of how the LRS is being used. Learn about the artistic process through the 11-808 blog post.
11-808 : Visualising the UTS Library Retrieval System from Elisa Lee on Vimeo.
