The World Needs A Stronger Blog...: Digital Crickets?

Hmmmm... Artist Michael Dory is expanding his definition of graffiti, with sonic street art presented last month at Conflux.

Dory hides small sound devices in containers around the city that play bits of music and make cricket-like sounds. The crickets are just loud enough for passersby to hear. And like their namesake, the crickets stop chirping when the curious draw too close — thanks to motion sensors Dory installs in them. Dory says the idea for the crickets came to him as he watched his lower eastside neighborhood change, becoming too expensive for the artists who lived there. Right. Ok, then.

"Graffiti is one of the most powerful and most personal displays in the urban experience, and can be used to make statements, tag territory, spread messages — urban markup language in practice. However, the output is nearly always visual in nature, making this experience one-dimensional. Furthermore, rarely does the work have a brain of its own, and is usually incapable of reacting to anybody
observing it.

Concrete Crickets was created to address this deficit, creating small devices that will be aware of passers-by as well as other units of their kind. Each unit consists of a sound generator, amp, speaker and sensory system, and is housed in camouflage appropriate to the streets of the city — soda cans, cigarette packs, and the like."

Not sure what I think of this but I am sure that the NYPD isn't going to be very psyched on these things around the city. People will most certainly be calling 911 and freaking out that something hidden inside a coffee cup near the curb is making chirping robot noises at them when they walk by. Then again, maybe thats all part of the plan. Check out a video of a device here. Are we this starved for nature in the concrete jungle? Is there a cricket shortage I wasn't aware of? I have about 7 million crickets in the trees outside my house and they run on solar power.