I'm Cezanne Charles and I co-founded Root of Two.
I'm John Marshall and I'm the other half of Root of Two.
I've been working together since 1998.
We've developed a number of projects that kind of investigate the here,
the now, the future and ourselves so that we can come up with different ideas
around the way that we think about the role that technology and design plays
in sort of creating a more just and equitable city.
It takes its starting point as a weather vane.
So looking at the way that the original weather vanes gave us the ordinals
of northeast, west and south to think about how the wind is positioned.
It's an urban device that we still see to this day,
but it no longer has the same meaning and resonance as it did in a Vagrarian age.
How do we think about the troubling currents that are currently blowing us around?
So it may not be the weather per se, but it's definitely the climate of fear on the internet.
What the chicken is doing is it's taking in news feeds from Rao Ars.
So whenever a journalist submits a story from anywhere in the world that goes up to Rao Ars,
what the chicken is doing is it takes that text from the journalist,
extracts the location that the story is being submitted from,
goes out and it gets the latitude and longitude of that location.
Chickens know exactly where they are, so it determines the distance from that event that it is.
And then what it does is it looks at the text of the story
and basically compares that to a list of keywords from the Homeland Security use.
So that's a whole list of words that were liberated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
in 2011.
If you're on the Weather Veins website at weatherveins.com,
it's really the only place that you can actually see the news stories that are coming in.
It's also the only place where you can actually see the state of the full system operating.
So when we did it in Folkestone, at best when you were walking around the town,
you could see at most three of the five chickens from certain vantage points.
So the idea is we were really trying to both distance you and create a different relationship for you
to the news and information.
But then you could on a mobile device because the website's mobile compliant,
you could see the news story.
If you didn't want to use your own Twitter account to tweet the chicken,
you could actually press the button that says either keep calm or sky falling.
So what we're doing with the small ones, we need to have the workshops in Miami.
We're going to use the kits to work with the local people in Miami
to get their fields to put into the new system.
But also we want to make these available for people that want to build them themselves
or if indeed they want to repurpose it.
So if you don't want a chicken, if you want some other totem
and you want to take in a different news source with different keywords,
then we have the ability to make that possible.
So we imagine any number of artists or tinkerers
or different advocacy groups could repurpose our system
to pay attention to the things that they want to draw people's attention to.
We're trying to create that moment of pause
where there's reflection before you respond in an e-jerk way to the news
because that's essentially playing into the manipulation that we're subject to.
When we did this, it was pre-Brexit.
It was pre-2016 election.
It was pre-alternative facts.
It was pre-fake news.
We're definitely not trying to come up with a solution to solving the fake news problem.
We do think that people need to have a better sense of their own agency
over the information they consume
and they also need to have some distance and respect from it.
And I think you can use humor and play in order to afford people that.
