Prosocial.Studio
Month 1: Festival Henge
Month 2: A Window
Month 3: Route Guides
Month 4: Virtual Bus
Month 5: Chalk Lines
Month 6: Give Me a Sign
Month 7: Snow Map
Month 8: TBD
Month 9: TBD
Month 1:
Festival Henge
A 12-minute video loop distributed across ScreaMachine's modular LED panel array.
MIT Media Lab, October 2025
Hyperspatial poetics - Simulating what it's like, being a new bus driver
The question I get asked most frequently is, "What's it like driving a bus"
You can feel a bit overwhelmed.
Especially the first few months while you're learning to navigate...
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the routes
the people in the bus
the people outside
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...while still refining your touch operating the machine.
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The streets you ride your bike down look different from the driver's seat. They're familiar but you lose your confidence that they're the same street. Your brains neurological map of your physical self extends to encompass the mass of the entire bus, so your sense of scale is completely thrown off.
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Since you've only been driving for about 16 weeks, the novelty of the bus you've begun to incorporate as a component of your peripersonal space blurs your proprioception.
If your physical conception of self is fuzzy, it makes it harder to judge how close a curb is, or a cyclist.
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So you've got a fuzzy sense of self, a noisy internal environment, a faulty recollection of where your next turn is, all while you're anticipating the next actions of the other vehicles you share the road with, and it doesn't stop for the whole ride.
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You balance all of this like a waiter carrying six plates, but you only set them down at a table for fifteen seconds, before you have to pick them up and go to the next one.
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From the berth. You pick up, note the environment, close the doors, note the environment, leave, and orient yourself to the next stop or turn, then maintain focus on a recurring loop.
ScreaMachine's "Festival Henge" is the perfect medium to convey this experience, which is why I was thrilled when they accepted my proposal for their jam night in the Media Lab.
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The low resolution of the panels make obvious landmarks unfamiliar. Streets, people, cars, all become fuzzy blurs that you have to reorient yourself to or risk losing track of where you were.
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The echoey hard walled cube shaped atrium it's installed in and precisely mixed audio, means you have to constantly strain to hear the poetry over the sounds of air brakes, next stop announcements, engine noise and ambient chatter.
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The 360 degree visual field makes it impossible to see everything happening.
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And the poetry doesn't stop. One poem ends, you pick it up, note the environment, accept the closure of it's beginning, reorient to the next stanza, and maintain focus on a recurring loop.
Or you get lost.
Hyper-spatial Poetics...huh?
I was trying to figure out how to explain this reverse 'Russian nesting doll' situation, where the experiential dimensions being portrayed through the installation were necessarily larger than the installation itself.
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On the bus, the attentional demands are greater, the stakes are more grave, the noises are louder, the route is larger, the length of time you have to focus is hours, not twelve minutes.
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Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space writes about how space produces feeling. The arrangement of the Henge isn't a single screen you can see or experience all at once.
The two separate footages being played on a circular arrangement of two sided panels makes this a geometric certainty a la Roger Penrose's unilluminable room.
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But if you truly try your best you can do well enough to skate by.
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Bachelard wrote about intimate spaces generating interiority and what better inversion of this than the permeable interior of this installation. The necessity of politely navigating around other participants in this space, is a beautiful counterpoint when held against the permeable environment of a bus and the behavior other participants in this enclosure.
Month 3:
Route Guides
Photo: Godfrey
Printed pamphlets, inserted into MBTA route guide dispensers.
Co-opted institutional wayfinding - how does the route look back at you?
Bus drivers are the most public, public servants. We operate public buses on public roads to move the public around the public domain. We're not hidden behind a door or a curtain, we're mixing it up with the rest of the ridership.
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Which is to say - We are constantly observed.
By the cars, trucks, bikes, scooters etc. on the road.
By the people on the sidewalk as we pull up or pass by.
By the cameras that are 'there for our safety' on the bus.
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and especially by our riders.
In this months poetry I noticed myself paying less attention to systems and looking more closely at relationships and interactions.
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Relationships between people and the service, people and their own past/presents/futures, people and their peers...
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I began to think about artifacts which mediate relationships. Phones are between ourselves and others. The bus is between me and the neighborhoods that I service (more on that next month). A route guide is between a new rider and their geography.
It's a paper thin connection to increasingly larger domains of access. The network connects them to the services and opportunities they need to maintain and improve their lives.
​In this space of thinking about artifacts, relationships and observation I decided I would share that we (bus operators) observe you back.
