Joshue Ott

The Residency at the Crossroads program’s focus is to bring artists back to Times Square at the earliest point in creating new work for urban centers and use this iconic place as a laboratory for uncovering how users of public places behave and identify with an area. The artists’ subsequent discoveries, in turn, provide the Alliance with qualitative research to use in developing future programming for Times Square, New York’s town square.Each residency is three-months and allows NYC-based artists time for reflection, exploration and experimentation in artistic spaces that are usually available only on the day of a performance or installation. The results may take shape as interventions, performances, events, published findings or project proposals. In the inaugural residency artist R. Luke DuBois created a video portrait based upon self-generated imagery from social media engagement, staged interventions and usage of EarthCam footage on the 24-hour cameras that share Times Square with the globe.During the Winter 2015-2016 residency, visualist/software designer Joshue Ott and composer Kenneth Kirschner collaborated to research and develop mobile technologies for visual and sound art with the ultimate goal of creating a free, publicly available smartphone app. The app was designed to respond to and interact with the specific audiovisual, informational and physical environment of Times Square. One result was a device that allowed one to quickly revise and rehear an environment that seems too difficult to re-imagine. Their Times Square residency ran from January - April 2016 though they began preliminary work on initial technology development in the Fall of 2015 at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center.Image courtesy of the artists.