Nudnik Lawn Boy
2020
Developed with Chris Berthelsen during an R&D residency at the Negative Emissions and Waste Studies Programme (T?maki Makaurau).
The basic premise of Nudnik Lawnboy is to roam the neighbourhood with a ramshackle hedge trimming device cobbled together from materials in the general environment and “get jobs” by going door-to-door and convincing homeowners to have a quick trim. The game cannot be played alone. Multiple players in various countries control different parts of the device and must communicate through flakey Zoom connections and physically strenuous movement.
Example: The trimmer operator in Auckland directs the blades of a trimmer lashed onto a bamboo pole according to the command of a man in Tokyo (who views the scene in First-Person Perspective AKA POV via a junk camera attached to the blades), while the on-off switch (made of a soccer glove, powerplug and some screws) is pressed by someone 20m down the road, connected by a series of extension cords. A lady in Paris (in the dead of night) tries to negotiate a job with the homeowner through a smartphone headset attached to a defunct Lime Scooter helmet and gets paid directly to her PayPal account. Power is provided by an old car battery we found on the side of the road.
Prototyping event: https://www.facebook.com/NEWSprogramme/videos/120343463073606/
Related: Presentation of the Nudnik system at the 10th ADA Network symposium, Indeterminate Infrastructures – Objects, signals and architectures: Nudnik System
