Your tweet in lights: Interactive tech-art exhibit in Chinatown

If you’re on Somerset Street in Ottawa’s Chinatown before June 8, drop by the Oriental Charm Gift Shop (653 Somerset Street West) and check out the interactive twitter-enabled light boxes:

One of the highlights of this year’s festival is an interactive lighting display by [ The Latest Artists ](http://www.thelatestartists.com/) — Ottawa’s dynamic artistic duo, Andrew and Deborah O’Malley.

The Latest Artists have created
[
 Twitter
](http://www.twitter.com/)
-enabled light boxes. These unique pieces  feature custom-built circuits and hand-made acrylic frames.

Using a mobile phone, audiences will be able to interact with the art  by sending messages to Twitter (using the hash tag #CTRM).

Thanks to creative custom software, audience messages will be  instantly displayed as text scrolling across the lightbox screens.  Strobe lights, placed near the boxes, will flash when the message  appears, altering audiences their Tweet is coming through.

When no one is sending a Tweet, the light boxes will display  scrolling fortune cookie messages, lucky numbers, and animated geometric  patterns. Previous Tweets will also be saved and randomly displayed,  serving as an archive of audience experiences over the month-long event.

Giving audiences the ability to comment and connect through lighting  art with Twitter is a novel interactive experience, providing global  reach to the local Chinatown Remixed event.

[
 Read the full article here on Andrew O'Malley's blog.
](http://technoetc.net/blog/2010/05/14/tweet-all-about-it-ottawa%E2%80%99s-chinatown-goes-global/)
  

And also on his blog - check out some of the
[
 "behind the scenes" on how the light boxes were made
](http://technoetc.net/blog/2010/05/14/printed-circuit-board-pcb-etching/)
.

**

Update: ** Check out photos of the installation here. **

Related: ** Ottawa Art Guide