Project Overview

Imagine an ice cream truck transformed into a mobile karaoke unit, driven by a squirrel cub with a penchant for cheap magic, deployed to spark spontaneous interaction between passersby in Chavez Plaza and surrounding neighborhoods.

The truck, or Lucci as she is known, is a tasty pop culture hybrid, one that brings three familiar expressions of “network culture”—ice cream trucks, datasets, and karaoke bars—into conversation. Dressed in song and shimmer, Lucci broadcasts twinkly pop songs in endless, repetitive loops as she weaves her way through the zone of the festival. At nighttime, once her work for the day is done, it’s time to let loose. She finds a party to join, dispatches the squirrel to hustle some more karaoke, and enjoys the festival entertainment.

Participants perform for an audience from a stage in the transformed rear of the vehicle, and use a customized karaoke engine to select, sing, and record a song for later broadcast. Free popsicles lure passersby to participate, creating an economy of exchange: She gives you icies, and you give her a song. Remedios the Squirrel Cub, the resident MC, distributes the pops and dances badly while choreographing enigmatic rituals of his own. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Work it. Heart of Glass. I Want You to Want Me. The streets of San Jose transformed through flavor and song. The resulting mix is one that celebrates the power of music to entice and inflame, as well as the sense of community that can be fostered among strangers trapped in a terrestrial network.

Negotiating space with absurdity

We choose fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic. We envision “magical” ways of physically blurring distinctions between the real and the virtual by creating community landscapes articulated as shared performance spaces in the city. We see salons and theatrical events spawned by the passage of virtual and real objects through invisible and visible urban infrastructures. We bring the outside in and the inside out, using karaoke as a means of revelation of individual dialects, personal sub-histories, performance anxieties. With the help of a nomadic squirrel cub and a vehicular mod, we populate and parse life as a lived database, transcribed through song. We imagine virtual savannahs, old Beijing, and bonfires in the snow.

Karaoke Ice contains an ensemble of elements relevant to the form of work and type of experience we aspire to produce: a space that is at once open to flow by various user groups, and bounded by certain cultural edifices; rich social systems tied to flows of immigration, capital, technology, and media; and a robust cultural infrastructure. Our shared goals have historically included the creation of expressive narrative experiences for both users and viewers, experiences that occur in the chance-laden environments of defined social spaces—city streets, a bar at dusk, Times Square, or a single city block. With this project we chose to explore the concept of the interactive city as a profoundly human endeavor, where “human” is defined as humanistic, humorous, and full of surprise; from the very beginning we saw potential for rewriting the urban/suburban landscape through meaningful acts of the imagination. By that we mean a kind of “magic bridge” across several binaries: digital + analog, designer + user, producer + consumer, local + visitor, worker + player, and of course, karaoke and ice cream trucks.

In the end it comes down to ideas—ideas about play as a transformative act for culture and community, about ways to harness and reimagine the flows of people, objects, technology; and ideas about the importance of shared experiences, through whimsy, magic, virtual drag races, and the spirit of a truck with no place to call home.