Hey G20! from Geoff Barnes on Vimeo.

On September 24-25, 2009 the G-20 Summit will take place in the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, where G-20 leaders, representing 80% of the world’s trade and two-thirds of the world population, will determine policies affecting our economic and financial futures.

To foster engagement despite the insularity of these talks, Osman Khan, an artist, and Elliance, are collaborating to develop heyG20 as a forum that will allow concerned citizen’s of the world to voice their thoughts and opinions to the Leaders of the G20 Summit. The project is an interactive installation that will take place during the G-20 Summit in the windows of Elliance’s offices located directly across the river from the Pittsburgh Convention Center.

Interested participants may tweet their message to @heyG20 (http://twitter.com/heyG20), whereby your messages will be transformed to a multicolored morse code light show, illuminating not only the night sky but also the concerns of the world’s citizens.

So tweet away…

via Hey G20

Johannes Gees, hellomrpresident, 2002.

Hey G20 does not appear to have quite the visual punch of Johannes Gees’ remarkable hellomrpresident projection onto the mountains outside Davos during the exclusive World Economic Forum in 2002, but it will be interesting to see how/whether the ubiquity of social media like Twitter bump up participation in and the impact of the project.

See also These projects are smokin’! for an earlier post about Germaine Koh’s Prayers and Ali Momeni and Robin Mandel’s Smoke and Hot Air, both of which translate messages – in these cases, datamined rather than Tweeted – into Morse code.