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.
Times and Places
Month 2:
A bus window, rectigraphs and handwritten poetry, rear projected with footage from an in-service bus
AI Generated Image displaying a pretty accurate imagining of what it's gonna look like when it's finished
The opacity is the point - resisting experiential imprinting
Where operators drive is dictated by these slips. They're a way of displaying times and routes called a rectigraph. Each rectigraph is typically associated with 'a piece of work'. This tells the operator where to meet the official who assigns buses, when to meet them to be assigned a bus, then where to drive, with or without people, for how many trips, and finally when to return to where.
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There are thousands of these 'pieces of work' each 'season', telling thousands of operators where to be at what time. The system of how work is created, assigned, and interpreted is pretty opaque. There are so many moving parts that so many people contribute to, that it can seem completely impenetrable, and in many ways it is.
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What's not impenetrable or opaque is how the work is carried out. It's carried out by people. The operators all exist in varying degrees of impressionability and new operators are especially impressionable, as I was in this second month of driving.
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Reading this months poems back to myself I got the sense that the person writing these was forming their impressions of the environment they were operating in. I think there's more editorialization in this month than in any other.
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In my opinion that's because the environment became somewhat more fixed. I became really familiar with the other half timer's I was working with, then about a week in I got my first piece of work. A 66.5 half trip going outbound to Brighton center, which became a 501.4 that I'd take in, out, in again, then back to the garage.
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This environmental stability became the fixed point I needed to begin forming an impression. In the theory of evolution you need a fixed environment in order to develop useful adaptations. There's a relationship between the lifespan of the adapting organism and the requirement for how fixed the environment needs to be. For instance a bacteria or virus needs a much less fixed environment than a sequoia because bacteria are capable of reproducing so quickly.
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In this instance I don't have to reproduce myself, I just have to reproduce my assumptions of the environment enough times to evolve an accurate understanding of what might happen in the day to day. What's useful and stable across time and space gets to stay and becomes integrated into a more permanent worldview. What's a one-off pretty quickly is subconsciously labeled as such and then depending on the severity of that instance is discarded or filed away 'in-case-of-emergency'.
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Importantly - there's a lag between perception/model formation and true adaptation. I think that's what we're seeing here. Model formation.
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Good stuff, useless stuff, accurate stuff, things that stick, things that slide right off.
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The fixedness of the route, the opacity of the work assignment, the immutability of the rectigraph, all dictates which environment I'll have to form a model of, and then adapt to.
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This piece features projected footage like last month. The footage doesn't surround the viewer, it doesn't overwhelm, the sound isn't spatial, you can read the poems at your own pace instead of having them thrown at you faster than you can handle.​
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It gives you enough space to start forming a model.
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Above each poem is the rectigraph of that days work where and when it was written. It's written on thick card stock that the projector can't penetrate. The experience of the footage doesn't get absorbed into the pieces of work. It's physically and metaphorically opaque, and it renders the experience invisible, the way bureaucracy and metrics are incapable of incorporating experience. You can't see what happens through them because the work doesn't form an impression.
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It's simply a register of time and place.
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The poetry however, is written on lined paper thin enough to act as the screen that the experience of the footage is projected onto. The footage passes through the bus window - the vehicle through which I experience the world being written about. The poems are the experiences I've experienced and managed to capture and impress upon a medium. The paper is me.
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The footage that leaks through and lands on you as you read what I've written, is the experience leaving an impression on you. It's likely that even with the explanation of the rectigraph, you don't understand it. In this way, bureaucracy is incapable of making an impression on you.
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Next time: ​
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.
