Gimme shelter

Bus-Tops is a collaborative public art project, comprising of 30 interactive, mass-participative LED screens attached to bus shelters across London. The project won the London arc of the Arts Council / LOCOG "Artists Taking the Lead" competition.

We caught up with Alfie Dennen of Art Public, the organisation behind Bus-Tops, to find out more about the project and how it has taken shape since its recent launch.

Please introduce Bus-Tops from your own perspective.

AD: Bus-Tops is a project that brings together a few strands that unite public art, digital art, and visual arts in digital form. It features screens that live on the roofs of bus shelters, and we chose that space so that people commuting would get that little "What on earth is that?", leading to a moment of joy or wonder – and to see that each day, building a relationship with everyone that takes a bus. It opens up a physical space, where public art is highly constrained and defined. In our case, we wanted to make something which was permanent piece of public art, but was also displaying work created by the public.

Public art is highly mediated; there's a commissioning structure in place, with the result being that "We'll put a nice new sculpture in your borough or High Street". Bus-Tops is a playful way to unite public art with the way that the web works.

How is the content gathered and selected?

AD: We work with one featured artist per month. They are all on the website. Mark Titchner was the featured artist for January; Ian Monroe the featured artist for February. We feature their work and highlight them through the site. They have control of 10 of the 30 screens across London, and only their work is seen on those.

The other 20 screens are open to the public. The way that their work is sent is via the website, which acts as a sort of corral point for the content that comes in. Like any user-created, user-driven website, you have people putting all types of content in, with different understandings of what the project is about. There are lots of different intentions behind the work - their work - that they want to see on the bus shelter. We operate on a really simple basis: the website is governed by the same content rules that govern any other image-driven website. Don't be mean to anybody; don't be pornographic; and be nice. There's a personal-moderation principle in place, so if anything happens, it is flagged up and one of our moderators can seize it in the stream of content.

There are two things that happen in order to select work from the site. The first happens programmatically, so the system looks at metrics such as how many people have seen the submission. It's similar to the way that Flickr works, in surfacing work that's interesting. The second is that Programmers, as we call them, are looking at work as it comes in, selecting work that they feel may fit into a thematic that they're exploring on a particular installation or across a series of screens. They then create playlists consisting of submitted work, for specific installations and specific times.

The site is a mix between an exhibition-style curatorial service and broadcast programming. You've got the morning commute, people taking the bus in the afternoon perhaps working in the service industry, people coming back, and you've also got people who are there going out to have a drink at 8, or coming back at 11. The type of work that these groups of people might appreciate is quite context-specific. It opens up by having a programming sensibility where, for example, people coming back from having a drink would appreciate a certain type of work.

How about the tech?

AD: Whilst we're surrounded by OLED, 64-million-colour screens everywhere in our urban environment, we've gone for a very low-fi, monochromatic, red LED solution. It has a variable brightness - 0-255 – which you can modulate. This means that when you take an image with tonal range, such as a photograph which needs gradation and balance, with the brightness of each LED representing that. What you end up with is a lo-fi but still quite a filmic effect. A very high-contrast black and white image could render very beautifully, whilst an 8-bit computer graphic also renders perfectly.

One other reason was that the displays are outside, and we don't want people nicking them in order to watch the football [!] - it's relatively inexpensive. The controller software and hardware that comes with it is off-the-shelf and didn't require a lot of intervention. We use a BeagleBoard that communicates with the controller via a 3G dongle. Every hour, the BeagleBoard calls the server. If there's something there, it initiates a download of new content.

The server side comprises of an image-driven website with people behind it, creating playlists. It's these playlists that each installation is looking for. It's fairly neat on the content moderation side; we think that we have solved the problem of "What if something really bad happens?" because we have used the best practice of the web in terms of how the best content is surfaced and chosen.

The technical solution needed to be fairly robust. The system is scattered across 20 boroughs. Some of the installations are fairly remote; some intentionally. We needed an overall technical solution which is robust, does the job, and is also very beautiful.

What has the view been of audiences experiencing it for the first time?

AD: A lot of people were initially quite confused and didn't know what to think. In talking with people online, it seems that there is a split between those who think that perhaps they're being advertised to, and those that think that it's an art installation. I think that people are really primed in events like this, to be linked to the launch of some kind of product. An intervention in urban space like this could only be advertising, because that's what people are used to, and that's a big part of why we chose bus shelters - because they're totally untouched. They are a network of blank canvasses.

With the effect that it has on people, I have seen peoples' eyes narrowing as they approach a shelter. The bus comes to a stop, they see it, they are seeing part of a work, and they are trying to figure out what it is, and where it fits into their world-view. Then, there's a sort of a "wow" and a little smile. Then, we have the opportunity to have that conversation every day. That's what I really like: the idea of people commuting and having this relationship with the work. Once they have become more comfortable with the experience, they can become a creator - or, at least, come to the website and actively engage with the artist who did that work.

What have you seen in terms of how content creators and artists have embraced the project?

AD: At the moment, we have been live for about a week. People are experimenting. There are some deep-sea jellyfish. There is rain falling. There's an X-ray image of people seen from above. there's weird, wacky and wonderful trippy, psychedelic stuff; there is just such a range of things, and you can tell that people are experimenting.

What's incredible for me is to see it from the nature of their people's first experiments. They're really grokking; they're understanding the constraints of the technologies. They are using high-contrast imagery. They are using the correct aspect ratio... of a bus shelter. In this first week, we had 150 pieces submitted. Of those, around 15 were programmed to be screened. I hope that as it continues to be talked about, and continues to be part of daily life to a lot of people, that it's something that they will continue with, and will then explain to others what it's about.

I also hope that when artists come in and submit a piece of work, they "bond". They create a series of works, they create a thematic through them.. But, we've got 9 months at least - and the first week has been promising.

How do you see the project working out in those 9 months?

AD: On one hand, one of the difficult things when you launch a project that relies on the public... the fact is, it's a big ask. You're not asking them just to press "Like". You're asking them to intellectually engage, and to create. I appreciate that as being a big ask, even for those who self-select as artists. They may already working in media that they're comfortable with, but this is a new medium.

We are working with ArtsAward, who work with A New Direction and their Truce programme, as well as other partners within the education/skills network, museums, and organisations such as the Camden Arts Centre. It's through them that I hope that we get more of an institutional take-up through the people that they work with. We don't really have the bandwidth to work with 50 schoolkids, but that's what ArtsAward does. So, ArtsAward has created a Bus-Tops Bronze Award which counts towards a national qualification in the arts for young people. It's programmes like that, that we hope to get more institutional breadth and reach.

Ultimately, this is a global project in the sense that if someone sees the project in Rio de Janeiro, they can also submit a piece of work. I hope that it's looked at that way. Even if you take this to Scotland, people might think "it's London. Whatever." But, what we have done is to try to lay the groundwork for a number of things. It's entirely predicated on openness, collaboration, and participation in a way that is real. With each piece of work uploaded, there's a tick-box you can click - Allow Copy – so anyone can create a derivative work, which talks to the fact that we're all copying each other anyway, in one way or another.

By the end of these 9 months, what we really hope is that we see a good take-up at an institutional level; we see an ongoing take-up from artists, both locally and abroad; and we see cross-disciplinary take-up ranging from generative computer arts to the more traditional fine arts. By the end of it, as well as that level of participation, we hope that we have also proved a model where when it comes to screens in urban spaces, they don't have to be hierarchically top-down. They can be programmed and content-created by the public.

What's next for you?

I have been working on this for two and a half years and really want to see this through to the end, and get the most out of it for everyone involved. There are some themes in the work that I'm never going to stop exploring in whatever I do: participation, openness, and the public-versus-private ownership of space. That's so much more important than it has ever been. Screens are getting cheaper and becoming more plentiful, yet they only show me the NASDAQ and Sky News. Urban screens are just... boring. I'd love to do more with screens and public space after this.

Alfie Dennen is founder of Art Public. He is @alfie on Twitter.

For further information on the Bus-Tops project and to submit your own work, visit the Bus-Tops website or its Facebook page.