The People's Petition - African American Museum in Philadelphia

In 1799, Absalom Jones and a group of free Black Philadelphians signed a petition to Congress demanding an end to the slave trade. They put their names on the record, and that was the act. The People’s Petition, a permanent interactive installation at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, asks every visitor to do the same.

The experience is simple by design. You sign your name at a touch kiosk, then walk into a 47-foot hallway. Overhead, your signature appears and joins a procession of names signed before yours. In its first few weeks, the installation has already collected thousands of signatures.

Knabe Labs built the technology behind it. A custom application drives the 47-foot LED video wall, and the signature kiosk is a custom iPad application that captures each entry and sends it to the wall through a custom local service that stores every signature. The wall application includes a custom admin panel that lets museum staff moderate submissions and bring past signatures back into rotation.

Everything runs entirely locally, with no internet required, so the piece keeps working no matter what the network is doing. We also built the system to handle the creation and storage of up to millions of signatures, and simulated that volume in our testing environment before it ever went on the wall.

The People’s Petition was created with the wonderful team at Mz. Icar, and it was a privilege to help bring their vision to life. A transitional hallway is usually dead space; this one asks you to consider your place in a longer continuum of voices. For a Philadelphia-based studio, building a landmark permanent piece in our home city, one that carries a Philadelphia story forward, is exactly the kind of project we exist for.