Hacking our way into the SFMOMA exhibit: Strangers Meet — the art piece bot
This work is the story of an opportunity. An opportunity that you only grasp when you sit in our meeting rooms overlooking the SFMOMA with its visitors staring at you.
When visitors to SFMOMA reach the third floor of the museum, they flock to the huge, green Living Wall and sculpture garden. From there, they also get a unique view into Turo, where they have an unobstructed view into our meeting rooms through our large windows. Many of the visitors often wave at us. From the inside of our meeting rooms, we just smile and wave back at them.
What visitors may not realize is that they’re not just looking into an office; they’re looking at a quintessential moment in time — a tech startup in the tech capital of the world — and thus we, essentially, are a living art piece: every single visitor will see a different situation, a different instant. The opportunity for us is to transform this instant into a more meaningful experience for them.
Technology is what can bring this opportunity to life. As part of an internal hackathon, Ericka Ames, Karl Hajjar, Tristram Hewitt, and I teamed up to create a connection between Turo and the SFMOMA visitors. Our goal was to prompt them to take a closer look and learn more about what we’re doing just in front of them. Developing a peer-to-peer car rental service, sure, but even more so: enabling unexpected connections between strangers.
The graphic: a visualization of the network created by randomly selecting 1,000 transactions on Turo. Each dot is a user and each line represents a transaction between them. Some users are only travelers, some users are only owners. Some of them are both travelers and owners creating this tangled network of connections between users.
The description: It had to mimic the descriptions of artworks in the SFMOMA. The author, the title, the tools used, and an explanation… or rather: an invitation to get an explanation. The visitor can text a SMS bot to connect with the art piece and learn more about it by sending the simple commands WHAT, WHY, WHO or LINK to a phone number. There are also some secret commands that the bot will let you discover as you text with it.
Making it happen
It took us two full days of intense work to bring it to life: a query against our Redshift cluster, some lines of code in R and its networkD3 package to create the visual, some extra work in Illustrator to make it pretty, split it and make it printable on our nine windows with 81 sheets of paper!
One Twilio account, a Heroku server, some lines of code in Node to build the SMS bot. We also wanted to know what people actually texted us, so we added some Segment tracking and a Slack integration: Every message sent to the bot is simultaneously sent to our database and posted to an internal Slack channel so everyone in the company can see it. Finally, to make this experience an opportunity to learn more about Turo, visitors texting WHO receive an answer with a link to www.turo.com/moma, a dedicated landing page. And now, you’re even reading a Medium post about it …
And, what’s next?
In the three weeks since we hacked our way into the SFMOMA exhibit, thousands of visitors have stopped by the third floor sculpture garden, some saw this intriguing art piece on one of the windows and, over 150 of them have texted us.
Bringing the MVP concept to an art piece — testing interacting with SFMOMA visitors as simply, though interestingly, as possible — has been an enlightening experience so far, but iterating on this work based on how visitors interact with it promises to be fascinating. We already have received some unexpected texts from visitors, from just saying “thanks” to someone applying for internship. There could be millions of new things to do: add more visuals, augment the interactive experience with screens, add more ways to interact with the scenery, add more options to the SMS bot, the list goes on…
So this is just the beginning of the experiment. This interactive art piece was named “Strangers Meet” because it is what it visually represents, and it’s also a representation of the connections we make through the windows. The connections represented by the graphic are made possible by technology (Turo users interacting with each other) and interacting with the art piece via technology (the SMS) not only lets visitors directly connect with the vibrant SF tech scene, but also creates a mise en abyme — a philosophical infinite loop — for the modern art appreciator.
How would you like to see this artwork evolve? Tell us in the comments or text the bot (650)800–3695.
