What could be more Irish than a student designing an artistic representation of the Stations of the Cross? After all, this is the land of saints and scholars.
Scholar Aisling Kelliher has forsaken the Emerald Isle to spend four or five years in MIT's Media Lab, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, doing her PhD. The stations? Well, she made holographic images of the Stations of the Cross and placed them in a dark space.
She then put a sensory mat under each of the 14 stations. The mat caused the station to light up when someone trod on it. They were also wired for sound - so your feet activated a sound clip of what Aisling imagines the Via Dolorosa sounded like on the day of Christ's crucifixion, "people screaming and shouting and doing their day-to-day business". The more people standing at the stations, the greater the cacophony. Why? You might ask. I certainly did. There was no special reason, she says, but "a lot of people here just create stuff for themselves". Along the way, Aisling learned how to make holograms and use sensors.
Her real "business" at MIT is working in an interactive cinema group with two other graduate students, Pengkai Pan and Jame Seo. "The overarching theme is shareable media. We're trying to get some idea about distributed storytelling, using video over the Internet. "We have created a very large database of short movie clips [60 seconds or less]. People can add clips, search and view them . . . by submitting your material to the database everybody can share it. "A lot of people have video-camera equipment and computers and lots of tape, but they're not sure what to do with it. We're trying to create a resource. The interface will be simple and fun.
"Pengkai is working on the infrastructure, how the system will work technically. James is working on the interface, imagining different ways of accessing the database. And I'm focusing on how this will benefit a community." It's easy to spot Aisling, James and Pengkai. Their hair colours are pink, red and blue. Pink-headed Aisling, who is 24 years old, says it's all part of the project: they had their hair dyed in Lunatic Fringe back in Dublin, and videotaped the process. Aisling had become attached to the pink-headed look and has no plans to go back to being a brunette just yet.
She says that in a couple of years, with the advent of broadband, people will be able to view videos and cinema via the web and also to communicate this material to the web via portable devices.
"In Japan some phones already have video screens . . . Maybe you could be at a concert, shoot it on the phone and send it to friends."
Aisling did a degree in communications in DCU, followed by an MSc in multimedia systems in TCD. She lectured in TCD in digital video, multimedia programming and music technology.
"I always had this idea I'd like to come to the Media Lab. It's the technological zenith.
"The Media Lab is distinct from MIT. It's an extraordinary place. People are interesting and diverse. In my research group there are six people, all different nationalities. It makes for a lot of fun, a lot of different perspectives, a lot of arguments. You have people from different backgrounds - physicists, artists, computer scientists, all trying to make something. The synergy is really interesting."
