STUART ROMM: I am Stuart Romm, and I am a professor of the practice in the School of Architecture and the College of Design at Georgia Tech. Also, I am on the architecture team that renovated the current library with BNIM and Praxis3. And that gave rise to media sites because we realized that the renovation, the renewal of the new library was with old media, print books often, a lot of it going out. New media was coming in, and we wanted sites that exemplified the new mode of information exchange with students and faculty being media sites. And that gave rise to the Media Bridge, among several other sites. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, The Research Library Rock 'N' Roll Radio Show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with Marlee Givens, Fred Rascoe, and a player to be named later. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you tune in for, we hope you dig it. MARLEE GIVENS: Today's show is called "Under the Media Bridge." Hey, Fred and Charlie, would you like to guess our show theme? CHARLIE BENNETT: I think the obvious one is mid '90s Red Hot Chili Peppers. FRED RASCOE: Oh, man, please not that. [CHUCKLING] MARLEE GIVENS: No-- FRED RASCOE: This was unexpectedly fired television hosts end up sleeping. CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, I like that one. How about hiding places for trolls booted off of social media platforms? MARLEE GIVENS: No, three guesses are enough. Our show today is all about the enormous media installation at the Georgia Tech Library built into the walking bridge between the two library buildings. The centerpiece of this Media Bridge is an enormous video screen that spans the length of the bridge. That screen faces the ground, which means the best viewing spot for the screen is-- under the bridge. CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, with Anthony Kiedis. FRED RASCOE: Under the Bridge in Midtown. Several classes have used the Media Bridge as a component of their class, and this semester, one of those classes was LMC 8803, which is Data, Design, and Society, taught by Professor Yanni Loukissas, assisted by the library's communication manager, Jason Wright, and the public engagement librarian, who is right here in the studio with us. Hi there. MARLEE GIVENS: Charlie recorded an interview with Yanni and Jason this week so that we can hear about the class and how it went this semester. FRED RASCOE: So our songs today are about learning where you are, creating your own questions, imagining possibilities, and maybe some bridges, too. CHARLIE BENNETT: Where is that bridge? FRED RASCOE: Let's start with a song about connecting emotionally through a huge illuminated display. This is "Lights" by Liz Cooper & the Stampede right here on Lost in the Stacks. [LIZ COOPER & THE STAMPEDE, "LIGHTS"] "Lights" by Liz Cooper & the Stampede. This is Lost in the Stacks, and our show today is called "Under the Media Bridge," referring to the media installation between the two library buildings at Georgia Tech. Our guests are Professor Yanni Loukissas of Georgia Tech School of Literature, Media, and Communication and library communications manager Jason Wright. MARLEE GIVENS: Jason manages the media that goes on the bridge, and Yanni taught a course this semester called Data, Design, and Society that focused on creating data visualization videos for the Media Bridge. CHARLIE BENNETT: Jason, I think you should set the scene for us. What is the Media Bridge? What's this thing we're talking about? JASON WRIGHT: OK, so the Media Bridge is a large scale media installation screen that sits on the underside of the bridge that connects Price Gilbert Memorial Library to Crosland Tower, which are the library buildings, collectively the library. And it's used as sort of a town square, I don't want to say bulletin board, but it's meant to show people all the scholarship that's happening all over campus. So we have things like researchers of note and what their research is. We have some video pieces that run that show research being done all over the campus-- NASA rovers and drones, just things that are neat and visually interesting. CHARLIE BENNETT: Why do you not want to say it's a bulletin board? What aspect of bulletin boards-- JASON WRIGHT: I think that kind of downplays it. I think that downplays what it is because it's meant to be a physical and digital experience in one, which-- and but, I mean, yeah, you can sell that as, it's just a big giant digital billboard. CHARLIE BENNETT: Except there's a lot of things that are different about it, right? I mean, like the orientation of it and the placement and how people are seeing it. JASON WRIGHT: Yeah, so it's a very novel concept in terms of the way screens work together. It's a lot closer to something like you might see in, say, Times Square, where there are technically nine screens all running at the same time. There's the large screen on the underside of the bridge, and then there's eight vertical screens that act as spires that go down the sides of the bridge because it is a three-story bridge. Those typically have a text element to them or some sort of visual element. So for the students that sit there and study, they can see and understand what's actually happening on the underside of the bridge because, for instance, we have a compass piece. So it will tell you, hey, this is an event that you might be interested in. It's happening in this building at this time. And then the compass will show you, that building is this way, less than a mile walk. So you might want to go over there and check it out. And while you're sitting inside, what's scrolling in front of you-- and it's actually reflected because of the interesting design of the Media Bridge, which was the brainchild of Stuart Romm, who's a professor of the Practice of Architecture here at Georgia Tech. It will scroll, and you can read and understand, oh, this is an event that is happening, and it's telling me what time it happens. Or if it's just-- we also have some kind of ambient stuff that runs through that was always very important to us to just sort of have some interesting, just visual elements that might calm you down, might help-- as much as we have a wonderful green space, you are in somewhat of an urban campus. So things like beaches, underwater, the way light interacts in an aquarium with bioluminescent organisms is on there, just really interesting kind of neat stuff, so that as you walk through, you never quite know what you're going to see. And we keep it pretty full of material, so hundreds of pieces that are running, more or less, 24 hours a day. CHARLIE BENNETT: Where is all this content coming from? Who's creating these videos or images, and who makes sure it runs for 24 hours? JASON WRIGHT: That would be me. I do have some help in terms of if Institute Communications creates a video that can run without sound. It does have the capability for sound, but we definitely found that you do not want sound running there 24 hours a day because it tends to bounce off the School of Design down the hill or bounce off the side of the buildings, and people really didn't like that. So we can do sound. If we want to do a specific time and installation that has sound, we can do that. And we do that with students who produce some work on it that have a sound element. Most of the time, it is just running-- it actually runs on the same content management system as the rest of digital signage on campus, which is a content management system called 22 Mile. So all the screens in Clough, all over campus, they all pretty much run on the same system. So it's just loaded into there. A lot of my job is just creating content for this. So going through, unfortunately, none of it is automated. We have not reached that point yet where we've been able to custom code automation into it. So I just go and check the calendar and grab stuff and then make the pieces, just little digital art pieces. It also has, because of the courses that we've been able to work with professors here at Georgia Tech, it also has a mode where we have a media server up there so we can have interactive content. And so last spring was the first class that worked on the bridge, and one of the groups was able to take their project all the way through and have an interactive exhibit called the Garden of Us, where you would scan a QR code, create an origami flower, and then it would appear and fall down the spire and land among the other pieces on the main pool part of the bridge, the other side. And then this semester, we're working, obviously, with Dr. Loukissas here. And we're also still working with that last class. It's Stuart Romm and Hunter Spence, who are both in the School of Design. And they're also working on interactive elements and things like that. And we've been able to show some student work on there as well. CHARLIE BENNETT: So, Yanni, from an outside perspective, outside the library organization, is there anything about the Media Bridge that you're interested in, concerned about that Jason didn't mention since he's coming from a practical place, talking about it? YANNI LOUKISSAS: Yeah, sure, I've been pondering this. I'm coming at this from a host of personal interests that have kind of developed over time. I was educated originally as an architect. And I see this very much, first and foremost, as a piece of architecture. Even though I no longer teach or practice in architecture in a traditional sense, I've still maintained a strong interest in the shaping of places, in understanding human perception of space, the way we interact with our environment, in particular, how public spaces shape the way we interact with one another, and the way we see ourselves. As I work in digital media now, this kind of project, I think, really opens up a host of new possibilities, new questions, new challenges, for thinking about my relationship to architecture and how some of the work I do now can be layered back on to architectural spaces. One of the problems with digital media in the last couple of decades is, it's been kind of place agnostic. There's this sense that it doesn't matter where you are or when you are or who you are. When you're looking at a screen, it's just a screen. I think that's totally wrong. I think place still matters. No matter where you are when you glance at your phone, you're someplace, and that place matters. And I think what this does for us is kind of makes that sense of situatedness, the kind of importance of place undeniable. MARLEE GIVENS: This is Lost in the Stacks. We'll be back with more from Yanni Loukissas and Jason Wright, "Under the Media Bridge," after a music set. CHARLIE BENNETT: Hey, Jason, why don't you-- you do the introduction to the music. Get up on this mic. JASON WRIGHT: File the set under LB1027.28.C87, folks. FRED RASCOE: Nice. [THE PRETENDERS, "TALK OF THE TOWN"] MARLEE GIVENS: You just heard "Wheels" by Cake, and before that, "Talk of the Town" by The Pretenders, songs about learning what's going on around you and why you're a part of it. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "Under the Media Bridge." CHARLIE BENNETT: We're speaking with Professor Yanni Loukissas of Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Media, and Communication and library communications manager Jason Wright, who has another job as a daytime radio announcer, I think. Yanni taught a class this semester that used the library's Media Bridge installation as a key component, and he enlisted Jason and me to help with the class, both in the classroom and under the Media Bridge. MARLEE GIVENS: We asked Yanni what he found compelling about the Media Bridge as a class component. YANNI LOUKISSAS: I'm not only someone who has a background in architecture and is now in digital media. I also am a social researcher so I'm very interested in how people behave in space, behave in relationship to new technologies, particularly information technologies. One of my mentors, Sherry Turkle, used to always say that what was more important than what technologies did for us was what they did to us. So I've tried to get this class to think about what can the screen do to us. This particular screen, in this place, at a moment in time, how might it affect us? And so, in that sense, it's a real challenge to think about data, not just in terms of decision-making or claim-making, but in terms of emotional affect in terms of how data can reshape the way we think about a place and our relationship to it. I want to throw out a couple of metaphors that I think can help us re-imagine this as something other than a screen or a billboard, as something really part of the environment that kind of extends into a new dimension. One notion is that it's a kind of virtual sky. The artist James Turrell created a whole series of beautiful installations called Sky Spaces, where he kind of opened up the ceiling of a room and in a way that people hadn't seen before. So he had these apertures cut in an incredibly precise way where the edge of the aperture is like a knife's edge. I don't know if you all have seen these, but the effect is that the sky looks like it's painted onto the ceiling of the room. There is no edge. There's no edge to that aperture. So it's just like one contiguous surface. So you're looking up, and you see this blue square. And you think, oh, there's a beautiful patch of blue painted on the ceiling. And then a cloud starts to float across it, and it blows your mind. So it's a kind of intervention into our perception. And I think that's what the Media Bridge can do. It can really help us to experiment with perception in new ways. I think what Turrell was doing was, let's say, amplifying perception. Here, we're potentially augmenting perception. Another way to think about it as an extension of the sky idea is as a kind of virtual horizon. And this is something that, really, the way that it acts in the campus is, you can see it from quite far off, but because it's a horizontal surface, it's a line, kind of like the horizon. And as you approach it, you realize that there's a space in that line, and it kind of opens up. And there's something there. And I think that's a really exciting notion because a horizon also suggests something like a threshold, a hole in the fabric of the physical campus architecture that leads to a virtual space. And I think with all the stuff that's happening in VR, AR, XR, I think even though, in some sense, it's still a screen, as we traditionally think about it, the way it works spatially is totally different. So I do think it's exciting. And it has this open-endedness to it. It's kind of meta architecture. It's mutable. And so we've been playing all semester with what we can do. And it's been incredible to have this resource to work with, one at this scale that has this kind of public presence, that we can test the real thing. And that's usually not available to courses like this. CHARLIE BENNETT: So I've learned something working with you this semester, which is that there's sort of categories of classes, almost like a template of a class the professor puts their particular interest into. So can you tell us quickly what's the base class that this Media Bridge class is? YANNI LOUKISSAS: This class is what I would categorize as a project studio. That means that instead of giving a series of lectures or having a series of seminar discussions, students are making things. And they're not only making things themselves, they're looking at things that their classmates have made. They're talking about those things. They're developing a shared language. And I'm directly working with them on their projects in the sense that we are iteratively developing these. We're talking about them. There's feedback sessions, critique sessions. And of course, you have been instrumental in this, Charlie, and you have kind of seamlessly flowed into the studio-- CHARLIE BENNETT: I insinuated myself, yes. YANNI LOUKISSAS: Yeah. Well, no, I invited you in, and you clearly have an aptitude with this style of instruction, which is not easy, because you have to kind of respond to what the students have done on the fly. It's a lot of improvisation, which given the fact that you do this show live, and you've done it for many years, obviously, something you are excited about, and you do well, and you have a lot of practice with. And it's an invigorating way to work with students because you get to, instead of setting out some abstract principles or showing them case studies, you're designing with them. You're working with them. You're modeling for them how to think creatively, how to do design, how to take a project and imagine several ways forward for it, how to kind of see obstacles that come up and find ways around them. So it's very interactive, and I love that. And I can see it's the format, at least in my experience, that students are the most engaged by. MARLEE GIVENS: You're listening to Lost in the Stacks. We'll be back with more about the Georgia Tech library's Media Bridge on the left side of the hour. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: All right. OK, Nicholas, on your own time. NICHOLAS FELTON: OK, this is Nicholas Felton. You're listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta. CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's show is called "Under the Media Bridge," all about a course conceived by one of our guests, Professor Yanni Loukissas. I asked Yani whether he felt left out not creating work for the Media Bridge while all of his students were doing it, and whether he had any ideas on something he might do in the future. [MUSIC PLAYING] YANNI LOUKISSAS: I do feel like I have been a collaborator in all the projects, and you have as well. We were really intimately involved in thinking through what could be possible on the bridge. We gave them a lot of the prompts that kind of motivated these projects. I think that designing with someone else, with someone more experienced, it's a kind of apprenticeship model of learning creative practice. So in that sense, I do already feel like I have designed for the bridge. I would be really excited to further explore this notion that the bridge can augment our perception. In that sense, I think there's a couple of other components that we needed, like a high resolution camera that was connected directly to the bridge, so we had real-time input that we could manipulate on the bridge through code, through algorithms. And it would be exciting to think about how we could use that kind of information to help students see the campus environment in new ways. Let's say there was a camera mounted on the top of the library, and we got a feed of the sky. Like, what could we do with that over time? Or the camera's pointing down so it records everyone that walks under it. What could we do with that? There's a host of potential explorations around augmented perception and how digitally layered or digitally augmented architecture can transform our perception of space in the environment. CHARLIE BENNETT: File this set under QA76.9.I52Y85. [UNWOUND, "DATA"] FRED RASCOE: You were just listening to "Design" by Gremlin, and before that, you heard "Data" by Unwound. Those are songs about skills and artifacts needed to visualize your research questions. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "Under the Media Bridge," all about a course created by-- excuse me, around the Georgia Tech library's Media Bridge. Our guests are Jason Wright and Professor Yanni Loukissas. I asked Yanni about how he designed the course. Did the desire to work with the bridge come first, or did you start formulating the class and then realize, ooh, the bridge. This is what we should do it with. How did that work? YANNI LOUKISSAS: It's a course that I've taught many times before, but each time I teach it, it's totally different in the sense that there's a new project. It's always dealing with data presentation in the public realm, in one way or another, and the social implications of that. I often think of the class itself as a kind of design problem. More than a year ago, I would say, I was talking with Greg Zinman, who's a media historian and a professor of Cinema Studies here at Georgia Tech, about doing something with a Media Bridge. And we actually applied for some funding from the Global Studies Center, which we got, which we were excited to get. And the funding was to commission someone to do a project on the Media Bridge, commission an outside artist to do a project. And when we got the funding, it was in the fall. And it was the time I was thinking about what I was going to do for this course. It just seemed like a natural thing to see the course as a place in which to explore the potential of the Media Bridge and feed into this commission. So in that sense, the idea for working with the bridge came before the course. Then what happened was once we got into it, the students were doing incredible things. And in some sense, the need to bring someone else in to do something on the bridge became less and less important. And when I told the people in the Global Studies Center about all the fantastic projects the students were doing, they were thrilled, and they wanted to encourage more of that. And so we're pivoting a bit to think about how we can use that funding to not just bring someone from the outside, but rather make the Media Bridge more accessible to other students, to other classes. And we have plans now to use that funding to develop a design guide for the Media Bridge this summer. So I'm really looking forward to that. And I hope that we'll have other opportunities to do courses like this in the future, building on everything we've learned. CHARLIE BENNETT: So we're coming to the end of the interview. We're also coming to the end of the semester. You've seen almost the final work of the students. Has anything changed about how you all imagine what people can do on the bridge? What has the students' work done to your internal image of the Media Bridge? I want to start with you, Jason. JASON WRIGHT: It really has expanded what I think is possible with the Media Bridge. There's one piece in particular that I'm really fond of, actually, the Frankenstein piece. I think that might just be my own-- I love literature, I love horror movies, I love Frankenstein, all that stuff. But I really like the idea that it could be a storytelling device. I think that that's really an interesting concept, and that as you're walking through campus, and generally, art interaction might just be consumptive. You walk past a mural or something, and you look at it or it becomes part of your understanding of the place, as Dr. Loukissas was talking about. But I really like this idea that it could tell you stories. It could expose you to the best of Western literature in this case, but world literature. We have a very diverse campus. I'd love to see many more things happen there in all sorts of different languages, in all sorts of different communication techniques. That, really, to me, has been, instead of-- I mean because of the way that we launched it, and we had to launch it playing videos and interactivity is another mode, but it takes a little bit of work, just the idea that you can use the basic structure to have a sort of true interactivity of being able to impress something upon people and change the way that they perceive, in that case, technology, the pursuit of knowledge, and just all the meta contextualization things of, you're sitting there looking at exactly what she's talking about it, an expression of what Mary Shelley is talking about, is just a very interesting concept. CHARLIE BENNETT: And Yanni? YANNI LOUKISSAS: So I think the most fascinating part of the course for me has been the public aspect of it. I don't think I've ever had an opportunity in a course to iteratively test student projects in public and get feedback, and reactions, and engagement from so many people about the work as it's being developed. And I think it really transformed the design process in the classroom into this kind of social, very social process, where there was this sense that the students weren't just designing this stuff for the instructors or for themselves, but rather that people were going to see this, a lot of people. And they were going to be reacting to it. But instead of just a one-off, like make something and just kind of put it out there, they had the opportunity to test different things, to kind of get feedback from their classmates, from us. They finally did a series of interviews with passerbys, which was terrific. And we prompted the students to think about a question related to their project, a question that they wanted to raise in the mind of a viewer, somebody who's walking by. What do you want that person to grapple with? And in that sense, I think they really enlarged the conceptual space of the project. So it was not just about what's on the screen. It's also about the experiences that that person might be bringing to the encounter. So there were a number of projects that engaged with how students feel, how they feel about the campus, how they feel about technology and science and the idea of progress, how they feel about the passage of time. I can see from the results of the interviews they did that they were incredibly effective, that people were excited to stop and talk to them, really kind of open themselves. And I think once you start to see that design exists in this larger social world, it's not just about what's the composition you put up there or how accurate are the data or something like that, but an encounter with a project, like one of these projects on the Media Bridge, has so much to do with what individuals and groups kind of bring to it as they walk by. What are they going through at the moment? What is the place where they're encountering this? What's the context? And I think that students really got a glimpse of that in a way that I haven't seen them do in a class context before. CHARLIE BENNETT: You just heard from Professor Yanni Loukissas of Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Media, and Communication and library communications manager Jason Wright, all about the course Data, Design & Society that took place under the Media Bridge. MARLEE GIVENS: Let's play some music. JASON WRIGHT: I'll do another voice if it's OK. File this set under TG147.M48. FRED RASCOE: Affirmative. [THE BREEDERS, "INVISIBLE MAN"] LED ZEPPELIN: (SINGING) I ain't seen the bridge. Where's that confounded bridge? CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, I can't stop smiling. That was "The Crunge" by Led Zeppelin with the bridge that never shows up, and before that, "Invisible Man" by The Breeders. Those were songs about looking up and imagining what could be and finding that confounded bridge. [MUSIC PLAYING] Today's show is called "Under the Media Bridge," all about a class that used the library's Media Bridge as a major component of the students' work. So I'd like us all to think quickly, is there another part of the library that you'd like to see as a significant part of a class at Georgia Tech? Fred? FRED RASCOE: So in the library, like in the stairwells, like you sometimes see exposed pipes and wires, it'd be great to have a class where they just say, yeah, these pipes and wires are here because of this, and they do that. I'd like to know about that. CHARLIE BENNETT: Interesting. Sort of an archeological kind of thing, contemporary wise. Marlee, how about you? MARLEE GIVENS: I love it. The furniture. I'm imagining a class on the aesthetics of furniture rearrangement-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, yes. MARLEE GIVENS: --by students at Georgia Tech. CHARLIE BENNETT: I like that a lot. Jason, I'm going to swing this mic over to you. You can come up-- oh, do you know what you're going to say? JASON WRIGHT: I think so, yeah. I'm actually going to cheat a little bit. And I saw some work that some students had done on the stairs in Crosland, and it was this whole idea of when you sit down, a pet pops up. Like, a digital pet pops up because you can have screens there, and it hangs out with you. And so it had three levels. It was like fish on the bottom, a dog or like a chicken in the middle, and then birds up on top. FRED RASCOE: Like holograms? JASON WRIGHT: So those stairs can actually be turned into screens. That's going to be like one of the future areas of digital interaction. FRED RASCOE: Whoa. CHARLIE BENNETT: [LAUGHS] Fred is amazed. That totally blows away my thing. I'd like an HTS course do something about coffee shops in public spaces, but that's like Loserville compared to-- FRED RASCOE: There's no holograms in that. CHARLIE BENNETT: --dogs or all that. If one is interested in seeing the final projects of the students in Data, Design & Society, there will be a viewing of all of them at 3 o'clock, Wednesday, May 3, under the Media Bridge. And we're so close to getting out of this episode without doing any "Under the Bridge" by Red Hot Chili Peppers. Go ahead and roll the credits, and please don't make it be that riff. FRED RASCOE: It's definitely not. [MUSIC PLAYING] Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens. MARLEE GIVENS: Legal counsel and a course from the Columbia School of broadcasting for Jason were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. CHARLIE BENNETT: That was quite a splurge, Philip. Special thanks to Yanni and Jason for being on the show, with a little extra to Jason for doing some show crew stuff. To all the students in LMC 8803 this semester, to Stuart Romm for everything he's done and still does. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. MARLEE GIVENS: Our web page is library.gatech.edu/lostinthestacks, where you'll find our podcast feed and a web form if you want to get in touch with us. CHARLIE BENNETT: On the next Lost in the Stacks, we're going to finally talk about a romance novel as long as the baseball schedule cooperates. FRED RASCOE: Oh, Georgia Tech baseball. OK, it's time for our last song today. Our guests talked about looking to the sky and representations of the sky, so it's the close. Let's look back at the sky one more time. This is "Mr. Blue Sky," a version of the ELO classic as done by Pomplamoose. CHARLIE BENNETT: The grapefruit? FRED RASCOE: I suppose? It's a good song anyway. Have a great weekend, everybody. [MUSIC PLAYING] [POMPLAMOOSE, "MR. BLUE SKY"]