Text The Throne is an installation meant to create a conversational space between two groups, in a place where they wouldn't normally communicate, the bathroom. Using a combination of SMS, Processing and projectors, we have a created a space where men and women can communicate in the bathroom in an anonymous fashion.


In both the men's and women's bathroom near the admin offices, our group installed a projector above the toilet of one of the stalls. Connected to a Mac Mini, the projector displays a Processing sketch onto the wall. Upon entering the stall, users are greeted with a sign, encouraging them to submit a message via SMS that will be displayed on both bathroom walls. Within seconds of being sent, the message is added to the Processing sketch, which is stylized to resemble hand written graffiti.


We purposefully gave our users the bare minimum of a prompt, because we wanted them to decide how and where the conversation went. In our brief testing, Text The Throne generated conversations that featured direct responses between users, as well as those that generated humorous memes. Being in the show would be an opportunity to test our project with non-ITPers (a.k.a. normals) and see how they would react to this unique installation.