Art these days. There’s the urine on display at MoMA, and naked models covered in meat. But my buddy Adam alerted me to a project from Oregon that involves trapping a young woman named Cristin Norine in a glass room room for 30 days. For the entire month of November, Nordine will have no human physical contact, but all of life’s newest communication technologies are available to her — iChat, texting, Skype, FaceTime video chat, and heck, I suppose she could write a snail mail letter. Well, maybe not, since she’s not allowed to use a phone because it’s an “old technology.”

Featured in a recent article from OregonLive, the art piece is called “The Public Isolation Project” and includes a nice video posted below. Joshua Jay Elliott, the artist, sees the experiment as a reflection of the way the Internet age allows for 24/7 accessibility with little privacy. Everything that Norine does is visible (save the bathroom), and Elliott likens this to our lives on the Internet which lack privacy. To add emphasis to the conceit, Norine’s computer interactions are displayed in live time up on a large screen able to be viewed by anyone walking by.

While the OregonLive piece fails to note it, I’m not sure Elliot’s project is a wild new idea — there have been many public art projects with people in glass houses and such in recent years — but the emphasis on new forms of communication may be unique. And if one can get past the voyeuristic undertones of watching a young woman’s every move for a month, the project causes some worthwhile reflections. Here are a few:

What use is physical contact, real life looking each other in the eyes, in our world today? Or to put it another way, as communication technologies have increased the ways we can interact, have we noticed the unique ways real life interaction affects us? For a personal example, my bank in Grand Forks very annoyingly does not have ATMs that accept deposits. So I have to either get out of my car to talk to a live person inside (my preference) or use the drive thru and deal with the muffled voice and vacuum tube weirdness. While I didn’t know the tellers at my bank in Decatur very well at all, I’m beginning to know the names and have nice chats with those in Grand Forks. Such contact is a far cry from substantive interaction, but it is humanizing and perhaps ultimately positive.

Second, I wonder if reflection on communication technologies actually has any effect on the way we use them. I see projects like Elliott’s pointing out what we know — our lives are increasingly overtaken with technology, but struggling to make the larger move to the “so what?” and “what now?” questions. Norine says, once she completes the project, she wants to go to the beach for a few days without any technology whatsoever. But, I wonder, if those who watch the project will do anything more than think, “huh, yeah, I text a lot….and then go on texting.”

Finally, the contrarian in me says: “what’s the big deal?” Nobody ever accused Abigail and John Adams of being addicted to letter writing, so why are we so critical of new ways of communicating that also happen to take up plenty of our time?  Sure,  I’m always up for reflection as long as it’s not too pessimistic.  But while I don’t need to text message through dinner, I also love them ability to do so when appropriate. Let’s think about such issues, sure, but let’s not pile on the negatives while forgetting the positives.

You could look at Elliott’s project and say: it’s totally awesome that Cristin Norine can function so well, communicate so clearly and quickly and with so many folks, even when she doesn’t leave the glass room. Put that in your phone and text it.