MEDIACITY. Situations, Practices and Encounters 9783865969224, 9783865961822

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MEDIACITY Situations, Practices and Encounters Frank Eckardt et al. (eds.)

Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur

Frank Eckardt et al. (eds.) MEDIACITY : Situations, Practices and Encounters

Frank Eckardt/Jens Geelhaar/Laura Colini / Katharine S. Willis/Konstantinos Chorianopoulos / Ralf Hennig (eds.)

MEDIACITY Situations, Practices and Encounters

Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur

Umschlaggestaltung unter Verwendung eines Entwurfs von Andreas Wolter (www.wolter-gestaltung.de)

ISBN 978-3-86596-182-2 © Frank & Timme GmbH  Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur Berlin 2008. Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk einschließlich aller Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des ­Verlags unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, ­Übersetzungen, Mikro­­verfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Ver­arbeitung ­in elektronischen Systemen. Herstellung durch das atelier eilenberger, Leipzig. Printed in Germany. Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier. This publication has been realised by the financial support of the European Commission – MTKD-CT-2004-517121. www.frank-timme.de

Contents

I NTRODUCTION MEDIACITY: Situations, Practices and Encounters ......................................................7

SITUATIONS K ATHARINE S. W ILLIS Wayfinding Situations....................................................................................................21

A RIANNA B ASSOLI /J OHANNA B REWER /K AREN M ARTIN Situating In-betweenness...............................................................................................41

M IYA YOSHIDA Interactivity, Interpassivity, and Possibilities Beyond Dichotomy ..............................57

A NDREA M UBI B RIGHENTI /C RISTINA M ATTIUCCI Editing Urban Environments: Territories, Prolongations, Visibilities........................81

PRACTICES L AURA C OLINI The Looming Mediacity: Framework for participative ICT spatial practices ........................................................................................................................107

HANA I VERSON /R ICKIE S ANDERS The Neighborhood Narratives Project: New Dialogues with/in the Mediated City ...............................................................................................................133

S HANNON M ATTERN Silent, Invisible City: Mediating Urban Experience for the Other Senses.................155

L ORENZO T RIPODI Cartografia Resistente: An Experience of Participatory Mapping Implementing Open Source Technology.....................................................................177

A LESSANDRA R ENZI Switches, Meshworks and Squatted Spaces: Fragmented Thoughts on Activist Research ..........................................................................................................197

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ENCOUNTERS KONSTANTINOS C HORIANOPOULOS Connecting Remote Educational spAces with mediaTed PresencE (CREATE) .....................................................................................................................227

K ATERINA D IAMANTAKI /D IMITRIS C HARITOS Locative Media in the City: Spatial Practices and Social Dynamics..........................245

JAN HATT-O LSEN Urban Artscape – Furesø .............................................................................................263

AVA FATAH GEN. SCHIECK/CAROLINA BRIONES/CHIRON MOTTRAM Exploring the Role of Place within the Urban Space: The Urban Screen as a Socialising Platform ..................................................................................................285

EXPLORING MEDIACITY R ALF H ENNIG The House as a Medium: A History ............................................................................311

G ULIZ M UGAN /F EYZAN E RKIP The Impact of Mobile Phone Use on Privacy Concerns in Public Spaces: A Preliminary Work on Young People ........................................................................339

S EBASTIAN H ÜBSCHMANN /RUTURAJ N. M ODY /C HRISTIAN S CHWARZ /T IM E DLER /R OLAND K ERSTEIN The Augmented City ....................................................................................................363

M ARTIJN DE WAAL From BLVD Urbanism towards MSN Urbanism: Locative media and urban culture ................................................................................................................383

O LE B. J ENSEN /B O S TJERNE T HOMSEN Performative Urban Environments: Increasing Media Connectivity........................407 List of Contributers ......................................................................................................431

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Introduction

MEDIACITY: Situations, Practices and Encounters

“Any technology tends to create a new human environment … Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike.” (Mcluhan, 1962) This book represents key findings of the research project MEDIACITY and selected papers presented at the final conference in Weimar in January 2008. The project has been realised against the background of a wider scope of academic and practical subjects. The terms media and city, when seen together, bring to mind many diverse meanings and associations. Yet it is difficult to imagine a modern city without media of some form, with the consequence that the city and media are inextricably interlinked and impact on one another in a multitude of ways. MEDIACITY investigates how the social settings and spaces of the city are created, experienced and practised through the use and presence of new media. We will take the position that new media enable different settings, practices and behaviours to occur in urban space. These media create opportunities for diverse forms of connections between people and spaces and enable and create flows: of information, of communication and of knowledge. As a consequence, we will approach the city, not only from the viewpoint of the city as defined by built forms or demographic facts, but as a form of spatial practice. The space of the city is not a static reality, but can instead be conceived as active and created by an interaction, such that the experience of urban space is transformative. The space of the city is constructed out of sets of interrelations, the simultaneous co-existence of social interrelations and interactions at all spatial scales, from the most local to the most global (Massey 1992, p. 80). Yet the city is for many an isolating social environment where

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individuals develop coping mechanisms, often exhibiting an outer reserve, a slight aversion, and a mutual strangeness (Simmel in Sennett 1969, p. 53). This manifests itself in forms of non-involvement (Milgram 1997 p. 29), such that whatever their relationship to the city, whether as citizen, city user, or visitor, many encounters in the city are experienced as strangers. In addition, it is also part of the research to investigate which are the existing forms of social involvement in a specific urban context that may be supported, enriched, or hindered by the use of media and technologies. In this context we see media enabling communication and interaction within urban settings, and as such they have transformative possibilities for the experience of the city. Such media have over the last decades changed the significance of space, time and physical barriers as communication variables (Meyrowitz 1985, p. 13). In fact one of the primary impacts or ‘messages’ of such media is the change of scale, pace or pattern it introduces into human affairs (McLuhan 1965, p. 8). The interactions between those in urban settings are the key to our project, and yet the nature of mobility in the contemporary city changes the context of social urban structures. Physical distance no longer prevents the types of interaction that were once confined to face-to-face contact. Electronic media have changed the significance of space, time and physical barriers as communication variables (Meyrowitz 1985, p. 13). The consequence of this is that although perceptions of the city are affected by whether the observer is a tourist, a newcomer, or a long term resident (Milgram 1977 p. 35), the way in which time spent in the city defines the level of social interaction no longer holds true. The traditional paradigm of the distinction between visitor and resident in the city no longer has direct relevance. As such the social spaces of the city can be intimate for the day visitor, whilst simultaneously disassociated for the long term residents who have never met their neighbours. On another level peoples’ experience of place is increasingly faceted. This can be attributed to the fact that peoples’ routes through the place, their favourite haunts within it and the connections they make (physically, by phone or post, or in memory and imagination) between them and the rest of the world vary enormously. People have developed practices for acting out multiple identities in one spatial setting, and new media increasingly mediate these practices. (Massey in Bird et al. 1993, p. 65). In order to approach these topics we have structured the research around three key themes: situations, practices and encounters. These investigate the 8

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types of settings for interaction, the processes which people adopt and develop to mediate social experience, and changing behaviours in public space:

1

Situations

Over the last fifteen years media and urban theorists have attempted to document the changing nature of urban space as mediated by new technologies, variously naming these new urban forms: the ‘space of flows’ (Castells, 2000), ‘city of bits’ (Mitchell, 1995), and ‘trans-physical city’ (Novak, 1991). These studies have mainly concentrated on the impact of media such as the internet and virtual reality on urban space. From a computer science perspective the paradigm is also changing; to date theorists have approached the growing field of ubiquitous computing from the standpoint that technologies should ‘weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it’ (Weiser 1994). The issue that both fields seem to encounter is a perceived conflict where users of public space ‘… are torn between these parallel and disjoint spaces’ (Ishii 1997) i.e. the ‘real’ space of the city and those of mediated environments. Yet, new mobile and wireless technologies no longer offer a substitute for the experience of, or provide alternative models for, urban space. They are instead converged and integrated; one might say that the technology has leaked out into the city. Our conception of the world is fundamentally spatial and the idea of 'space' is essential to our everyday experience (Lefebvre, 1974). The way in which we communicate with others is also closely related to space, and our interactions with others can be considered as situated, in that they are shaped by both the physical setting (Goffmann 1963), as well as being guided by a rich unarticulated background of social experiences and circumstances (Suchman 1987). Consequently people behave differently in different situations depending both upon where one is and who one is with, and this in turn is influenced by the degree to which they are present in the situation. But communication technologies overcome the limitations set by such physical boundaries and situations, and in so doing they not only offer more effective or comprehensive access to environments and behaviours but also create new opportunities (Meyrowitz 1986). The key aspect is that the physical setting no longer determines the nature of social information flow and the degree of access to an established situation directly affects behaviour. ‘Spatializing’ these communica-

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tion technologies and thus reconnecting them to spatial settings requires new views on the inter-connectedness of location and behaviour. Lynch established the concept of mental or cognitive maps of urban space (Lynch 1960), and stated that for a city to be more fully experienced the imageability or intelligible elements of the city need to be understood. An imageable place can be defined as one that that can be comprehended over time as having a pattern of high continuity with many distinctive parts clearly connected (Downs and Stea, 1974). Our perception and action in space is in part made possible by our ability to act on mental models of the space and our position in it, whether physical or social. The question then arises as to how we perceive the spaces of communications media in the city if we can neither see, hear or touch them nor model their structure on existing bounded spatial concepts. It would seem that the layering of digital and physical space enables us to experience some sort of intertwining of experience, which is subsequently conceptualized. As with mental maps of urban spaces, images of the abstract topologies of communications networks and electronic spaces need to include emotional and subjective information about their qualities, as well as showing what is where within the complex and intertwined web of physical spaces (Graham and Marvin, 1996, 122). However, the frameworks of communications media are being mapped too loosely onto the spatial structures of the city, in part because the dilemma exists of how to give such media spatial and visual form. Similarly, the view of space as some sort of container, which bounds perception and action, no longer provides an adequate description for the spatial manifestation of media technologies. Instead a more complex framework is necessary, where multiple spaces and times become overlaid within the framework of a single experience such that places are no longer defined by their physical boundaries. The nature of social interactions has a strong relationship to setting or situation. Yet these settings are no longer defined only by physical spaces with their corresponding meanings, but can occur in diverse and often physically remote sites. Do concepts of neighbourhood and territory and of belonging in spatial settings still have relevance in times when cities become essentially temporally transitory social spaces for many of those who experience them? How are concepts of ‘interactional territories’, which are geographical locales in which some type of interaction occurs among a group of people (Lyman and Scott 1967), reworked by communications media?

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2

Practices

The discourse surrounding the ‘state of the art’ is nourished by different assumptions which will be explored and critically studied in the frame of this research following general questions tested and analyzed through case studies. Those assumptions come from an understanding of the discipline of urban studies as an evolving discipline that is not only limited to physical organization of the space. Urban studies are confronted here with lessons that challenge boundaries with other disciplines, focusing on the comprehensive approaches of social spatial organizations and their representations through modern tools and technologies. The production of images is part of everyday life, and available media and technologies spread and expand its consumption. Digital technologies are embedded in contemporary society and these expand the concept of media. It can be argued that the sentence “each medium displaced the old” (M. McLuhan) is not completely true today. Business on the global market captivates customers by following the instincts of possession and pleasures associated with symbolic digital tools, leading to new inventions that not necessarily substitute or displace the old ones. Through this unlimited production, old media are reinterpreted and reused in a different manner. As a result, the quantity of technological tools is now considerable and fast growing in number, quality and functions, influencing the physical world and social relations. This makes the definition of human needs questionable and contestable in relation to technological tools and media in contemporary society. Which are the attempts to develop critical thinking on the torrent of media technology that overwhelm and inform our daily lives without being against technological progress? How do we question the concept of “necessity”? What is the applicability of the concepts of ecology and sustainability when used in environmental, urban and social studies of media and urban studies generally? We understand a medium at large as a channel of information, influenced by technological innovation and socio-economic dynamics (Sorice, M.). Therefore, it can be stated that socio-economic dynamics are created by different narratives, practices and interpretations due to interests, cultures and contexts, which do influence how physical and social space is organized not only in a virtual, utopian or dystopian reality but definitely in the tangible world. To what extent is there an open dialogue and a learning process between social practices/narratives and media? In other words, how do media

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represent and influence narratives/practices and how do/which narratives/practices affect the creation and definition of new media? What is the role in media of arts, creativity, memory and storytelling in informing social practices that could affect the perception of physical space? Could digital technology in this discourse become self-referential? How are narratives and practices captured and spread? The first two points necessarily pledge a consideration of the concepts of power, community, and public space. These are paradigms that crosscut the discourse in many ways. In particular, power, community and public space demand definition according to their respective locations, situations, identity and ethnicity, and period of time: they are continuously contested and reclaimed through social struggles and practices (Mumford, Innes, Lefebvre, Bourdieu…etc.). Questions can be very broad in their application to the tangled debate on society and media. Provocatively, it can be stated that even the use of the two words ‘society’ and ‘media’ should not be separated in our contemporary context, as we describe media as being deeply embedded, although displaying great differences within western societies and developing countries. Today, the struggle for a definition of these paradigms cannot rescind media and technological tools, especially in the contemporary debate around neo-liberalism and public control. How can social struggle be voiced? To what extent can “Resistant communities” (Castells M.) be considered beneficiaries of new technologies? Considering their embedded nature and their power: How do people create communities and new social/public space? What are the limits or the breadth of active participation? Why participate (reasons for participation and community making), and who can participate (with reference to age, education, expertise)? What are the alternatives? Multifaceted social and physical realities of cities and regions have been always represented through maps and visuals. The interface between knowledge and experiences in maps is, for instance, one of the oldest representational instruments of power and management of information, as they have been visually stating the reality and guiding plans for the future for centuries. The image creation of a place (whether a region, city or neighbourhood) has been conveyed by complex processes where interests, goals and power play an important role. New technologies give a new significance to this process of image making as they offer a wider array of possibilities for production of images and maps. This form of production is still powerful as it conveys the “dominant narrative” as transmitted by global images, or “resistant narratives” as those 12

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made and represented by independent activists or under-represented social groups. The novelty is in the fact that this form of production no longer requires expert knowledge, asking rather for further exploration through practices. What kind of visual representation can raise awareness and encourage debate in the public sphere? How can the “dominant narrative” be unveiled? Can mapping and the creation of images be a social practice reinforcing community making and an advocate for social struggles? What is the potentiality and the type of technology used? Is there a chance of waiving visual productions, narrative and mapping practices in urban planning processes? Which are the impacts of these practices in the process of city making?

3

Encounters

A significant research field is the study and design of ambient interactive TV systems that facilitate and promote social communication in everyday places. In particular, this research program investigates the relationship between television use and architectural space. The main motivation was inspired by many readings in HCI, media and architecture. From the sparse research in this interdisciplinary field there have been some interesting findings. Adams (1992) studied the phenomenon that TV is described by people and considered by the media researchers as a physical place. This finding confirms the results of empirical research by Reeves and Naas (1996). Wildman (2001) traces the historical impact of communication technologies (radio, TV, telephone) on the design of the home and reports that each of these technologies slowly yet boldly transformed the design of domestic space. In addition, media researchers found that the design of domestic space has an influence on the way people watch TV (Pardun and Krugman 1994). Although TV is implicitly assumed as a domestic technology, there are also several uses of TV in public space (McCarthy 2001). Furthermore, the closer integration of powerful communication media, such as TV, in the fabric of the social and built space is of central importance to the future of human-computer interaction (Dourish 2002). In this context, Ambient ITV is defined as a rich audiovisual user experience that spans physical places (private, public) and devices (TV, mobile, public display). Despite the many criticisms on the quality of TV content and on the passive nature of the viewing activity, the social uses of TV have been

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documented in acclaimed research (Gauntlett and Hill 1999, Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi 1990). It has also been established that the users of TV systems have adapted TV in many ways to meet their everyday life needs (Lee and Lee 1995, Rubin 1983). The findings of these works frame a set of opportunities for and threats to the design of communication services in Ambient TV. The majority of recent research on interactive TV has over-emphasized the benefits of increased choice of content and of interactivity. Moreover, media researchers have studied the interaction between electronic media and humans, while architects have studied the interaction between humans and the built environment. What happens and how do these disciplines complement each other when digital media become an integral part of everyday (both home and city) life? Of particular interest is the use of interactive public displays in the city (Pieter Boeder et al. 2006) and the interplay between the large displays and mobile end-user terminals. Social behaviours in urban settings are differentiated by so many factors; whether they are public or private, individual or group, planned or chance. The physical distance over which one interacts with others varies according to many factors, as do the types of events or occasions which often structure interaction in the city. However, many people feel like outsiders when experiencing the city, and there are multiple social communities which do not interact with one another. How can the quality of encounters in the city be raised by new media, which enable new forms of communication, and how can the relationship between different individuals and communities in the city be enhanced? Previous research on the social impact of communication technologies has followed two distinct directions and has considered individually either interpersonal or mass communication. The use of audiovisual content as a placeholder for starting and sustaining relationships (e.g. discussions about yesterday’s football match, or a TV series) is an everyday experience for the majority of citizens. Previous ethnographic and survey studies have documented the social uses of TV (Oehlberg et al. 2006, Lee and Lee 1995), but have not described the implications for user interface design of applications (e.g. interactive TV, desktop computer, or mobile phone applications) that support the social uses of Ambient ITV in public and private space. The editors

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Situations

K ATHARINE S. W ILLIS

Wayfinding Situations

1

Introduction

The often repeated cliche; that networks enable people to interact with ‘anyone, anywhere, at any time and in any place’ illustrates our crude vision of the emerging digital world (Batty 2000). Instead, what is required is an emphasis on how humans interact, adapting to access the right amount and the right information in the right time and the right place. This chapter takes the position that urban space and the social behaviours that are enacted in it can act as a structure for the experience of technologies. It sets this study in the domain of the everyday activity of wayfinding. Wayfinding i.e. getting from some origin to a destination, is one of the prime everyday problems humans encounter. It is a purposive, directed and motivated activity (Golledge 1999). Humans use different wayfinding strategies depending both on their own individual spatial awareness, and also their knowledge of the environment they are traveling through. In a key work on the subject Arthur and Passini (Arthur & Passini 1992) define it as follows; ‘wayfinding is continuous, spatial problem solving under uncertainty’. But, wayfinding is much more than a process; it is does not take place in a vaccum but is instead immersed in the rich social setting in which the wayfinder thinks and acts. Thus, the aspect of wayfinding to be considered here is that it takes place in a social world; we rely on people as external sources of information and our wayfinding activities are almost never undertaken for the pure purpose of moving physically from A to B. Instead they are motivated, influenced and affected by out interactions in the social world; we travel to and from places to visit people, to work and for pleasure. In this manner, wayfinding is not an activity that can be studied by focussing on one aspect, but must be seen in a wholistic manner as a process undergoing change affected by a whole range of dynamic aspects. In the following text we draw on the concept of ‘situated actions’, a concept developed in 1980’s by Lucy Suchman which attempts to find a way of understanding and responding to the relationship of humans with technology in real world

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situations. In her presentation of the concept of ‘situated actions’, human communication, instead of being structured by a set of predefined plans, is instead considered as situated in the sense that ‘knowledge remains under construction within the framework of each action’ (Suchman 1987). The concept of situated-ness has been explored by many researchers and theorists, and despite many similarities in ideas of what characterises situatedness, these approaches also expose different perspectives. These viewpoints originate from an extraordinarily broad range of fields; sociology (Goffmann 1969, Meyrowitz 1986), HCI (Dey and Abowd 1999, Dourish 2001), anthropology or ethnography (Suchman 1987), cognitive psychology (Hutchins 1995, Wilson 2002), architecture (McCollough 2005) and geography (Batty & Miller 2000, Massey 2005). Despite varying perspectives, one common concept seems to persevere is that context is a relational property (Dourish 2004), which means that the various aspects of a situation cannot be seen as isolated, but are fundamentally interrelated. The ubiquity of mobile and wireless technologies in urban space has caused a change in the way people enact situations in everyday life. For instance, researchers have noted how the introduction of the mobile phone has altered the mobility patterns of users, so that rather than meeting at landmarks in public locations like plazas or street corners, young people tended to loosely co-ordinate movements and meetings through constant communication by mobile phone (e.g. Townsend 2000, Zook et al 2004). In another study of the perception of WiFi networks in urban space, it was found that people do not frame their plans and actions around the physical location of the technology, but based on the types of behaviours it affords them in the space (Willis, 2008). People have started to navigate urban space, not by using physical landmarks, but the structure and patterns of social connections enabled by ubiquitous technologies. This has created a phenomena referred to by Ito (Ito et al 2005) as ‘techno-social situations’, which hybridize technical, social and place-based infrastructures. In this context the use of wayfinding as a focus for the research does not frame the research in a minor problem domain, but instead offers a broader metaphor for us to understand how we navigate both the physical world comprised of spatial information and the world of digital communication networks.

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2

Applying the Theory

In order to investigate the nature of situated interaction we take the setting of a small city as a case study to investigate how situations are enacted. This is then used to understand how we might better support wayfinding if these features are integrated with the use of a technological application. In this context, the setting is defined as the interweaving of the physical setting (the particular features and structure of urban space), the social setting (the networks of communication) and the technological setting (the nodes and networks of technolgical availability). To define the setting in a more realistic manner a scenario is proposed, and then a series of empirical studies are discussed which explore the implications for wayfinding situations within this scenario. This is followed by a proposal for a series of interface elements which enables technologies to be implemented in the city so that people are able to act within an integrated framework of social, spatial and physical setting.

3

Scenario

A visitor to Weimar, Germany approaches the city with prior expectations and probably plans about how they will experience the city. Typically they will spend a relatively short period of time in the city itself, and may come away at the end of a trip without having engaged with the real city; its local residents and the everyday stories of the place; they will have superficially touched the city in the role of a ‘tourist’. They may also find that they are led or guided through the city for much of their trip, so that once they leave they would have had little chance to to create their own memories. The relatively complex configuration of streets and paths through the city mean that often they will have remained on a limited set of routes through the urban space. This proposal seeks to enable people to engage with the city on a more personal level, so that they are encouraged to build their own level of memories, rather than simply taking in the established history of the city. In terms of technology their mobile phone, an everyday and ubquitous technology provides the personal platform on which they interact.

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4

Empirical Setting

„Where else can you find so many good things in one small spot?“ Goethe (attributed) The setting chosen for the development of a wayfinding support is an approximately one kilometre square central area of the city of Weimar, Germany. The setting was chosen for a number of reasons relevant to the requirements of the study. Firstly the town offers a rich uban public space; the streets are primarily pedestrianised and the centre is focused around walking as a means of moving around. The centre of the city is also remarkably compact and dense in form, meaning that the development of a prototype system was manageable over a relatively small physical area. In terms of exisitng material to support wayfinding, the town’s national and international status as a historical tourist destination means that a great deal of information about the city is available for the visitor; maps, guides and other various sets of information about the space. The Weimar Tourist Office also runs a city guide service which is very well used, and the guides are offered in thirteen languages including german, english, french, russian, japanese and czechoslovakian. Along with this available information exists a corresponding set of visitor expectations of how the city might be experienced as well as concepts of its visual presence. However this means that many people are familiar with the historical relevance of the various sites in the city, but have no knowledge of how these individuals sites exist in configuration. The physical setting of the city is a configuration of tightly woven streets, many pedestrianised, with no obvious coherent spatial pattern. Topologically the space is on a fairly equal ground level, allowing no global views from one point to another which would help orientation. The built structures are generally low rise, with a number of key landmarks located throughout the space. These landmarks, including churches, musuems and even a castle are visually distinctive and create a rich set of focal points within a fairly small area. Depsite the small size of the city centre, the density of the layout of the space together with the richness of the features that comprise the physcial setting of Weimar make wayfinding a demanding task. In terms of technology the city is also host a public wireless network; ‘wireless weimar’ and has all the usual embedded technological networks.

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As a social setting Weimar has a complex and fluctuating mix of long term residents, semi-permanent residents (many students or academics at the local educational institutions) and short term visitors. The city has a very high number of visitors, in particular people who visit the city for one day only. Statistically, this amounts to over 3 million day visitors per year, with a smaller number of 150,000 people who stay overnight. Of these visitors only 13% are foreign vistors (Source: Weimar Tourist Office). This can be set against the actual resident population of the city which is around 60,000 people. In addition the town has a number of visitors as well as residents who stay for short periods of time (1–2 years). One consequence of this flow of visitors and residents is that there is a lack of interaction, since the different groups tend not to communicate a great deal, often due to langauage barriers but also for cultural reasons. Thus the city operates on many social levels. The pedstrianised centre of the city is host to many markets, both weekly and annual events such as the Zwiebelmarkt. This aspect of the city acts as a rich urban public space, with lots of opportunity for social interaction.

4.1

Study One: Sketch Maps of Weimar Spatial Relationships

In order to understand the local spatial characteristics of the particular urban setting a sketch map study was undertaken. The intention was to identify how the city is experienced not as a series of static physical location but instead as inter-linked sets of social spaces. Method: The study was undertaken by interviewing people familiar with the city centre i.e. locals. This follows a methodology used by Milgram as part of his wider study entitled ‘Psychological maps of Paris’ which sought to uncover the associational structures of the city (Milgram in Proshansky, 1979, p. 110). At various specific locations in the city participants were asked to sketch a map based on their current location with particular attention given to the indicating the links to local places. Participants were not paid to participate, were interviewed in the environmental setting and were chosen if they had more than two years knowledge of the city. Participants were were approached and asked to draw a sketch map of the local area, showing the streets and any locations they considered important. To provide a context, it was explained that they should draw the map as thought they were explaining the local area

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to a person new to the area, with the proviso that there was no incorrect results. In particular they were asked to represent the connections between different locations or their relationship to one another. The study was limited in scope; since it was semi-formal and not completed under rigorous conditions, but it was intended to gain informal insights into the locals’ perception of the structure of the city. Results: Across the various locations, the sketch maps showed a pattern which indicated that the city structure was conceived in ‘chunks’ or areas which were salient in themselves but poorly connected to adjacent ‘chunks’. Even locals very familiar with the city had problems making even simple street connections between one place and another. Strong connections were however identified between Theatre Platz and Markt (two large open spaces), although participants often incorrectly drew or named these connections. Theater Platz, Goethe Platz and Markt were linked by all participants, although again th actual linking paths were often wrongly named or the spatial relationship was incorrectly drawn (see Fig 1 and 2).

Fig. 1: Associations to Theater Platz

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Fig. 2: Associations to Markt

Based on an analysis of the connections made by the participants a ‘chunking’ map of Weimar, which summarised the areas and connections of the urban space – see Fig. 3.

Fig. 3: Chunking and links in the Urban Setting

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4.2

Study Two: Ethnographic Observational Study of Wayfinding Practices

In order to gain an understanding of how the city form of Weimar affects how people wayfind in the city an observational study was undertaken to record, document and analyse wayfinding practices. Method The study was undertaken over three days in Spring 2007 in Weimar. It involved observing people in the act of finding their way and noting both where they paused to make decisions and what activities they undertook during the time in which they made decisions. The method was drawn from the ethnographic field work of Brown and Laurier, who have developed strategies for deriving field work from observation (Brown & Laurier 2004). Although in the study described here only visual data was recorded and there was no conversational analysis. The people were not aware they were being observed, and as such they did not choose to ‘participate’ in the study. Wayfinders in the study were typically tourists, who were either referring to some form of map or a guidebook, which enabled them to be identified. To document the wayfinding practices, photos were taken to record behaviour. However in order to authentically observe the practices every attempt was taken to undertake the study without disturbing the wayfinders or making them aware they were being observed. Results Again clear patterns emerged; this time in terms of wayfinding behaviour and at which particular points in the urban space in which they occurred. The first observation was that there were key ‘nodes’ in the environment where people paused, reviewed and acted. These are summarized in the Fig 4 below.

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Fig. 4: Nodes in the urban setting.

Fig. 5: Node 1 Herderplatz

Fig. 6: Node 2 Goetheplatz

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These decision point nodes corresponded closely with the ‘chunks’ identified in the study described above (see Fig 5 to 6). A key characteristic of these nodes were that they occurred at physical boundaries; such as a T-Junction, a line in the road or a corner. On further analysis of the combination of points it also emerged that these points all had visual sightlines leading from them, which enable people to reference their position and to orientate themselves. These nodes provided a basis for a whole range of decision making activities; quickly deciding where to go next, referencing a location in the real world with that on a map, a photo opportunity, a place suitable for a longer pause (e.g. sitting down on a bench) and also as a meeting place. Arising out of this it is clear that to interact with information in an environment the individual needs to ‘pause’ to take time to reflect, plan and decide what to do next. It was also clear that the environmental structure itself provided a form of decision making structure which the wayfinder used to support a mapping of infromation in their head and that in the immediate environment. In this way the environment acts to support learning, and to enable the wayfinder to crossreference and check against some form of plan. These nodes became part of a wayfinding situation; it created a structure or frame for moving between one set of decisions to the next. This the situations were fluid in themselves, but there were transitions between them, which corresponded with salient transition points in the urban setting.

5

Supporting Wayfinding Situations in Weimar

In order to create a different level of engagement the scenario proposed is that at specific key points in the trip they will be able to interact with everyday stories and memories of the city as recorded by those who know it intimately. Since these stories are delivered only at the actual locations in the city which they relate to, then the visitor is encouraged to see the city through the eyes of the local, and to establish a conection to it through the narrative. As they listen to the story on a mobile device this helps to build up a memory for the place, and as they move through the city the accumulation of heard stories builds up a picture of the city which is embedded in these key nodal points. These nodal poinst are literally visible in the city as a series of illuminated posts, giving a visual and material indication of the source of the information is being delivered. Once they have listened to a story they also have the opportunity to 30

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record their own story and to capture their own experience of the city, which is then added into the database available to other users of the system. Thus over time a body of stories embedded in key places in the city develops, creating a way for people to find their way through the city by engaging with the local knowledge of the urban space.

6

Proposal

Story post is an element which seeks to enable the delivery of local narrative based technologies, and so assist wayfinding and discovery of local places. At key nodes in the city of Weimar illuminated posts will be located. These posts metaphorically host stories about the place. The story post is a physical metal post with an illuminated top section installed in the street in the city of Weimar. Hidden inside the base of the post will be the Bluetooth distribution system, with power supply and a wifi connection to a remotely located server/PC controlling the delivery and reception of messages. Storypost seeks to create a series of datum points for intertwining the physcial space of the city with the digital space of mobile and wireless technology. They seek to create a way of referencing between the two largely unconnected spaces. They are to be placed at nodal decision points in a wayfinding scenario. Thus they become a way of embeding a decision in a wayfinders task with the technological level of support that may assist them in this task.

7

Prototype Development

A prototype was developed based on the features above. The basic features of the storypost application are as follows: Listen and Receive: People in the zone of the Bluetooth story post receive a Bluetooth message with the text ‘do you want to hear a story about this place ?’. If the person accepts, an audio file from the selection in the database is randomly selected and sent via Bluetooth to the person’s mobile. They then open the audio file and listen to the story. Speak and Send: People record with their own voice a short audio on their mobile phone describing an event or feature of the place that is important to them. They then send this audio file via bluetooth to the story post. The stories

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are stored in order of being received. The database can only hold 10 stories at a time in the prototype phase. Creating a Loop: The narrative loop can then continue if the listener chooses to record their own story about the place and sends it back to the post. In order to put together a working model both the content and technical side of the application had to undergo development: The key issue was that since the prototype was not publically available it was necessary to adopt another method for the gathering of local stories in order to have some initial content to test. This involved recording people narrating verbal memories or anecdotes about places identified in the ‘node’ study. The gathering of content was started with the location ‘Markt’, and initially people were randomly approached and asked to participate in the gathering of verbal stories about the place. However it was found that this method of approoaching people was not sucessful for a number of reasons; the purpose of the study was not understood and people did not appreciate how they could contribute. It appeared that people did not feel that their individual opinion or experience mattered, and many suggested that an expert of knowledgeable person would be more appropriate to make such a contribution. Additionally people felt ‘put on the spot’ in that they could not simply recount a story from memory about the place, without having had some time to reflect and consider what was important to them or what might be interesting to others. Consequently a different approach was adopted where it was decided to approach people who had some experience of telling stories about Weimar, or had some clear role as a ‘holder’ of information’ about the city, either as a city official or some other position that gave them a ‘right’ to give their opinion. In the first case this involved approaching people who acted as tour guides for the city, since they had experience of narrating stories about place and also had a great deal of knowledge about Weimar. They were asked to participate in the study in advance, were explained the purpose of the project and given some background information. It was explained that what was required was not the recounting of historical facts about the place, but instead personal or everyday stories about specific points in the city. Once the project had been introduced to them they were given time, between a day and a week, to reflect on what might be suitable and then it was arranged to meet with them in the particular location to record their narrative. Technically the recordings were made using a Sony MiniDisc player with Sennheiser MD22 microphone. Recorded narratives were transferred to MP3 digital format. It was considered 32

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important that the narrative be recorded in the respective location, and at the beginning of each recording they were asked to gve their name, the date and the place in which they stood. Parallel to these sessions, a series of recordings were made during key events in the city; most notably the christmas market. The intention with this was that temporal events be captured, as these had their own quality of locality. Problems identified: One key issue identfied with the gathering of stories was that of language. Since local knowledge is held by german speakers, and the stories were recorded as verbal narratives the language of the recording was german. However it is anticipated that many of those that will use the system will have english as their chosen language. This highlights a problem that exists at the very heart of exchange of information between locals and strangers in the city; that of the language barrier. Technical development In the prototype stage it was decided to focus on the sending of stories to people in specific locations, and not to include the facility of the people responding by recording their own stories and adding them to the database. The model of the system is as follows • Bluetooth sender (running on laptop computer embedded in location) • Mobile phone with Bluetooth switched on (property of participant and no special application required to be installed on the device) • Internet site with content uplodaed as mp3 files (www.storypost.de) • Public wifi node The system works by integrating the delivery of a Bluetooth message with a hyperlink to a website, where the content is accessible. Thus as a person passes within the proximity of a node; approximately 15 metre radius, they receive a message via Bluetooth. The message reads as follows: ‘Do you want to receive a message from storypost?’ This is a default message inherent in the Bluetooth system, where the receiver has to actively accept a message. Once they accept the message they receive the following information as a text message: ‘Do you want to hear a story about this place: http://www.storypost.de‘

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On clicking on the link they access a browser interface as follows: In the interface a choice of stories is listed. By clicking on a story they access a MP3 file, which is approximately 1 ½ minutes to 2 minutes in length. This is then listened to on the mobile device. Below is the transcript of a typical story: My name is Jutta Schulze, and I’m standing in the Market Square in Weimar. Over there is Hotel Elephant. It is connected to Thomas Mann, among others, since the well known book he wrote entitled ‘Lotte in Weimar’ is set in the hotel. This book was turned into a film in the seventies, and Weimar was used a set during the filming. A famous actress called Lily Palma was the leading lady in the film and played the role of Charlotte. The film is based on the meeting between Goethe and one of his young lovers; Charlotte Boeuf, born Kessner. Who met in Weimar. The story is a parody of Weimar during Goethe’s times, and whilst they were filming Weimar was turned into a city in the time of Goethe. I remember it well because we often skipped school and came down to the hotel to watch the filming. Luckily our German teacher was quite sympathetic and always let us off! (story told by Jutte Schulze, November 20, 2007)

8

Usability Testing

The first stage of testing was to assess the usability of the protoype.

8.1

Method

Participants were asked to take part in a survey. Participants were chosen if they were german speakers. The usability testing took place in the real environment. They were not told details of the project but were told to walk to one particular area in the city and expect a Bluetooth message which they were asked to accept. It was explained that they should proceed with the options that were offered to them until they felt they had used the system enough and then to return to the interviewer to answer some questions about what they had experienced. They were then observed from a distance as they interacted with the application, and then the evaluation process began in an adjacent café. The following questions were used to evaluate the system’s usability: 34

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Interface

Did you understand what you were supposed to do? Did the interaction with the interface work in the way you expected? Was the progress through the series of stages of the interface clear? Technical Did everything work? Do you think you would normally accept a Bluetooth message from an unfamiliar device? Was the sound quality acceptable? Was the download time for the story too long, too short or just right? Timescale How long did you interact with the application? How many stories did you listen to, and why? Did you find the length of the stories to be too long, too short or just right? Content Did you find the content interesting? How did you decide which stories to listen to? Did it make you think about the place differently?

8.2

Results

Observation In terms of the user attention this was initially directed to the device as they interacted with the first stages of the interface. Howevere once a story had been selected the individual could be observed seeking out the place being described in the story and either literally moving to the place, or more simply just looking at it whilst listening to the story. This was a benefit of the interface being sound-based for the story delivery. Users either kept the device at hand level, as through they were reading a mesaage, or held it to their ear once the sound began to play. Interview Users generally reported that the interface worked, and that they found navigating through the various stages easy to understand. Since users were not expecting to receive content in the form of a sound file it was reported that this was initially a surprise, as they had expected a picture. In terms of the technical aspect of the application the system worked. However one user reported

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that they did not feel they would normally accept a Bluetooth message from an unknown device. This was a peceived privacy issue, and a concern about receiving advertisements. A further criticism was the length of the story, which some users felt was too long. This meant they only listened to one or two stories. One user stated that the shorter the stories were the more they would access. Users reported liking the fact that they had a choice of stories, and they used the title of the story to assess what they thought the content would be about. However some users found that the actual content of the story did not match their expectation of what it would be about from the title they had chosen. Typically users reported that they found the stories interesting and also amusing, and that the content was new to them. This was the case for one user who was actually reasonably familiar with Weimar.

8.3

Key Usability and Design Issues in Working Model

Language: A key design issue is that of language. In the design scenario, the typical user is to be someone familiar or semi-familiar with Weimar. This would mean that they could have a range of native languages, but the distribution would be a mixture of German and English speakers. In the prototype system the distribution of stories is approx. 70% german language, 30% english language. Theoretically it would be possible in the next iteration to translate german stories into english and vice versa. However the system design relies on the fact that the person narrates their story in their own voice. This means translation is not appropriate. The second aspect is that typically german sepakers will only choose german langauge stories and vice versa. Bearing in mind that the vast majority of people who visit Weimar are german speakers (87% according to Weimar Tourist Office Statistics for 2006), it seems appropriate to implement the system intially in German only. Once the user aspect of the system is implemented where users can also record their onw stories and upload them to the system, this would create more possibilities for stories in a range of languages. Content Delivery and Bluetooth There are perceived privacy issues with Bluetooth technology. The system relies on users accepting a Bluetooth message to initiate the interaction. The prototype works on a scenario where people in the city receive ad-hoc messages as they move around the city. This setup does not allow for differentiation between people who may want to engage with the storypost system and 36

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those who may choose not to. A solution to this is an opt-in setup, where the user agrees at a particular point in their stay or visit on Weimar to ‘activate’ the system with their Bluetooth device. This would mean they enact some form of agreement to participate in the storypost system, and also that they have the ability to deactivate their participation as they require. This setup would be activated through the user’s Bluetooth chosen name on their mobile device which would give them a unique ID and identfier. The system would have to have a level of technical authentication with specifc Bluetooth names, not just at individual nodes, but as a system. Story Length Users reported that the stories were too long and that there was also too much choice. The stories should be edited to be a maximum of 1 minute 30 seconds in length, which also reduces download time. Secondly in the working model the list of stories per location should be limited to three options at any one time. These three options should be randomly selected from a larger database of stories, so that a person visiting the same location twice would be offered a different selection of stories on their second visit.

9

Next Steps

The most immediate work required as the obvious next step of this research is to test the working model of the storypost application for its effect on wayfinding in the urban setting. The features of the system were developed out of a response the problem of the situated quality of wayfinding. In order to establish whether the solution does indeed have validity it is vital to assess whether people who accessed the storypost system in Weimar enabled people to enact a more meaningful wayfinding situation. There are two possible methodologies for proceeding in obtaining results and this would in a sense depend on the field or discipline in which it is required to substantiate the work. The first option would be to proceed with pyschological methods in order to test for performance in a task, and assess whether the storypost application actually results in the user becoming more engaged with the spatial setting. This would involve a comparison group; typically participants who had experience of the environment from a cartographic paper map source. Thus a route in the setting would be created which would be navigated by both sets of partici-

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pants. Both groups would then be tested for memory of the setting they had experienced. Although such an empirical study would hopefully enable quantitive analysis of acquired knowledge in a manner that would have some methodological validity in a field such as cognitive pyschology, it has definite limitations in terms of actual usefulness of the results. The outcomes of the study would study differences in essentially metric spatial knowledge, and consequently the type of knowledge tested for would not reveal the full facets of the situation in the sense that wayfinding situations have been explored in this discussion. Thus a second option for to testing the system would be to assess more qualitative measures of learning in the setting. This would involve a repetition of the sketch map and linking study undertaken at the beginning of the development of the application. However in this case the participants would complete the tests at the end their trip. In this option there would be a repeat of the study with a control group of participants who are visitor's to the city but have referred to maps or other guide material. The storypost participants would then be tested for whether the storypost format encouraged both incidental and structured learning about the environment they had experienced. These studies would also provide a basis for assessing how the system could be implemented in other urban environments. Since the system has been developed specifically for the setting of Weimar the fundamental design concepts of the application can be implemented in a wide range of urban settings. However the outcome should be the same; that people are engaged in the situated aspect of wayfinding as they navigate the city.

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Conclusion

In this chapter we described a series of site specific empirical studies which investigate how wayfinding is enacted in the setting of a defined area in Weimar. An application was then proposed addressed the issues indentified in the empirical studies. The requirements of the system identified how wayfinding situations are situated in the urban space, and how information might best be meaningfully interwoven into the experience of the space. The features of a prototype working model were described and the results of usability testing on the prototype are discussed. The storypost implementation described attempts to suggest a direction for how to support wayfinding in the city based on a situational experience of space, through supporting the enaction of localised technologies. 38

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References ARTHUR , P. AND R. PASSINI (1992). Wayfinding: People, Signs and Architecture. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. BATTY, H. MILLER , H. (2000). Representing and Visualizing Physical, Virtual and Hybrid Information Spaces. In: D. HODGE AND D. JANELLE (eds.) Measuring and Representing Accessibility in the Information Age, Berlin: Springer Verlag, pp. 133–146. BROWN, B. & LAURIER , E. (2004). Maps and Journeys: An Ethnomethodologival Investigation. In: Cartographica, 4 (3), 17–33. L.J. CARR , SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS (1948). An Observational Approach to Introductory Sociology, Harpers Social Science Series. DEY, A., ABOWD, G. (1999). Towards a Better Understanding of Context and ContextAwareness. In: Proceedings of CHI ‘99, 434–441. D OURISH, P. (2001). Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. D OURISH, P. (2004). “What We Talk About When We Talk About Context”, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 8(1), pp. 19–30, 2004. GLADWIN, W. (1967). Culture and Logical Process. In: W. GOODENOUGH (ed.) Explorations in Cultural Anthropology. New York: McGraw Hill, pp. 167–177. GOFFMAN, E. (1969). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: The Penguin Press. GRAHAM, S., MARVIN, S. (1996). Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places. London: Routledge. HOLLAN, J., HUTCHINS, E., KIRSH, D. (2000). Distributed Cognition: Toward a New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 7(2), June 2000, pp. 174–196. HUTCHINS, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ITO, M., OKABE, D., MATSUDA, M. (2005). Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones and Japanese Life, MIT Press, MA. MASSEY, D. (2005). For Space. Sage Publications, London. MCCOLLOUGH, M. (2005). Digital Ground. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. MEYROWITZ, J. (1986). No Sense of Place: The Impact of the Electronic Media on Social Behaviour. Oxford University Press Inc. PROSHANSKY, H. (ed.) (1979). Environmental Psychology: People and Their Physical Settings, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. SUCHMAN, L. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions, Cambridge University Press, NY. TOWNSEND A. M. (2000). Life in the Real-Time City: Mobile Telephones and Urban Metabolism, Journal of Urban Technology 7:2, 85–104. WILLIS, K. (2008 to appear). Spaces, Settings and Connections. In: AURIGI, A., DE CINDIO, F. (eds.) Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City. UK: Ashgate Press.

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WILSON, M. (2002). Six Views of Embodied Cognition. In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9, 625–636. ZOOK, M., D ODGE, M., AOYAMA, Y., AND A. TOWNSEND (2004). New Digital Geographies: Information, Communication, and Place. In: Brunn, Cutter and Harrington (eds.) Geography and Technology, pp.155–176.

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A RIANNA B ASSOLI /J OHANNA B REWER /K AREN M ARTIN

Situating In-betweenness

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Introduction

As Urban Computing emerges as a distinct field of research in the area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), new approaches to designing technologies for the city are being developed in response to the challenges of an increasingly complex and multi-faceted urban experience. Social action and spatial form in the built environment have been described as being deeply entwined and inter-related [Hillier & Hanson, 1984] and one strand of social action which is increasingly being explored is peoples use of mobile technologies. These relationships – of the social to the spatial, and the role of technology within this – have been studied in detail by anthropologists, geographers and social scientists [e.g. Sheller & Urry, 2006, Crang & Graham, 2005] These studies often focus on understanding and analysing the current situation, and developing theories around this. We are interested in building on this work and exploring how an understanding of the articulation between the spatial, the social and the technological might enable designers to identify new design spaces for mobile technologies and services within the built environment. The question we have been studying is how can we start to understand how does peoples use of technology change their behaviour in in-between spaces, and how do we begin to design new technologies and services to respond to this? Mobile technologies and urban lifestyles have led to changes in proximal relationships and local communities, with the rise of non-geographical connections and splintered communities, and the flexibility of mobile technologies means that the activities of business, leisure and home life are increasingly entwined. Just as the development of the telephone helped enable skyscrapers to become a viable business environment in New York in the 1920’s, mobile technologies are today changing the way we interact with the built environment. People search out a quiet corner of a public square to make a business call, seek out the table with the strongest wifi signal in their

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favourite café, or chat simultaneously with friends around the table and with those on the other side of the world. Consequently, a challenge has arisen for designers to understand these new socio-spatial configurations and to design technologies and services appropriate to them. While there is a large body of research investigating the use, design and appropriation of technologies in the home [e.g. Gaver et al., 2006, Brown et al., 2007], the workplace [e.g. Heath et al., 1999] and what Oldenburg calls ‘third spaces’, that is social spaces such as bars, cafes and leisure venues [e.g. O’Hara et al., 2004] we believe there is a gap in research into the role of technology in the spaces and activities that fall between these areas. That is, within loosely defined public spaces, or areas of what we call ‘inbetweenness’. We consider in-betweenness to be the moments of transition between places and activities; the walk to your car, the wait at the bus stop, the daily commute, the checkout at the supermarket, the path through the park and so on. These are situations and spaces we encounter everyday and by acting in them and reacting to them, they acquire meaning for us and become places. Augé’s concept of ‘non-places’ [Augé, 1995] includes some situations we consider as in-betweenness, including airports, highways and transport lounges. However, this term has a negative connotation that we prefer to distance ourselves from; instead of considering these situations as the void between meaningful activities or places, we suggest thinking of these places in their own right, and in terms of how they are actively constructed by a city’s inhabitants. Can developing a deeper understanding of these in-between spaces benefit design? Mobile computing research, on which much Urban Computing is based, has been criticised as potentially resulting in a limited understanding of the urban experience and consequently producing mobile technologies based on a narrow range of ideologies and agencies [Dourish et al. 2007]. Techniques from the social sciences such as observation, participant interview and fieldwork have recently been employed within the field of HCI as ways of exploring the context into which new technologies might be situated. Projects such as Familiar Stranger [Goodman & Paulos, 2004], Urban Tapestries [Silverstone & Sujon, 2005] and Uncle Roy All Around You [Benford et al., 2004] exemplify an approach to discerning the urban environment, and our behaviour within it, through observation of people’s actions and interactions via a custom-made application or device. This approach, which is simultaneously design and research, can be considered as 42

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an example of ‘situated perspectives’, as defined by Harrison et al [Harrison et al. Under review]. Harrison suggests that this umbrella-term collects together a number of approaches currently found in HCI research which have a common point of reference in a particular model of interaction, suggesting that these approaches all “treat interaction as a form of meaning making in which the artifact and its context are mutually defining and subject to multiple interpretations.” This definition implies that a tripartite relationship exists between the spatial and social situation of a technology and the designed artifact. However, design studies produced so far in Urban Computing have tended to focus on one particular activity – story-telling e.g. [Nisi, 2006] or game-playing e.g. [Barkhuus et al. 2005] for example, or an explicit location e.g. [Jungknickel. ongoing] and have not greatly considered how technology relates to more ambiguous social and spatial concepts.

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The Challenge

The difficulty with understanding and designing for in-betweenness is that these spaces tend to be unstructured and weakly defined. Mobility and indeterminacy are two properties we consider to be characteristic of in-betweenness; activities may emerge spontaneously out of the general ebb and flow of the city, disappearing again as quickly as they arrived leaving behind few traces of their existence, while occupants are often transient and mobile, located in these spaces only temporarily. In these places distinct social behaviours frequently arise in response to the spatial context; for example, a queue for an ATM develops on a crowded pavement, positioning itself so as to leave a gap between the person at the ATM and the start of the queue. Responding to both the spatial and social context of the in-between situation, not only does this leave room for pedestrians to pass by but it also offers privacy for the current ATM customer. This behaviour is dynamic and transitional in nature; once the queue at the ATM has dissipated there are no traces left in the environment informing future queues of how they should form; knowing how to queue requires local knowledge.

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Our Approach

How then do we begin to understand and design for in-betweenness? Our approach has been to break down this broad topic into more manageable instances and to explore a small number of focused and tangible topics. By comparing and contrasting the outputs of these more constrained investigations we can begin to see how in-betweenness is similarly and differently constructed and begin to recognise future opportunities for design. To this end, we organised a series of workshops focusing on specific aspects of inbetweenness that are visible in our everyday environment. Within these workshops we looked at how the built environment, people’s activities and their use of mobile technologies are inter-twined and related. We were interested in exploring how a deeper understanding of the existing situation might lead to a broader, more nuanced, range of designs able to reflect people’s lived experience of the city. By looking at everyday social practices in situ we believe that a more discerning understanding of these situations might be cultivated and new design spaces identified. To date, our findings have been; • Observation identified a number of common characteristics and themes of in-betweenness that cross all contexts and locations studied. • However these themes and characteristics manifested themselves differently in different social and cultural contexts. • Engaging designers in observational activities led to a wide range of designs for public spaces reflecting the social and cultural context in which they were situated.

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The Workshops

To date, we have held three workshops. Each of the workshops took a different perspective on the topic of in-betweenness providing us with a number of lenses through which we could view the subject. Our first workshop, ‘Why Wait? A workshop on place, time and future technologies’, took place in central London in July 2006 and explored aspects of public 44

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waiting – the places in which people choose, or are forced, to wait and the activities and technologies that support this waiting. In this workshop we considered in-betweenness in terms of time, where waiting constitutes a ‘pause’ in the rhythm of people’s everyday lives. The second workshop, Betwixt, took place in September 2006 in Orange County, California, an ‘exurban’ environment sprawling south of Los Angeles. While Why Wait began its examination of in-betweenness by considering waiting as an inbetween activity, Betwixt focused on the spatial aspects of in-betweenness, in particular, transitional spaces – the highway, the pavement, the mall, the pier, the drive-thru – that are characteristic of the everyday life of this environment. In Betwixt we considered how these spaces revealed their qualities of transition, and who they were (and weren’t) transitional for. Our most recent workshop, ‘A Public (in)Convenience’ took place in Amsterdam in November 2007. This workshop looked at one specific example of an in-between space – public toilets – and considered the relationships between social attitudes and values and spatial form and technology design. Research of technologies rarely deals with the physicality of body functions and public toilets exemplify an often overlooked space. In A Public (in)Convenience participants considered these sites as being a precise intersection of social and spatial in-betweenness and reflected on how social and cultural conventions and practices can be reinforced or subverted by design. Each of the three workshops had the same structure. They began with a session of research speed-dating which compelled participants to introduce themselves to each other. This was followed by a fieldwork activity in which participants were divided into groups, given identical lists of scavenger-hunt style tasks to complete and then sent out into the local environment. Completing the list of tasks required participants to actively engage with the situations they encountered as well as observe and document them. On returning to the workshop venue, each group presented their documentation of the fieldwork to the other participants. A discussion followed which drew out the predominant themes around the topic and offered participants an opportunity to share their theoretical and personal perspectives. Finally, during the design session groups were asked to select a situation or individual they had documented during the fieldwork and to produce a concept design inspired by this image. These design sketches were then presented and

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critiqued by the workshop participants. For more information on the rationale behind this workshop structure see [Bassoli et al. 2006]. Each of the workshops generated findings around the particular subject – waiting, transitional spaces and public toilets – but here we’re going to focus on the question of what we can learn about the social and spatial nature of inbetween spaces in general by looking across all of the workshops, and how this understanding might be of use to technology designers. Looking across all of the workshops we begin to see a number of common themes which emerged naturally in each case. By comparing and contrasting how these themes manifested themselves in each of the workshops similarities and discrepancies in the social and cultural construction of in-betweenness were revealed. To illustrate how this comparison across the series of workshops can deepen our understanding of in-betweenness, we will take a look at one of these themes in depth, that is, the concept of LEGITIMACY. In this case, we define legitimacy as the right to be in a certain place at a certain time.

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Legitimacy in Why Wait?

In Why Wait, the discussion of legitimacy focused on social negotiation – exploring and understanding the ways in which certain actions made one’s waiting legitimate to the other people in the space. For example, waiting in certain places could require different attitudes or postures, to make clear to people around that the waiter’s presence is socially legitimate. In figure 1, a girl sits outside a café checking her text messages as she waits for a friend, her behaviour indicating to those around her, ‘I’m busy, don’t speak to me.’ This action, observed by a group of our participants, affirms her right to be there alone. In this case, the mobile phone was being used as a form of social defence against unwanted attention. In other situations our participants noted, the act of waiting itself was called on to legitimise presence. In another example a workshop participant approached a girl standing outside a theatre, wanting to ask her what she was doing there, ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I don’t have time to talk to you. I’m waiting for a friend.’

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Fig. 1: A girl checks her mobile phone as she waits for her friend outside a cafe

One group of participants observing the actions of pedestrians and drivers at a busy zebra crossing noticed that pedestrians and drivers took it in turns to take an active role. For a certain period of time pedestrians would assume the right to cross the road, drivers would then indicate to pedestrians when they felt they had waited a reasonable amount of time by edging slowly forward onto the crossing. After allowing cars to pass for a while, pedestrians would step onto the crossing forcing the traffic to give way. In this way, the physical actions of pedestrians and traffic were used to negotiate who had the legitimate right of way on the crossing at any moment in time.

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Legitimacy in Betwixt

In Betwixt, different aspects of legitimacy were observed and commented on. During the fieldwork activity participants took a photograph showing a list of regulations painted directly onto the Newport Beach pier. This lengthy set of

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rules describes all of the things one is not allowed to do in that location. Another group of participants, who visited the Irvine Spectrum, a shopping mall, for their observations, was struck by the incessant cleaning, noting that there seemed to be more cleaners than customers and saying that they felt the mall space was entirely prescriptive. To them, everything appeared preplanned leaving few real choices for the visitors; smoking or eating, for example, could only be done in very particular locations that had deemed to be the “right’ place for that activity. Our participants stressed that even “public places” in Orange County are often actually privately owned and so legitimacy here was less about negotiation with other people in the space, but more about a set of rules and legitimate behaviours imposed by people with authority over the space. In Betwixt then, unlike Why Wait, the focus was not on legitimacy to one’s peers or co-occupants of the space, but more about legitimacy with regard to the owners of the space and there appeared to be little room for social negotiation over acceptable types of behaviour.

Fig. 2: Legitimacy in Betwixt; A list of rules painted on Newport Beach pier

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Legitimacy in A Public (in)Convenience

As gender-specific spaces public toilets are subject to strict social codes of behaviour covering legitimate use of the space and participants felt that design was able to subvert or support these codes. The picture in figure 3 was taken by one of the groups during the fieldwork session of a Public (in)Convenience and shows one of the portable urinals that are placed around the city centre during weekends. In this case, the group felt, legitimacy of people to use the urinals was constrained by their physical form. One participant pointed out that, in fact, the design of the urinal excluded more than just the female section of the population, it also discriminated against children and non-ablebodied males. In the discussion following the fieldwork presentations, several participants expressed the view that, in this way, design legitimises and reinforces cultural values. The provision of these urinals, participants felt, reflected the attitude that it was acceptable for men to urinate in the streets but not for women. By looking across all three of the workshops we can show that despite apparently sharing few characteristics of form or activity, there are commonalities in the themes and behaviours that take place in in-between spaces. Observations made by the workshop participants revealed legitimacy to be a common attribute of in-between spaces, with occupants often desiring to find ways to legitimise their presence in the eyes of others. However, the form of this legitimacy, and to whom it is necessary to make your presence legitimate, varied depending on social and cultural context. In our workshops legitimacy in in-between-spaces was observed to be enforced by social negotiation, regulation as well as through the design and form of objects and technologies.

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Fig. 3: A temporary urinal on the street of Amsterdam, only accessible to a portion of the population

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Designing for In-betweenness

Our question now is how can observations ‘in the wild’, such as those of the workshop fieldwork activity, help us open up new design spaces for inbetweenness? As we described earlier, the workshops were structured so that participants engaged in fieldwork, discussion and finally, a design activity, and our approach to answering this question was to look to see how the former influenced the latter. We maintained a strong narrative thread throughout the workshop, guiding the group from one activity to the next and helping establish a common frame of reference for participants. In the fieldwork, groups undertook identical scavenger-style list of tasks then were asked to present their findings to the other groups when they returned. During the discussion which followed we encouraged participants to illustrate theoretical points with concrete examples drawn from these fieldwork presentations which helped overcome participants differences in vocabulary, technical knowledge and background. The same thread continued into the design session when groups were asked to choose one situation encountered during the fieldwork and to design a tool or service to support or subvert it. For this exercise, groups were given between one and two hours in which to come up with their design sketches and told not to consider practical matters such as technical constraints, cost or materials. Our aim in this session was not to come up with implementable designs during this activity, but to explore the links between observation and design and the potential for opening up new design spaces. We found that taking part in an observation exercise out in the ‘real’ world and drawing on this as the basis for design led to a wide variety of designs for public spaces each of which reflected the social and cultural context in which it was situated. To illustrate this further we’ll follow the theme of legitimacy again as it re-emerged as a basis for design in each of the workshops.

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Legitimacy in the Design Activity

Observing how people currently act in public spaces, how they adapt the environment to support their actions and what objects they bring into the space with them can suggest new roles and design spaces for future technologies. Using an image of a man waiting at the bus stop as inspiration,

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one group from Why Wait produced a design sketch for a device they called ‘Myst-Air’. This was a breath-activated appliance, similar to a cigarette, though larger and less fragile, which instead of creating a cloud of smoke around the user, generated a watery mist. The group said that they wanted to devise a positive response to waiting that allowed for both territory marking but also had a calming effect on the user. During the critique of the design, other participants commented that the design was open-ended enough to allow the owners to either admit other people around them into their “cool bubble” by sharing the device, or to use the cloud of myst to keep the space for themselves. In this way, one could mark the boundaries of one’s personal waiting space, while also engaging in an activity indicating to others your legitimacy to be there. In Betwixt, one group responded to the concept of legitimacy in a very different way. Using as inspiration both a photograph of a woman cleaning the mall and a video from a group who had spent time interviewing a homeless man, they developed a design they named ‘Tuckatruck’. Similar to the TukTuks of South East Asia, the Tuckatruck is a single-person, threewheeled vehicle. The group described it as a pedal-powered cart big enough for a homeless person to sleep in but also featuring a large rear compartment to be used in the collection of objects for recycling. This design was inspired by the challenge of providing a homeless person with a legitimate presence in the mall; with this design the group sought to legitimise an existing activity in the eyes of others.

Fig. 4: Photograph of mall cleaners from Betwixt observations; TuckaTruck design

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Another perspective on legitimacy was represented in a design sketch created by one of the groups at A Public (in)Convenience. During the discussion participants had debated at some length issues around the role and working conditions of the toilet attendants whom they had encountered during the fieldwork. While participants observations and conversations revealed toilet attendants to feel a certain amount of ownership over the place in which they work, the later discussion and some of our participants previous research brought out details of the low-pay and social isolation often suffered by toilet attendants. Taking these issues, and the image of one of the participants in conversation with a toilet attendant as a basis for their design, a group came up with the concept of the Toilet Paper Publishing Company. During a chat with one toilet attendant, the had group discovered she was writing her memoirs describing her 35-years as a toilet attendant and the group designed a means for her to publish these memoirs to a wider audience. Using the toilet paper publishing service, her observations or funny interaction with customers could be captured and written down, reappearing in the toilet cubicles printed on the toilet paper. The group suggested that the service might be networked between remote toilets enabling better communication between toilet attendants, which it was suggested, might in turn lead to greater legitimacy of this occupation. From the diversity of these design sketches, and the variety of approaches which groups brought to concept of legitimacy, we can begin to see how observation in situ might lead to designs able to address in-between spaces and situations in general, while retaining a social and cultural specificity.

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Conclusion

The questions we were interested in were, how does peoples use of technology change their behaviour in in-between spaces, and how do we begin to design new technologies and services that respond to this? Through a series of workshops we found that breaking down broad concepts of urban experience into observable instances allows us to discover their social, spatial and cultural specificities and that observation of current practice, social convention and behaviour in a number of culturally different locations can reveal new design spaces for future technologies. We believe that using observation as part of the design process helped establish a common frame of reference and store of

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examples and engaging in a collaborative process of observation allows individuals to refer to these shared experiences as concrete illustrations of more abstract concepts. Within a single workshop we can see how the topics raised by these observations were reflected in a design activity, but also expanded upon. However, with more than one workshop to draw on we begin to understand how the themes are both generalisable and locally specific and by tracing the process of the evolution of one particular theme through three workshops we can see a dialogue beginning to emerge. We believe that engaging designers in observational activities can lead to a wide range of designs for public spaces capable of reflecting the social and cultural context in which they are situated.

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Acknowledgments

We thank all of our participants in Why Wait, Betwixt and A Public (in)Convenience. Also the Adaptive Architecture and Computation Studio at the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, UCL, The Donald Bren School of Information Sciences, UCI and the Waag Society, Amsterdam for hosting the workshops. Karen Martin is funded by ESPRC and BT. Arianna Bassoli would like to acknowledge funding from the EU-project, Bionets.

References AUGÉ, M. Non-Places (1995). An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London Verso BARKHUUS, L., CHALMERS, M., TENNENT, P., HALL, M., BELL, M., SHERWOOD, S., AND BROWN, B. (2005). Picking Pockets on the Lawn: The Development of Tactics and Strategies in a Mobile Game. Proc. Intl. Conf. Ubiquitous Computing Ubicomp BASSOLI, A., BREWER , J. MARTIN, K., D OURISH, P. & MAINWARING, S. (July–September 2007). Aesthetic Journeys: Rethinking Urban Computing, in: IEEE Pervasive Computing, 6(3), BASSOLI, A., BREWER , J. & MARTIN, K. ( 2007). In-between Theory and Practice Adjunct Proc. ACM Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI BENFORD, S., FLINTHAM, M., DROZD, A., ANASTASI, R., ROWLAND, D., TANDAVANITJ, N., ADAMS, M., ROW, FARR , J., OLDROYD, A. AND SUTTON, J. (2004). Uncle Roy All Around You: Implicating The City In A Location-Based Performance, Proceedings Of Advanced Computer Entertainment 2004.

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BROWN, B., TAYLOR , A., IZADI, S., SELLEN, A., AND KAYE, J. (2007). Locating family values: A field trial of the Whereabouts Clock. Proc 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing 2007 D OURISH, P., ANDERSON, K. & NAFUS, D. (2007). Cultural Mobilities: Diversity and Agency in Urban Computing, Proc. IFIP Conf. Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT 2007 CRANG, M. AND GRAHAM, S. D. N. (2005). Multispeed cities and the logistics of living in the Information Age. Project Report. Economic and Social Research Council, Swindon. GAVER , W., B OWERS, J., B OUCHER , A., LAW, A., PENNINGTON, S. AND VILLAR , N. (2006). The History Tablecloth: Illuminating domestic activity. Proc. Conference on Designing Interactive Systems 2006 GOODMAN, E. & PAULOS, E. (2004). The Familiar Stranger: Anxiety, Comfort and Play in Public Place, Proc. ACM Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI HARRISON, S. TATAR , D. AND SENGERS, P. The Three Paradigms of HCI, Journal of HCI, Taylor and Francis, (under review) HEATH, C.C., HINDMARSH, J. & P. (1999). Luff Interaction in Isolation: The dislocated world of the train driver on London Underground. Sociology, 33, 3, pp. 555–575, Cambridge University Presss HILLIER , B. & HANSON, J. (1984). The Social Logic of Space, Cambridge University Press JUNGNICKEL, K. http://www.studioincite.com/73urbanjourneys/ NISI, V. (2006). Media Portrait of the Liberties, Community Domain Symposium, International Symposium Electronic Arts (ISEA) 2006, San Jose, O’HARA, K., LIPSON, L., JANSEN, M., UNGER , A., JEFFRIES, H., MACER , P. (2004). Jukola: democratic music choice in a public space. Proc. Conference on Designing Interactive Systems SHELLER , M. & URRY, J. (2006). The New Mobilities Paradigm, Environment and Planning A, vol. 38 SILVERSTONE, R. & SUJON, Z. (2005). Urban Tapestries: Experimental Ethnographies, Technological Identities and Place, Media@LSE Electronic Working Papers Why Wait? A Workshop on Space/Time and Future Technologies, http://www.inbetweeness.org/waiting/ Betwixt: Technology and Transitional Spaces, http://www.inbetweeness.org/betwixt A Public (in)Convenience: A Workshop on Public Toilets, http://www.inbetweeness.org/apublicinconvenience/

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M IYA YOSHIDA

Interactivity, Interpassivity, and Possibilities Beyond Dichotomy

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Introduction

Along with the development of communication network technologies, there has been the big boom caused by the so-called “interactive revolution” in the 1990s. It promised that interactivity would “change the way we shop, play, and learn” (Jensen 1998, 185). Picking up the part of the virtues of an “interactive life”, academic research has widely tended to emphasize the positive potentials of its exploration in diverse ways – in computer sciences, cybernetics, logistics, socio-economic game theory, new media and art studies. But, arguably, even before that, the catchword “interactivity” already had a remarkable impact in the field of popular culture, especially in that of user-oriented communication technologies. However, after the popularization of “interactivity”, the notion of “interpassivity” was critically proposed by Robert Pfaller and reinforced and further explored by Slavoj Zizek with a series of examples, the discussion has been turned around in such a way that in most cases, especially in mediarelated practices, interpassivity seems to prevail. In the context of art – which I am going to address here in some detail –, artists have attempted to explore the conceptual structure of being participative and have created spaces and interfaces to allow for new forms of interaction. Historically, the earliest pertinent cases are to be found since the 1960s; this development can be traced as a complex of original ideas until the present, employing concepts such as “chance operation”, “happening”, “indeterminacy”, and many others; whereas a clarification of terminology is still lacking in this field of production. Moreover, the use of technology in general as well as in the field of art has tremendously inflated and diversified the notion, with still noticeable undercurrents of modernist ideologies. As a result, in fact, the more frequently the notion of “interactivity” is used, the more confusion seems to arise, and that is true especially around the use of technology. For in the present age of networking and mobility imperatives, what does interaction actu-

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ally mean? – when it can be observed that, in most cases, there is only a preprogrammed and rather limited set of codes to be “encountered” and “explored” in allegedly interactive situations and set-ups? How interactive are we really in negotiating or using interfaces with their pre-programmed surfaces? Apart from the “depth” of possible decisions that can be made at any given point of an interaction and can be approximated by rational means, how and at which level do common concepts of interactivity really create an active “inter” that is “more” than “entertainment”? Does it all, as many have critically proposed, actually become something that could better be termed “interpassivity”? Or, is the paradigm of codependent notions of interactivity/interpassivity still valid when it comes to the task of understanding the complexities created by mobile networked situations? What seems to lie behind most concepts of interactivity is the tacit assumption that human beings can make “creative” use of a technology whose complexity is not only highly developed in the complexity of its variants – what seems at stake is a technology that is able to offer the equivalent of interactions between two or more humans that result in elusively unpredictable but still meaningful productions. This “human-like” equivalence can be found in all kinds of simulations, from the “intelligence engines” in game architectures and unfathomably variable recombinations of “genetic” codes in musical composition to simulations of social behavior. In this paper, I would like to take a closer look at these two mentioned notions – how the terms “interactivity” and “interpassivity” were first introduced and then transformed within diverse ambivalent uses –, as exemplified here by concrete participatory art projects. Examining two projects which refer to contemporary daily phenomena in network culture, I would like to point out some of the problematic aspects of conceptual framing inherent in these notions and suggest that potentials are rather in unintended and unrecognized forms of knowledge which bear complexities that reach beyond the concepts of “interactive,” or “interpassive”.

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Notions of “interactivity” and “interpassivity”

When it comes to describing and characterizing creative processes, “interactivity” has almost become a sort of modern classic. While art in general is almost always considered interactive, the culturally dominant emphasis on technology over the course of the last decades has enormously opened up models of 58

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participation. This emphasis has also brought a lot of attention to the notion of “interactivity,” and later its counter-notion, “interpassivity”. “Interactivity” was identified as one of the three characteristics of new media, together with demassification and asynchronicity. (Williams, Rice and Rogers, 1988). In general, “interactivity” is “associated with the use of computers that accept user input while a program is running, as opposed to ‘batch’ computers, which process only preloaded data without interruption.” (Aarseth, 1997) To name some earlier examples, Blattberg and Deighton (1991) proposed “interactivity” as a set-up or facility for persons and organizations to communicate directly with one another, regardless of their relative distance or of time; in short: it has been defined in countless ways, and modified alongside technological developments over the years. But the frequent use of these notions and their inclusive capacity has also created a lot of confusion. It seems almost safe to say: Whichever technology is involved in a discussion, it will be considered as an “interactive” one, either from the beginning, or at some point. Already reflecting on this state of apparatuses, Lev Manovich referred to the adoption of computer technology in art practices as only happening on a superficial level. He has critically termed such works “pseudo-interactive” (in “On Totalitarian Interactivity”, 1996), and provocatively stated that “the emergence of media is characterized by a transition from representation to manipulation”. More recently, in his article “Distinguishing Concepts” (2007), Usman Haque pointed to the confusion that appears in the use of the notions of “reactive” and “interactive” in artistic and architectural practices. In his account, he introduced input criteria on the “user” side in order to provide satisfactory and appropriate output in architectural environments. He emphasized that there is the potentiality of a rich conceptual framework that exists beyond these two notions, and tried to prove this by using different conceptual approaches – theoretical terminologies of space (public, private, and commons) and bringing the analysis of relational elements (open source, user) – by considering some concrete practices and projects in the field of architecture. Haque’s attempt to seek new potentials in the fields of environmental engineering and architecture and to expand the field considering “interactivity” in connection with modern ideologies, has some similarities with other concepts: interactive newspapers, interactive video, interactive television, and interactive architecture. (Aarseth, 1997:47) “Interactivity” there signifies a radical improvement in relation to before such as a “change for the better” (Aarseth,

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1997: 47). Seemingly, such ideologies are strongly associated with and applied to the complex of computer and Internet, and even stronger with portable and wireless gadgets such as mobile phones or PDAs. However, could such ways of understanding be little more than an extension of the industrial rhetoric of modernism? Would Usman Haque’s approach only be within the limits of modern ideology? His exploration helps us to understand the notion in a wider context, but also raises the question of how we can seek possibilities to explore the fertile potential of the notion of “interactivity”, apart from the ideological nature of the modernistic notions of “better”, “more appropriate” and “more satisfying”. While the notion of “interactivity” originally came from the field of computer sciences/media studies and was heavily discussed in the field of media practices, the counter-notion of “interpassivity” has emerged out of Cultural Studies and media philosophy, where issues of morals and ethics were additionally involved – it brings a strong taste of cultural criticism to a media debate on individual freedom, subjectivity and agency. After the hype of “interactivity”, in the late 1990’s, a strong critique of “interactivity” was presented by the notion of “interpassivity” – which, even at first glance, offered a provocatively negative turn and an aura of enlightenment. This concept was coined by the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller and by the Slovenian theorist and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek in order to describe the counterpart of interactivity. It was first discussed in relation to topics of postmodern society. (Zizek: 1997, 2004 and others, Pfaller: 2000, 2005, 2007, Gijs van Oenen: 2007) According to Zizek, “interactivity” means to “delegate pleasure” through others or through other symbolic acts. “Instead of excitement through participation, one seeks relaxation through someone else’s experiences. Comparable to what was represented by the Greek chorus, who laughed and cried in the observers’ stead, the pleasure of interpassivity consists in not having to live through everything oneself; appearance substitutes for personal experience.” Zizek proposed the notion of “interpassivity” as a counterpart of “interactivity”, thus criticizing interaction as a simulation navigated by commercialized behavioral scripts. Referring to interaction from a political perspective on the importance of cyberspace to everyday life, he asks, “… how cyberspace opens up the possibilities for the large majority of people to break out of the role of the passive observer following the spectacle staged by the others, and to participate actively not only in the specta60

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cle, but more and more in establishing the very rules of the spectacle. Is, however, the other side of this interactivity not interpassivity?“ (Zizek, 1997) Because of the shift of fields from computer to cultural studies, these notions of “interactivity”/“interpassivity” emerge not only through a sequence of stimulus-response acts, but also extend their influence beyond these acts: Interactivity is not only the result of a provided interface, of a technology – an act and sensory reception –, but also the creation of a social context (Pelletier, 2005): it inevitably reflects how society is influencing individuals. However, as contemporary realities are made unintelligibly complex by wireless portable networks, which are changing the meanings of locality, site specificity, are modern self/ves as always to be so clearly defined within a binary mode of “interactivity” or “interpassivity”? Facing the fact that the dichotomic conceptual frame – subject/object, actor/receiver, public/private, front (stage)/back (stage) – has its limits in reflecting contemporary realities, are there any conflicts when adopting the set of notions of “interactive”/“interpassive” to understand current examples? Are there any further considerations to be made when we reconsider contemporary realities? Despite a lot of research on the notion of interactivity/interpassivity, there are significantly fewer discussions about the conceptual dimension of playfulness, miscommunication and unintended forms of knowledge, topics often considered out of the range of categorization. How do we take such illegitimate spaces into account in our terminologies and scripts? Here I would like to sketch out some distinguished examples of interactive art practices – from art and theater, to be more precise. I picked two examples involving (mobile) telephony, since this technology can at present be seen as the decisive field in which the quality of human-technological interaction is enacted. It is an intensively explored medium of everyday culture, and vast majorities in many societies are well trained to interact with this medium, and even feel comfortable to take individual steps within it without any fear. But at the same time, telephony is a technology that implies and involves the subject, location/locality, and a reflection of social imaginaries. It implies complex dimensions: social, personal, physical and psychological as well as geographical, political and economic imaginaries, and simultaneously has so many effects on the personal life of its users. At the same time, these references I decided to pick out of the huge horizon of possible others, are particularly

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significant in regard to considering where the potentials of the notions in question lie in contemporary realities. Through a juxtaposition and discussion of these examples of practices, I would like to go through the two notions of “interactivity” and “interpassivity”, and attempt to clarify categorical problems of differentiation in relation to “participation”. When art combines such a medium with both the socially and personally accumulated, it may grant more access for viewers by introducing a different approach to reconsider the notions of interaction. I hope that an analysis from the context of art can contribute to enrich any understanding of these notions, not only within, but also beyond the field of art – in architecture, design, engineering, and others.

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Two Projects on Mobile Telephony: “etherSound” & “CallCutta Mobile Phone Theater”

After briefly sketching out this background of the notions of interactivity/interpassivity, I would like to move on to a closer look at two art projects in order to consider the notions. Both are site-specific interactive projects of recent years that use the mobile phone as their interface. One is “etherSound” (2003) by Henrik Frisk, the other is “CallCutta Mobile Phone Theater” (2005), a play by the theater and performance group Rimini Protokoll. Both were presented in the mobile phone exhibition “The Invisible Landscapes” (2003– 06) which I curated in different stages and in different locations. Both projects deal with complexity regarding the concept of “participation”, but, interestingly, in very different ways. The former is more intuitive and symbolic; the latter is more based on information and emotion. Examining two “participatory” projects such as these together in one place, I think, may help us to more concretely articulate how the complexities in participation penetrate through and go beyond the concepts of interactivity and interpassivity. EtherSound “etherSound” is an interactive sound installation by the Swedish musician and sound artist Henrik Frisk. It was displayed for the first time in the open hall between the first and second floor of Malmˆ Konstmuseum, and continuously presented at different venues like Copenhagen and other places. In this work the audience is invited to participate in the creation of new sound events by sending text messages from their mobile phones. The title “etherSound” was 62

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intended to open up a mediated, imaginary ether-like surrounding space through the audience’s participation. “etherSound” integrates the mobile phone as the most popular among the new communication tools and opens a specified participatory channel to the public. The principal idea behind “etherSound” was to design a special kind of musical instrument that could be played by anybody who had the knowledge to send an SMS from their mobile phones – and to interact in an improvisational mode that let the participants experience that they were, through their messages, influencing a sound continuum that had been pre-constructed by Frisk. This provided the participating visitors with an experience of what it is like to improvise in an electronic space that is sensitive to certain patterns of change – although not knowing exactly what the specific “requirement” of the situation was (apart from the fact that it had to have the format of an SMS), and also not knowing which reaction would be elicited by which action. In the version displayed as part of “The Invisible Landscapes”, all messages sent to a specified number were received by an Internet server, parsed for its content, the phone number it was sent from and the date and time it was received. This information was written into a database which was queried at regular intervals by a computer running a control and text analysis application and the sound synthesis software (Max/MSP running a Csound orchestra). For every new message, the data were downloaded, processed and analyzed by a controlling program, turned into control signals, which were then sent to the sound synthesis engine. Every message generated one “sonic object” – a new melodic sequence particle – that would last for up to two minutes. The response was very direct – any SMS received would result in an immediate and perceivable change in the sound. “etherSound” was tried out in two different modes: as a stand-alone, interactive sound installation, and as a vehicle for improvisation. In the latter version, one or several performers improvised along with the sounds of the installation while the audience contributed actively to the performance by sending text messages.

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Fig. 1 “etherSound” in the version of “The Invisible Landscapes”

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Activities in “etherSound”: Interactive or interpassive?

“etherSound” offers a tentative invitation on several levels, as mobile phone technology here is both a medium and a subject for interaction. As a medium, it is a familiarized gesture that invites participants/visitors to use their own personal gadgets. The assumption is that their mobile phones are something that they can statistically be expected to carry with them “anyway”, even within a somewhat differently coded social space such as a museum. As a subject, the mobile device simultaneously evokes fundamental questions on contemporary culture, which heavily emphasize ideologies of “communication” and “connectivity”. Frisk’s intention, as a “real-instruments” musician collaborating with a computer program, was a very attractive one for the context of an exhibition that tried to realign the audience’s perceptions around their use of the mobile phone. The invitation of “making music together” sounded concrete, but turned out to be very abstract, and it soon became evident that the democratic ideology implied by a staged act of “participation” requires careful examination. As elaborated in the previous paragraphs, the members of the audience in “etherSound” sent SMS to interact (“directly”) with the streaming sound and (“indirectly”) with the improvised “live” playing of the musicians. There, the

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mobile phone is used as a medium, the act of sending an SMS is a method of interacting, in other words, a surrogate or substitution of skills to play music. Influencing the streaming sound with their (non-specifically, only quantitatively relevant) SMS, the audience members that chose to do so played music together with Frisk and another musician, a drummer. Now: can we say that the audience participates, that it takes an (inter)active part in music-making? Or, in a case such as this one, where the interactivity offered is based on a 1/0 gesture – would it better be termed interpassivity (between the audience and Frisk)? The key point in “etherSound” is, of course, that the participants do not know what the effect of their actions/interactions on both sounds (streaming/live improvisational play) will be. They are generally informed about their capability of controlling the sound output through their SMS. However, as computer programs made by Frisk generate SMS, the participating subjects have no way of knowing the relationship between the specific act of composing an SMS and its effects on the composition and development of sound. This differentiates “etherSound” from other previous SMS intervention projects – such as “Bliken Light” (2001), “Dial Tone”(2002), “Hello, Mr. President”(2002), “Poetica” (2003), “Simple Text” (2003), “Open Burble” (2006) and others –, in which a relationship between act and effect were mostly transparent, simple and spectacular: they implied sending text messages to be projected on huge displays in public space, or just to control a switch of light, or to play pong on an enormous scale display, etc. If the audience knows what the effect will be, the outcome can more easily and simply be called “interactivity”. Or, referring to the critique of such “interactivity” put forward by Lev Manovich, it may be called a “pseudo-interactivity”. If the audience is correctly and sufficiently informed about the preconditions – that there is no way of knowing the contribution implied by their own acting –, this totally changes the whole setting, and quickly discourages interest in the act of participation. Or, the act of sending SMS transcends from an “interaction” to a representational act towards the other that is considered as “interpassive”. Or, if participants start to develop disbelief in the existence of “true” interaction, this may also bring the end of participation. However, neither is the condition in “etherSound”. The open initiation through SMS text message as an attitude of “being part of it” and “enjoying it” in a certain sense treats the act of participation paradoxically. Ignoring to provide the details of the system behind the set-up, here communication technology creates a symbolic exchange between making music and

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sending SMS that is thought as an equivalence between symbol and symbolized, based on a pre-existing desire for participation. Accordingly, this opacity sets possibilities to make the participation neither interactive nor interpassive. Obscuring any concrete idea in this set-up opens up possibilities to evidence fictive or illusionary levels in a kind of participation that is based on a desire. The offered interactivity in “etherSound” is equal to a largely symbolic exchange. In a way, the substitution of the skill to play music means the substitution of the signifier for the subject. The ideological short-circuited assumption that the offered participation is equivalent to “playing music together” is nothing more than a fantasy. What does “individual” participation mean when the participants do not know what their contributions actually are? It becomes evident here that the emergence of mobile communication, the Internet, and the technological devices used to interact in these networks, may really have the potential to change the nature of (social) interactions. Interactions take place as extensions of everyday acts. Collaborative music compositions and sound art have been realized in a number of ways and with different objectives. There are especially numerous examples in the very active field of “art and music”. Today, and since more than a decade, it has become impossible to talk about these collaborations without thinking of a strong trend in which there is rhetoric at work aiming to convince audiences and consumers of a “return” of collective modes of production as a sign of authenticity. Keeping such contemporary realities in mind, how do we understand the scene of (acting in) “etherSound”? At its best, it does not matter if it is manifested and glamorized as a single, unique and individual voice. It is not strained and it is not performed in a pedagogic mode, but instead follows a pop-cultural mode. It abandons the idealized image of the rational individual and puts emphasis on the collective in a typical Durkheimian fashion. It can be said that this new form of interaction, consisting of clusters of anonymous random acts, empowers a new structure for creative corporeality, never fixed within predetermined conditions, but more reminiscent of a flow. It could be suggested here that it may hold potential as a new coefficient of an autonomous agency of participation. As Frisk has stated in an article that we co-authored some years ago, “etherSound” is “not about understanding, but about being part of ” (Frisk and Yoshida, 2004). How, then, do participants experience the work? Who is conducting the sound, who is actually playing, and who is the composer or originator? But, under pre-programmed conditions, does the composer (artist) 66

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still remain the composer? Active public participation raises a series of questions about authorship. Due to the double opacity, it seems impossible to impose pre-existing fixed role on participants and allows every position (performer, composer, conductor, originator) possible within participation. The coefficient of plural roles within one individual appears and disappears in a subtle and sensitive balance, which will be different in every performance. Roles are constantly shifting and oscillating each other, and changing freely without any conceptual problems. Ultimately, the hybrid role is created, or multiple roles are taken on simultaneously. So, it is not possible to grasp any specific condition saying that it is either interactive or interpassive. Moreover, as the offered interactivity neither creates confrontation nor demands responsibility, the free-floating quality of being between different positions is quite flexible. This lack of confrontation together with no fixable positions opens up an interesting mashed-up condition beyond the interdependent concepts of interactivity and interpassivity. However, without taking any risk, without having to consider questions of responsibility, what sort of creative process can possibly emerge? One wellknown example of “interpassivity” is that “the symbolic representation of reading by photocopying assumes for the interpassive intellectual the full value of real reading, providing him with full satisfaction.” (Pfaller, 2003) In this anecdote, there is the clearly fixed position of the intellectual as a subject. The automatic labor of copying a text substitutes the confrontation of actually reading the text by the subject, thus it is “interpassive”. However, in “etherSound”, the lack of confrontation emerges from the ambivalent and non-fixed position of the subject. By transferring responsibility, the “I” position constantly shifts and replaces the Other as a player, a conductor, a composer, or all of these. This strangely ambivalent position is not something which Zizek called the “exterior” existence of something “subjective”. (Zizek, 1989) It is a different mode of being that is not being perpetualized or contingent, that never has any fixed positioning. In other words, it is the ambivalent distinction between the self and the other, because “an always ‘I’ can only clearly keep existing with confrontation”. (Pfaller, 2003) The “subject” itself is changing, thus the substitution within the act of the “subject” in “etherSound” is also, “automatically”, unfixed. Under such circumstances, it is hard to fix who is the interpassive subject and who is the other to delegate the “subject” of pleasure. Accordingly, in “etherSound” the framework of the other objective belief vs.

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subjective/personal belief does not function or cannot be imposed on the activity.

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Two Points in “etherSound”

“Since objective belief is basic principle of cultural pleasure, the blindness for objective belief also implies an unawareness of one’s own pleasure. ‘Civilized’ cultures blind to their magic dimensions are therefore unable to consciously enjoy their pleasures.” (Pfaller, 2003) Another point worth mentioning about “etherSound” is its reverse/subversive use of cultural blindness within mobile communication technologies. In a sense, mobile phones and computers are representative technological products of contemporary culture, a qualification, which strongly implies objective belief as a basic principle. However, Frisk adopted them in an opposite use that, in its symbolic simplification, almost brings us back to something like magic practices – the subjective belief that lies in symbolic exchange –, as the paradoxical result of the complex system within the computer program. When a technological filter transforms the acts/inputs beyond a clearly visible, understandable connection, it becomes a black box – a contemporary practice of magic. People just need to believe theories and engineering behind and practice them with belief. “etherSound” may look/sound quite banal, but the twisted use of technology in cultural blindness actually has some theoretical charm that makes it very difficult to define the form of participation triggered in the audience as either “interactive” or “interpassive”. A cultural blindness was actually observed in the first performance of “etherSound” in the most typical and astonishing way. “etherSound” was successfully played for first time in public at its first venue. The audience sent more than fifty SMS over the duration of approximately twenty-five minutes of live playing, apparently reaching a satisfactory level of participation that sufficed to create the impression of “making music together”. However, ironically, nobody recognized that the server responsible for the transmission of the “interactive” signals was accidentally “down” during the play – which means there was no interaction between the streaming sound and the SMS sent by the audience. This fact was revealed by the artist some days later. It was a surprise to learn it, but simultaneously it was very stimulating to think about what was to be 68

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learned from such an experience. As visibility is the basis for strong beliefs in culture today, it is quite possible that the visual existence of two musicians playing an improvisational performance reinforced the fantasy of symbolic exchange in the audience. In the same manner, the emphasis on real-time interaction confines the audience within a supposed moment of presence. It symbolizes the fact that one never gets to grasp the whole work, but only for a certain attention span or the duration of (short-term) memory. It means, your imagination always has to fill up the past and the near future. This may be another way of understanding Frisk’s statement according to which it is “not about understanding, but about being part of ”. The visuals functioned to affirm the acoustic fantasy and subvert the reality of no interaction, thus affirming only a fantasy of interaction. It is interacted physically and consciously as a result of no interactions. How do we understand it? Should it be called interactive or interpassive? Virtual space mixed with a real environment: it may only work to affirm virtual space instead of creating the new or the third space. Or vice versa. This anecdote obviously tells us that we never know when and how the interaction happens in our mind. It is not only that we do not know the interrelation between the act and effects, but also we do not know when substantive interaction takes place. Accordingly, “etherSound” opens up an imaginary space – like the “ether,” as the name goes – in a relationship between act and effect. This is exactly the point where the illusion of interaction can grow. It may be his “strategy” to invite participation, in which the audience will not know what they control without making theme frustrated. Such playfulness in the work of interactivity supposes to create an inter-relation between the audience and the work, in extension to the platform provided by the artist. Increased complexity in computer processes nowadays creates more and more situations in which there is no way of knowing the stakes, and where, as a consequence, complexity is left to the imaginary space of each participant. Reflecting such a contemporary situation, “etherSound” has no specific idea of a goal, of any destination or task to accomplish, and no idea of being better, appropriate or a comfortable satisfaction. While many other media-related projects that I mentioned before always run (and calculate) the risk of providing their audiences with an immediate satisfaction that is delivered by the advertising industry in a similar way, “etherSound” took a different direction. By using the unpredictable filter, Frisk shifts the meaning of participation and proposes (inter-) acts beyond “interactive” versus “interpassive”.

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To realize music making, the interaction in etherSound brings the space of capitalistic economy into the process of interacting with music. This may not be a relevant issue to the artist’s intended focus, but it is important to mention that this kind of “democratic” participation in music-making is realized on the unmentioned basis of communication capitalism, a pay-per-interaction scheme, because it is certainly present as a framing condition. Accordingly, by the use of the mobile telephone as a participatory tool, the space of participation moves from political and ritual spaces to a more commercialized space, even in the sphere of culture. Shifting the space of participation into a commercialized space, my next example, the “CallCutta Mobile Phone Theater” provides a different conceptual model of participation today, and can be further exemplified for the problematics of the conceptual frameworks of “interactive” and “interpassive”.

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CallCutta Mobile Phone Theater

“CallCutta Mobile Phone Theater” is a theater piece organized by the German/Swiss theatre collective “Rimini Protokoll” in 2005. It is an essentially mobile phone-based project, which provided personalized guided city tours via mobile telephone conversations in order to explore hidden memories, dimensions and layers in cities that had previously seemed familiar to the local participants. The project was divided into two parts – one in Calcutta, the other in Berlin. In the first part in Calcutta, the project was a remote-guided city tour for local people, who were navigated by voice from the call centre. The call agents operated as guides and actors at the same time, and from point to point navigated the audience through city streets, making them “discover” details, entering into a more and more personal dialogue, talking about their own memories, and letting the guided persons perform little tasks. The second part of the project consisted in connecting Calcutta to the “other side of the world”, to Berlin. The navigator was still at the same call center, participating in the project there during nighttime in Calcutta, and during daytime in Berlin. The audience members in Berlin were guided through many surprising sites of “their own city” by a voice with an Indian accent. In a documentary about the process that is used as promotional material by the group, one such process is recorded. Sounding bizarre in the second part of this documentary, however, the Berlin version grew to become a more intimate conversation 70

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between two people who were far away from each other and connected only by telephone. In this film directed by Anajun Dutta (2005), Rimini Protokoll juxtaposed two distant cities, Berlin and Calcutta, by means of mobile telephony. This unexpected combination, that is an absurdity – being guided through Berlin by a person on the other side of the globe, who probably has never been to that city personally – and exoticism towards the other – actually and easily conversing with people in Calcutta, i.e. people from a very different cultural background – opened up a new approach to thinking mobile connections. For example, “CallCutta” re-inserts a political way of thinking by reflecting on banal daily communications through the mobile telephone – without idealizing theoretical assumptions of what political thought is. By directing a lot of attention to the call centre industry in Infinity Tower, Salt Lake, in Calcutta, it indicates interrelations between industry and globalization at the “personal” level of one mobile phone call.

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Complexities of Interpassivity

“CallCutta Mobile Phone Theater” demands a lot of participation from its singularized audience members. The project also implies or focuses on mobile communication as the subject – international call center industry, unbalanced labor conditions, effects of globalization in CallCutta, historical connections between India and Germany, sometimes related to personal stories and sometimes to more ethical issues. During the over forty-minute excursion, a lot of information related to call centers is provided as well as information on hidden sites within the city. The structure of “CallCutta” is actually not a computer generated project, as it utilized existing commercial infrastructures and replaced the computer-generated part by call agents. Instead, its ambivalences and complexities start in the human agency that was necessary to realize the project, especially the call agents who had to be especially skilled for this type of navigation that was based on the information of the intricate scenario provided by Rimini Protokoll. In “CallCutta”, Rimini Protokoll’s intention was to invent a culturally interesting use of those economic structures and infrastructures exploited by global capitalism. According to their logic, as the industry learns and takes from cultural production, cultural activities should also adopt what new possibilities the industry has to offer. In a sense, they project themselves as parasites to the telecommunication industries infrastruc-

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ture, and bring a set of acting in a capitalized space, although the kind of “interactivity” it dealt with in “CallCutta Mobile Phone Theater” derives from a theater background and, interestingly, was very different from the one employed in “etherSound”. The project proceeds based on the dialogues between the call center agent and the participant. With the professional skills of a call agent, the conversation flows interpolating all provided information with astonishing ease, even finding a place for the curious anecdotes of the other. Verbal conversation results as having a considerable convincing power, as information delivered by a personal attachment is more convincing than information broadcasted today. During the guided city tour, there are constantly direct and instantaneous exchanges between the two, at least in the documentary. How do we understand a series of acts in “CallCutta”?

Fig. 2 Call agent in call center, Calcutta

Fig. 3 Participant of “Call Cutta” in Berlin

“CallCutta” is not realized by the interaction generated through a computer. The notion of “interactivity” has to be understood in a more general sense or in the context of art, while the notion of “interpassivity” has been argued and developed more in the discourse, without any computational setting. However, the conversational mode is often described as an ideal model of interactivity for artificial intelligence. In this sense, through a smooth two-way communication and the physical re-experience of their own city, is it possible to say that the basic structure of “CallCutta” makes senses adhering to the notion of this ideal model of interactivity? Were the series of acts by the audience interactive, then? In a process of dialogue, what sort of exchange took place? While “etherSound” produced an imaginary space of intuitive and symbolic exchanges – what kind of space did “CallCutta“ produce by its “staged” exchange of personal stories and by its providing specific focused information?

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Listening to the background stories, enjoying the performance – of singing a song in the participant’s “own” language – and moving on to the next targeted place in a prescribed scenario: theater is a limited time event, even though it suggests that it is happening all the time. It does so only within a script. There is a specific purpose, a beginning and an end, a clear destination of the journey, and several tasks to do – picking up a photo from a dust bin, finding the site of an old station or graffiti on a wall, and certain paths to take. With these facts in mind, it is recognizable that “CallCutta Mobile Phone Theater” actually has a rather similar structure to gaming architectures or to online narrative models. During the play, from time to time, participants are also offered to make simple choices (A, B, or C) for certain things. There are many small anecdotes and interesting stories surrounding the journey, but they are more a strategy, or a strategic medium to conduct and proceed with the journey. Beyond appearances, such information can actually remain abstract and ambiguous as well. Precision of information is not always a high priority, especially in “CallCutta” – the symbolic function of “successful communication” in surrogate intimacy and its enactment seems to be much more important. In this sense, it would be possible to say that it is more like reacting rather than interacting under the active pseudo-interactive surface. For the project, conversation is more like a catalyst for a flow of communication and for the continuation of a journey. In order to guide a person from the other side of the globe, call agents are trained and given information beforehand about the neatly organized excursion, and they conduct the blind guided journey with specially prepared cards. (See Image 4. the image of info card) Such a strongly prescribed set-up makes blind navigation possible, providing the participants with what they are familiar with from surveillance scenarios more than with anything else, and conveying quite uncanny feelings – as if they were being watched or tracked by the city guide without noticing it. Such illusions or effects of verbal rhetoric really work, due to the conceivable conditions of contemporary realities – wiretapping, surveillance cameras, tracking technologies, information business, and many others. These elements are also well integrated in a scripted space to create and to provide participants with a powerful imaginary area they can interact with. However, what kind of interactions are they? In spite of allowing many possible reactions during the course of the project, the task of the scriptwriter has to be to suggest an unfathomable, “life-like” complexity while actually limiting the choices to a manageable amount. The pre-assumption by the author is what actually makes this

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absurdity – remote guiding by a person who has never been to the city without any surveillance technology – possible. This silently but strongly imposes a framework onto the audience to follow a preprogrammed range of (inter) actions, rather than to open up possibilities. Despite the flexibility of active communication on the surface, participants engage themselves in reacting and responding actions: follow the given route, a specific order of visiting sites, contents, points of navigations. Participants can get lost or the line may be disconnected due to bad reception. Although it is certainly one of the most intricately structured experimental theater projects at this point in time, the type of interaction in “CallCutta” is more like navigating and reacting in passivity; as all is supposed to be under the control of the background scenario of the invisible artists through the medium of a charming commander/call agent. So, it seems to be interactive on a dialogue level, but structurally it is not framed by interactivity. There is apparently not much alternative space for other unexpected acts and imaginaries.

Fig. 4 Information card for the call agent

At one point, one of the participants questioned the complicated mixture of interactivity/interpassivity in the project: ‘Who was the real protagonist of this play? It seemed that the way when we began as he urged me to see his world. Instead, I landed up performing, partly for others and partly for myself… Without technology this play wouldn’t have been possible. Yet it talked about the scary world of call centers swallowing our youth and locking them in the dungeon of their stomachs. If theatre is about live interaction between, at least, two people,

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in this case there was a mobile phone, voices, strangers and I. Did I act? Then, what was CallCutta? Was it really theatre?” (Wahi, 2005) The way in which the process of a personalized guided city tour is described here, indicates difficulties in attempting to understand the action with the concepts of “interactive” and “interpassive”. In the quote, a transcendent relationship between the subject and the object within the mobile theater is observable. In case of “Call Cutta”, the audience participated in a project expecting to be entertained, but gradually found out that they were the actors without being aware of it. That is, interaction begins in a rather reacting/passive way, but then shifts to something else. The coaxing part of the project is a naÔve fascination with its functional root – the capacity of being able to communicate in a surrogate intimacy even with a total stranger on the other side of the world. During the play, some intimate dialogues emerged and opened up personal memories, or the two persons asked each other about their personal lives like family, love and problems in life. There are personal and emotional complexities in such exchanges. These intimate dialogues were made to not only look like a lot of interactions were taking place, but they transcended the passivity through the intimacy in a set-up, which is something like “extended interpassivity”(Phaller, 2003). The endless complexities based on dialogues might be a symbolic enactment of a globalised “being-in-communication”, but the complexities with the notion grow in such symbolic acts. Moreover, the audience is in fact tacitly well embodied as theater actors instead of spectators. This suggests that they become a part of the object/medium, while simultaneously remaining a subject. Here the audience crosses the line between subject and object: she/he is not a passive or extended interpassive subject anymore, but instead an object or medium of interpassivity for the authors or for the anonymous in public. Such contradictions indicate the fact that participation in “CallCutta” does not fit into the notion of “interactivity” and “interpassivity”, and the limitations of that conceptual framework. However, what does “not fit in” really mean or signify? Pointing out the interesting aspects of interpassivity, Zizek stated that “fantasy is subjectively objective – it is created through social relations but objectively true in that it structures our identity, So the interpassive fantasy is not so much a question of what we individually believe in, but underpins the material structure of our social relationships, our being and therefore our sense of

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reality.” (Zizek, 1997) To follow the idea, it is possible to say that the series of “interpassive” acts in the play reveals not only personal attitudes but also attitudes that are floating especially around the space of communication technologies in the post-Fordist era. The difficulties in categorizing the act of participation is a reflection of society. Illusionary space produced through “CallCutta” is a model of how structures are negotiated in all areas of public life, thinking about how people deal with rules and imposed categories of thought, internalizing both. It shows a new role of communication not as a process but as the production and “subsumption” (Negri, 2000, P.25, 2005 p.84-85) of life. In other words, it is a different mode of being which cannot be conceptually grasped either by “interpassivity” or “interactivity”.

8

Conclusion

Participatory projects often seem to be categorized under the notion of “interactivity”, or to be subsumed under a rather general category of mobile media. However, observing more closely the act of interaction in two mobile phone projects – “etherSound” and “CallCutta” –, there are far more complexities to be produced around the act of participation. In these two projects, the positioning of subject/object is not fixed, and roles and identities are constantly transcended, flipped and twisted. It has become clearer that such “plurality” is hardly graspable by a codependent concept of “interactive”/”interpassive”. Simultaneously, the problematic of the conceptual framework is not limited to cultural/artistic projects. It can be considered as a symptom created by network communication and as a reflection of contemporary realities that are deeply rooted in most of our societies. A characteristic of “plurality” is that processes of realization, production and consumption are inseparable in the realms of mobile communication, in which there is no distinction of instrumental and/or communicative action. Within the project, participants probably are not even conscious about the fact that they are involved in a process of production, a part of the production itself, and simultaneously engage in an act of consumption as well. Especially in “CallCutta”, a predominant tendency of linguistic power in the post Fordist labor invites participants to perform a “‘just-in-time’ production linked and coordinated by global networks of communication.” (Ray, 2007) Such a “new role for communication” that we were able to observe in the two projects in 76

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this paper are actually what Negri and Hardt have called the “real subsumption” of social life (Negri and Hardt, 2000: 25). Participants are involved in all three dimensions – in the process of production, as the production, itself, and its consumption –, which are inseparable in a typical set-up of cognitive capitalism. This, a core phenomenon in the post-Fordist era, can be considered as one of the reasons for a dysfunctionality of the classic notions of “interactive” and “interpassive” in participatory projects such as “etherSound” and “Call Cutta”. Looking at these two projects also points to the difficulties to sustain criticality in the cultural space in the age of the post-Fordism. In mobile networked communications, the intentions and aims of the projects are twisted and flipped in totally different directions than the ones intended by the artists. This is another reason for the malfunction of the framework of “interactive”/”interpassive”. In “CallCutta”, the Rimini Protokoll group attempts to imply a criticism of the globalized exploitation of labor within the structure of the communications industry, but has also, voluntarily or involuntarily (cynically), produced a new exploiting model of a “real subsumption” of social life – love, personal memory, individual lifestyle and profile. On the other hand, in “etherSound”, Frisk’s aiming at democratic ideologies has brought a capitalist symbolic exchange in music-making to the fore. Such mutations of intentions are a tendency of contemporary mashed-up spaces of politics, culture and economy (Negri and Hardt, 2000, 2004, Virno, 1996, 2000, 2004, Lazzarato, 1996, 2005). We need to bear in mind that “the condition for economic production, artistic creation and political action has been entered into a zone of indifference where they appear linked through a senses of reciprocal presuppositions”(Lazzarato, 2005). Once you liberate something – identity, race, labor, class, subjectivity/ies and others –, it immediately and easily becomes the model for a market instead of retaining its potential of criticism. This also really confronts us with the logic of new cognitive capitalism: the fact that contemporary cultural activities risk the exploitation of the Multitude no matter what the intentions of the creators are. This makes it more difficult to understand participatory acts using the conceptual tool of “interactive”/”interpassive”. Despite of its double act of communicating and consuming, needless to say, mobile communication surely opens up positive options as well. However, an extensional mode of daily life that is found under the concept of participation functions in a very different way in the “New Enclosures” than ever before.

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References B OULANGER , RICHARD (ed.) (2000). The Csound Book, Perspectives in Software Synthesis, Sound Design, Signal Processing and Programming, Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 2nd edition. DUTTA, ANAJUN (2005). Documentary film on “Call Cutta” Mobile phone theater. DUCHAMP, MARCEL (1959). The Creative Act, in: ROBERT LEBEL, MARCEL DUCHAMP, New York: Paragraphic Books: 77–78. (Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957). HENRIK FRISK AND MIYA YOSHIDA (2005). ‘New Communication Technology in the Context of Interactive Sound Art’. In: Organised Sound, vol. 10, no. 2, August. Cambridge University Press, pp. 121–127. HENRIK FRISK. homepage: http://www.henrikfrisk.com/music/archives/2007/10/ ethersound_perf.html). Retrieved on 2007.12.10. JENSEN, JENS F. (1998). ‚Interactivity: Tracing a New Concept in Media and Communication Studie’, Nordicom Review, 19 (1): 185–204. KAYANY, JOSEPH M., WOTRING, C. EDWARD, AND FORREST, EDWARD J. (1996). ‚Relational Control and Interactive Media Choice in Technology-Mediated Communication Situations’, Human Communication Research, 22 (3): 399–421. LAZZARATO, MAURIZIO (1996). “Immaterial Labour”. In: PAOLO VIRNO AND MICHAEL HARDT (Eds.)Radical Thought in Italy – A Potential Politics. University of Minnesota Press, Mineapolis – London. pp.133–146. LAZZARATO, MAURIZIO (2005). “What possibilities presently exist in the public sphere?” In: euroland. Retrieved from http://www.moneynations.ch/topics/euroland/ text/lazzarato.htm. (2008.08.10) MANOVICH, LEV. (1997). “On Totalitarian Interactivity (notes from the enemy of the people)”, retrieved at: http://www.manovich.net/TEXT/totalitarian.html (2008.08.10) NEGRI, ANTONIO & HARDT, MICHAEL (2000). Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000. NEGRI, ANTONIO & HARDT, MICHAEL (2004). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Penguin, New York. OENEN, GIJIS VAN (2007). “Interactive mental fatigue: the interpassive transformation of modern life”. Paper presented at Studiedag Theaterwetenschap, Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, 2007.08.31. PFALLER , ROBERT (2000). “Interpassivity and Misdemeanors: The Analysis of Ideology and the Zizekian Toolbox”, vol. One, Number One – Why Zizek? pp.33–50. PFALLER , ROBERT (2003). “Little Gestures of Disappearance (1) – Interpassivity and the Theory of Ritual”. In: Journal of European Psychoanalysis vol.16 Winter-Spring. Retrieved from http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number16/pfaller.htm. (2008.08.10) PFALLER , ROBERT (2005). “Where is Your Hamster? The Concept of Ideology in Slavoj Zizek’s Cultural Theory”. In: GEOFF B OUCHER , JASON GLYNOS AND MATTHEW

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SHARPE (Eds.), Traversing the Fantasy-Critical Responses to Slavoj Zizek, MPG Books Ltd., Bodmin, Cornwall. pp.105–122. RAY, GENE (2007). “Revolution in the Post-Fordist Revolution? – Notes on the Internet as a Weapon of the Multitude”. In: Third Text, Vol.21, Issue 1, January. P.1–8. VIRNO, PAOLO (1996). “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus”. In: PAOLO VIRNO AND MICHAEL HARDT (Eds.) Radical Thought in Italy – A Potential Politics. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis – London. pp.189–212. VIRNO, PAOLO (2000). Labour and Language. Trans. by Arianna Bove. http://www.generation-online.org/t/labourlanguage.htm Retrieved on 2007.10.25. VIRNO, PAOLO (2004). Grammar of the Multitude – For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Trans. by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson, Semiotext[e], Los Angles – New York. WAHI, RICHA (2005). ‘Was it theater?’ http://www.chillibreeze.com/articles/WasitTheatre.asp#a. Retrieved on 2006.6.10. WILLIAMS, FREDERICK, RICE, RONALD E., AND ROGERS, EVERETT M. (1988). Research Methods and the New Media. New York: The Free Press. USMAN HAQUE (2007). Distinguishing Concepts. Lexicons of Interactive Art and Architecture. In: Architectural Design, Bd. 77, 2007, no. 4, p. 24–31. ZICCARELLI, DAVID. Max/MSP, Manual. Cycling 74, IRCAM, http://www.cycling74.com/ products/maxmsp.html, 4.2 edition. Retrieved on 2005.01.30. ZIZEK , SLAVOJ (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso. ZIZEK , SLAVOJ (1997). “The Interpassive Subject” http://www.egs.edu/faculty/ziziek/ ziziek-the-interpassive-subject.html. Retrieved on 2006.4.30. ZIZEK , SLAVOJ (2004). “Will You Laugh for Me”. http://www.lacan.com/ziziek laugh.htm. Retrieved on 2006.4.30.

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A NDREA M UBI B RIGHENTI /C RISTINA M ATTIUCCI

Editing Urban Environments: Territories, Prolongations, Visibilities

1

City, circulation, and interaction

The modern city emerges as an environment of flows and circulation, in which mobility is essential. Richard Sennett (1994) singled out the significant parallel between the medical discovery of blood circulation in the 17th century and the emergence a new urban model. The image of the fluidity of blood pumped around the human body by the heart, as described by the English physician William Harvey (1578–1657), is at the root of the type of social organicism that inaugurated the discipline of sociology. At the beginning of the Twentieth century, especially in early American sociology, the city is seen from the perspective of natural history as a diagram of zones (Park, Burgess and McKenzie 1967[1925]) which were the product of both short-term and long-term flows. The emergence of such idea is part of a process that had already begun with the Humanists and their vision of Ideal City that transcended the Medieval walled town. However, the modern urbanisation process introduces into the urban pattern not simply a quantitative difference, but qualitative one. As the city becomes a site of flows and circulation, it turns into a complex territorial composition of vectors, trajectories, paths and directions that are both sustained top-down, through planning, and shaped bottom-up, through interaction. As André Leroi-Gourhan (1964) first pointed out, the whole history of human evolution is better observed as a history of mobility, rather than as a history of intelligence. The influential functionalist urban theory propounded from the late 1920s through the ‘50s by the series of Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne – most notably summarised in the theses of the 1933 Athens Charter – did not content itself, as American sociologist did from a natural history persepctive, to record and describe existing urban paths, trajectories and sectors as the outcome of human ecology. Rather, Modernist urbanism aimed explicitly at intervening upon urban circulation rationalising it, elimitating all

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the sources of chaos and disorder. Zoning, standardised dwellings, and fucntional analysis were the main tools deployed to such aim and they were clearly designed from a clearly top-down perspective. Among the harshest critics of functionalist urbanism, in the ‘50s the Lettrists and the Situationists heralded by contrast the playful possibilities associated to free, non-rationlised and even random movement in the city. Traffic circulation, in particular, was seen by them as the opposite of human encounter, i.e., as organised universal isolation. The Formulary for a New Urbanism (Ivain 1953) and Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism (Kotányi and Vaneigem 1961) – which included urban practices such as ‘drifting’ (dérive) and the ‘unarranged meeting’ (possible rendez-vous) – constituted the Lettrists’ and early Situationists’ response to what they perceived as the ‘frigid architecture’ of modernism that lead to the fragmentation of the human being into a series of functionally defined, separate spheres of existence. Against the functional circulation of city inhabitants, imposed upon them by the imperatives of the spatial separation of the various dimensions of life (production, consumption, rest, etc.), the Situationists sought to reconstruct the unity of human existence through the free construction of situations and an alternative use of space and urban mobility. Such type of experimentation – which, on the other hand, reprises some aspects of the Carnivalesque use of public space – has not completely faded away, as for instance a recent report David Pinder (2005) on an experience of urban exploration which seeks to engage critically urban space reveals. From Constant’s New Babylon (Careri 2002) to David Le Breton’s (2000) eloge de la marche, then, the idea of wandering in the city, of a type of movement that exceeds territorial fixations, constantly re-emerges as a vital reaction against the planned, functional aspect of urban mobility. In short, the logic of circulation and mobility is not without conflicts – not least because modern media and new media (from the press to hi-tech portable devices) intervene upon this type of urban reality, adding a further layer of complexity because the material and the immaterial become stratified one upon the other and constantly acting upon and reacting to each other, thus leading to an unpredictable mix of what, in Lefebvrian terminology, we could call conceived, perceived and lived social space. Urban mobility is stratified. In its most extreme consequences, mobility stratification results in territorial confinement, territorial stigmatisation (Wacquant 2007), and the emergence of socially differentiated and even deeply polarised spatial capabilities. Suffice to 82

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recall that Lefebvre’s (1968) right to the city also included ‘the right to the use of the centre, a privileged space, instead of being dispersed and stuck into ghettos’. In respect of this, analysing the impact of new media and information technology on everyday life, Manuel Castells (1996) identified two contrasting spatial logics inside the contemporary city, which he called space of flows and space of places. Whereas the space of flows corresponds to the market logic of global networks of capital flows, human experience of workers’ lives is increasingly cut out from the space of flows just to be confined into a type of space of places that gathers together everything that is not enough flexible and adaptable for capitalism, including, notably, identity. As a consequence, spatial, horizontal mobility is inextricably linked to vertical, social mobility, as already understood by Louis Wirth (1938) (for a recent empirical study, see Camarero and Oliva 2008). It is important to remark that media and new media can actually enhance rather than reduce cleavages in the positive and negative effects of differential mobility. As observed by McCullough (2007: 388), ‘effective layering of successive technological infrastructures amplifies the advantage of particular neighbourhoods and cities’. Therefore mobility should be described as the ability to move around autonomously, not only in geographical spaces, but also and especially in relational spaces. In other words, mobility is intimately interwoven with the type of interaction in public that has been explored by interaction sociologists, in primis Erving Goffman (1959; 1963; 1971). The construction of the urban public domain meant the development of an impersonal, role-based model of interaction, which can be observed at small scale and retrieved even in the most ephemeral episodes of everyday life. Some of the richest phenomenological accounts of this type of experience have been provided, for instance, by Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin – not to speak of novelists, from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Man of the Crowd, through Virginia Woolf ’s Street Hunting, to Paul Auster’s City of Glass. The matrix view of fluxes in the city, or of city as a pattern of traces and trajectories, is not opposite, as Amin and Thrift (2002) argue, but rather nicely complementary to the phenomenological experience of urban circulation, precisely as, respectively, top-down and bottom-up perspectives on the same process. For Simmel (1950[1908]), city life shapes its own peculiar sociopsychological type, a personality that is defined as the reaction and adaptation to the ‘intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli’. Similarly, Benjamin

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(1999[1927–40]) collected thousands of pages of material for his unfinished Passagenwerk, a project in which he delved into the peculiar, mixed, hypnotic, oneiric nature of that specific type of urban architecture which is the glassroofed shopping arcade, ‘the most important architecture of the nineteenth century’. Because of the deep mutual interpenetration of city and subject, the human types inhabiting the arcade mirror the hybrid nature of in-betweenness that characterises these architectures: prototypes of the shopping mall, the passages were at the same time for Benjamin places protected against noise and the weather, separated from the ordinary and the prosaic: places in which the distinction between inside and outside, between daytime and night became uncertain, enigmatic places in which to rethink or recast the modern urban human figure (Benjamin 1939: §D). The urban ecological environment results from a layering and mixing of different types of social territories, or interaction regimes. Lyn Lofland (1998) terms these regimes the realms of city life. She distinguishes three such realms: the private, characterised by ties of intimacy among primary groups members, such as families; the parochial, characterized by a sense of commonality among members of neighbourhood networks and other cultural and religious communities; and the public, characterised by the copresence of strangers, people personally unknown or only categorically known to one another. The stranger is an outsider to the private and parochial realms, but is a crucial figure of the urban public realm, which is founded precisely on the capacity of people to interact with strangers and to understand them at a specific level. These three realms, Lofland reminds us, are social, not physical territories. The fact that certain physical spaces become private, parochial, or public realms depends on the proportions and densities of the type of social relationship that are enacted there. The public realm is constitutive of urban circulation, insofar as is defined by a series of well recognisable and recognised aspects. First of all, we have a situation of social diversity, where differences encounter. Stranger contact in practice means the mixing of people from various socio-cultural and economic background within a single space. Typically, contact and mixing take place in a condition of density and concentration of both people (crowds are the urban phenomenon par excellence) and the built environment (urban architecture entails a constant reworking on previously built environment). In this sense, the city is the place of concentration par excellence, vis-à-vis the dispersal that characterises the territory, the countryside. 84

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As a consequence, urban public realm is characterised by compression. This is not only space compression, but also time compression, or acceleration, as decribed for instance by Paul Virilio (1977). Compression leads to a sophisticatedly shifting balance in the public realm between the scheduled and the unpredictable, between the non-event and the event, or, with Jacques Derrida (2000), between the futur and the avenir. For Derrida, there cannot be avenir, there cannot be event without a type of opening towards the other which he calls hospitality. As recalled above, the interplay between the non-event and the event has been explored by the Situationists and their practice of drifting. Drifting was understood by the Situationists as an exploration of the psychogeographical contours of given urban zones and neighbourhoods. Urban drifters attempted to carry out a scientific and affective analysis of the urban network, with its continuities and fissures, its microclimates, and its attractors. Recognising the importance of concrete spatio-temporal variability, late Henri Lefebvre – who, not by chance, was strongly inspired by the Situationists, and harshly attacked by them – undertook a project of study of territorial rhythms, which he called rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre 2004[1992]), aimed at understanding the interweaving of localized times and temporalized places in the city. The balance between the different realms of city life, and specifically the balance between the public and the private, is intimately linked to both spatial mobility and the media (Sheller and Urry 2003). It was the modern mass media system – beginning from newspapers, magazines, and the film industry, through radio and television later, to the newest portable, locative and interactive media – that created the modern public, the audience. The relationship between the mass, the crowd and the public is indeed at the core of the debates that marked the birth of sociology, as in particular the work of Gabriel Tarde (1989[1901]) shows. As it will be argued more extensively below, each media technology defines a specific public regime or, even better, a specific regime of publicness. Contemporary reflection on media and new media in the city push to the foreground a theme that is already present in the authors we have recalled so far, i.e., the issue of the convergence/divergence between planning and experience, between strategies and tactics in the use the urban public realm.

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2

The material and the immaterial

On the basis of what said, the public realm has its material basis, which is defined in the first place by bodily experience, density and rhythmic dimensions. But the peculiar regime of public interaction in urban spaces cannot be reduced to such material basis. Quite the contrary, the public realm must also be appreciated and understood from the point of view of its social features, of the immaterial social relations that constitute it. In traditional ontology, spaces and relations are two different sets of things. However, the distinction between the spheres of the material and the immaterial is far from being fixed or absolute. Indeed, technology plays a crucial role in defining and redefining the balance between the two spheres. The massive introduction of media and new media in everyday life and the concurrent mediatisation of everyday urban environments during the 20th century has been significantly reshaping this balance. In practice, in contemporary urban environment the material and the immaterial ceaselessly prolong into each other. The specific features of these prolongations between the material and the immaterial, and the related patterns of speed and slowness, of relative speeds, created in the heterogenenous assemblages of elements coming from the two spheres, can be appreciated focusing on a set of interlinked concepts. In this chapter, we suggest to explore the relevance of three such concepts, namely territory, prolongation, and visibility. We also propose an ethnographic perspective on these phenomena and will consider some case studies that will help us identify the most promising areas of inquiry to which the proposed concepts can be fruitfully applied. Overall, then, our aim is to argue that the environments created and edited by new media in urban space can be conceptualised and studied as specific territorial and visibility regimes in the city.

3

Territory

Following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1980), a territory is not to be understood as an object, nor as a space, but rather as an act. A territory is something one makes vis-à-vis others. Emphasis on the act leads to the recognition that territories are not simply relational, but also and foremostly processual and directional entities. Territorialising is a way of carving the environment through some boundary-drawing activities (Brighenti 2006). 86

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Consequently, trajectories and boundaries should be conceived as complementary rather than opposite types of entities. Boundaries are not fixed objects, but rather processes or operations (see in particular Barth 1969 on ethnic boundaries). A boundary is the operation that leads to the instauration of a territory. Boundary-drawing can be described on the basis of the following aspects: Who is drawing. The territory cannot be conceived outside its relationship with the agents who undertake the territory-making activity. Notably, individual as well as collective (group) territories may exist. Human territory-making activities encompass both types of territory. The ratio between individual and collective territories varies according to social groups, their culture, economy and technology. Of course, the most visible and stabilised political territories are usually collective territories. How is the drawing made. There are many different technologies for drawing and dropping markers, which range from body secretions, postures and plumage, to graffiti, stone walls, cartographic projections and GIS technology, as well as situational, ad hoc procedures. Technology always matches with the specific sensibility and understanding of the boundary-drawing agent. Different technologies produce different types of markers apt for different types of inscription surfaces. Territorial markers are in themselves meaningful: each marker is a sign that bears its own individual characteristics, so that it can be more or less effective, impressive, memorable, and affectively poweful according to specific circumstances. What kind of drawing is being made. Territory is not an absolute concept. Rather, it is always relative to a sphere of application or a structural domain of practice. Territory is always qualified: reproductive territory, proprietary territory, economic territory, political territory, psychological territory, affective territory and so on. Boundaries are more or less focused on a range of expressions and a given set of functions, that shape the rationale for a certain territorial constitution. Expressions and functions manifest qualities as properties, or possessions. Because not all boundaries are of the same type, though, there may be no coincidence between different types of boundaries (e.g., contemporary economic and political territory clearly do not coincide). Why is the drawing being made. Qualities pertaining to various domains of practice are inscribed into the territorial constitution. Projects, plans, and strategies, too, are inscribed. Because a territory is established as a semiotic device and as part of a plan to control resources, it can be thought of as expressive and teleological. Projects and plans transform territories themselves into

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resources. But this is not an univocal process. Here, the Italian word ‘piano’ can be helpful, given that it means both ‘layer’ and ‘plan’. Territories are ‘multipiani’, in the sense that they are both ‘multilayered’ and ‘multiproject’. Plans aim at establishing hegemonies, but hegemonic frameworks can always be resisted. The image of territorial boundaries as the result of contingent acts of drawing may convey the wrong impression that arbitrariness rules over the constitution of territories. But to stress the dependence of territory on boundary drawing activities undertaken by interacting agents employing given technologies to carry on some plans in some domain of practice that is of concern to them, does not amount to saying that territories are merely arbitrary constructions. On the contrary, after being established for the first time – it may not be easy to tell when the first time was, though, because origins tend to be enveloped in mythologies – boundaries become the object of an on-going work of enactment, reinforcement, negation, interpretation and negotiation. In short, they become stratified. As we have seen, each boundary-drawing is based on a technology that allows a specific type of sign emission and processing. In their turn, signs exist within a semiosphere in which the act of semiosis joins together representamens, objects and interpretants. Processes of territorialisation vary widely from finding one’s place on a crowded metro train, through locating one’s mobile phone with GIS technology, to engaging in face-to-face interaction. Distance management and civil inattention in the urban public realm are two crucial territorial endeavours, too. Each of these territories has its own specificities, but once a regime is set up, territory-making becomes a routinary activity. Recently, Mattias Kärrholm (2007) has remarked that territorial complexity is due to the balancing between processes of territorial production and territorial stabilisation. Building on the acteur-réseau perspective, Kärrholm has identified four forms of territorial production and three forms of territorial stabilisation. His 2x2 matrix of territorial production accomodates territorial strategies, tactics, associations and appropriations. On the one hand, territorial strategies and tactics are ‘intentional attempts to mark or delimit a territory’ on the other hand, ‘territorial associations and appropriations represent productions that are not planned or intentionally established but are consequences of established and regular practices’ (ibid. 441). Following Michel de Certeau (1984), to which we shall come back, whereas strategies are impersonal and 88

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planned-at-a-distance, tacticts are personal and situational. As to the second couple, while appropriations are the result of active usage of territories (although not of formal claims), associations are ascribed, i.e. attributed by others. Kärrholm’s threefold typology of territorial stabilisation includes networks, bodies and sorts. Networks of actants have been at the core of the acteur-réseau research programme. For Kärrholm, networks are undoubtedly important as sources of stabilisation, but they are to be complemented with bodies and sorting in order to produce satisfactory descriptions of the different territorial roles of materiality. Bodies can function as territorial landmarks, reminders that somewhat ‘refresh’ the aim of a specific territorial configuration. On the other hand, sorting produces a classification and typification applied directly to territories themselves (sorts of territories).

4

Prolongations

The concept of prolongation emerges as an integrative and a corrective to media theory. Marshall McLuhan (1964) famously advanced the image of media as sensorial extensions. He claimed that one cannot conceive these extensions as if they were not mediated. Media are hardly neutral because their expressive characteristics affect the content they mediate. Media are content modifiers to the point that ‘the content of any medium is always another medium’ (McLuhan 1964: 15). This concept – which, in a more nuanced version sounds: ‘societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication’, ibid. 1 – was popularized by the slogan ‘the medium is the message’ (later ‘the medium is the massage’, as a result of a publisher’s typo McLuhan warmly welcomed as corroborating his own theory). However, McLuhan’s theory – as well as later studies carried out by McLuhan’s followers – remains unclear in accounting precisely how extensions work. Insofar as it tends to conflate the layers of content and expression, McLuhan’s original formulation ultimately is at risk of reductionism. It fails to distinguish the mediating from the mediated medium. While, generally speaking – as observed by Lister et al. (2003) – McLuhan’s ideas have undergone an important and timely renaissance in new media studies (arguably, a healthy correc-

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tive against pure culturological explanations in the British cultural studies vein), his media theory per se remains incomplete. If one compares the two idealtypical situations of a face-to-face conversation and that same conversation on the phone or through any new media, one understands that the problem for a theory of prolongations is to explain how a quantitative worth (in this example, a spatial distancing) becomes a qualitative one (in this example, a mediated interaction) – or, with Bergson, how a difference of degree is replaced by a difference of nature. In fact, even face-to-face conversation involves a type of mediation: there is no zero grade medium (see e.g. Rice 1999). But an apparently similar conversation, mediated by different technologies, is no longer the same. A transformation occurs through the mediation process. This process has been explored and theorised by Régis Debray as a techno-social ‘middle realm’ in which the social and the technical meet and mix. Frédéric Vandenberghe (2007: 26) has described this mixing as the process through which ‘the spirit gets materialized into technology at the same time as the social gets organized into society and reproduced through history’. Each technological arrangement opens up a set of coordinated possibilities to create events and make them meaningful. Once we accept that mediation entails much more than mere transmission and draw our conclusions from that, we necessarily come to question the singleness of acts and events. In particular, attention to mediation shifts the focus from presumed single and unique events to series of event. In the case of the conversation considered above, it becomes clear that there is not any single conversation, but rather a cascade or series of conversations, a series (philosophically speaking we may call it a virtuality) in which each conversation is confined into or, on the contrary, pushed to the limits of its technological mediation. The convergence of the social and the technological is best captured in Leroi-Gourhan’s idea that no tool exists except in a gesture (‘l’outil n’est réellement que dans le geste qui le rend techniquement efficace’, Leroi-Gourhan 1964: 35). Just as the geste, prolongation draws attention precisely to the existence of series and to relationships within and across such series. In practice, every mediation works through prolongation. The concept of prolongation can be understood in relation to the phenomenological concept of lifeworld, or environment. Edmund Husserl (1970[1936]) describes the Lebenswelt as a ‘pre-given world’, something which is ‘always already there’, the horizon within which objects can be perceived by 90

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an experiencing subject. In interaction sociology and ethnography, the lifeworld category has been translated into Goffman’s (1971) situation, Garfinkel’s (1967) plenum, and Geertz’s (1988: § 1) there. The lifeworld, we may say, is the here-and-now of experience, that which provides its field without becoming its object, thus making it possible for social experience to take place. The hereand-now is not an isolated system. Each locale is porous, in that it prolongs towards an elsewhere which, though not present in the here-and-now of the locale, becomes part of the plenum through that same prolongation. Hence, objects, actors, events, practices and concatenations not present in the here-and-now are important and even crucial for the plenum. These processes of importation and exportation come about essentially through the media, which act as bridges, corridors or thresholds which traverse the plenum to connect the various here-and-now. Portions of elsewhere and at-other-times are constantly imported into the locale, just as portions of the here-and-now are constantly exported, projected towards somewhere-else and at-other-times. The media that accomplish this import/export task work essentially as prolongations. Thus, they can be imagined as corridors enabling both the extension and the compression of here-and-now. What does the concept of prolongation add to the conventional notion of medium? Prolongation is a type of connection that falls neither under the categories of evolution nor under those of system. The concept of prolongation can be traced back to the phenomenology of crowds and power developed by Elias Canetti (1973[1960]). The type of relationship existing between the individual and the mass, or between climbing and trading, between jaws and prison, between excrement and morality – as they are explored by Canetti – can be allocated to the category of prolongation. Clearly, a prolongation is neither an organic evolution nor a systemic prescription. Rather, it points towards the existence of zones of indistinction between radically heterogeneous (material and immaterial) spheres. More recent sociological approaches, like acteur-réseau theory, move in a similar direction, as they stress the continuity cum ontological heterogeneity of the social. The concept of prolongation thus bears some similarities with what Latour (1993) calls mediation work or, elsewhere, factiche, or, again, collective of beings. The concept of prolongation as a corridor or bridge shares some similarities with the much more fashionable concept of network. But whereas the network shape stresses the aspects of connectivity between points, thus ultimately pointing towards an image of closure, the concept of prolongation

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stresses the moments of opening, the flight lines, lignes de fuite or lignes d’erre that constantly open up in the here-and-now. Prolongations constitute territories which are hybrid, material-cum-immaterial constructs. Territories bridge spatial and temporal dispersals, they keep people engaged into social relations. Recognising that territories exist in the tension between the material and the immaterial enables us to avoid reductionism of both the medium-message type (McLuhan) and the space-extinction type (Virilio). Because, as we have said, territories are imagined, relational and materially processual entities, we can also describe them as practices. Territories are practices insofar as a practice is a set of repetitions and differences that prolong from one environment to another. Extensions and compressions (taking place as territorial rhythmic and melodic patterns) are inherent to prolongations, just as they are to practices. Connecting past knowledge to present circumstances, a practice enables to encode and decode signs, to share a meaningful environment, in other words, to territorialise environments.

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Visibility

Visibility essentially regards the activity of introducing, establishing and negotating thresholds that join together or separate territories. The point can be made clearly in relation to the city and its public realm. We have observed that urban public realm is characterised by encounters among biographic strangers. But this also means that those who access public space become observable. In other words, in the public realm one can look and be looked at. Yet, given that clearly the city does not coincide with the public realm, islands and layers of private and parochial realms coexist and intermingle with the public. The constantly rearranged balance between the various realms depends on the management of reciprocal visibilities among actors. For instance, the capacity of managing eye contact – which is part of what Goffman (1963: 84) used to call ‘civil inattention’ – is essential to the maintenance of social order. In short, the domain of the public is a field of reciprocal visibilities, and visibility is an essential feature of social life one should always be attentive in the attempt to describe urban environments. At the ecological level, accessibility and observability, which are characteristics of the public at large, proceed together. The public sphere has been described by political philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Ha92

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bermas as being basically accessible to all. Arendt (1958) speaks of a ‘common world’ which provides the basis for all politics. On his turn, Habermas (1989[1962]) assigns to the public sphere a function of mediation between civil society and political society. In both cases the public sphere is seen as an open arena for communication and action. But how exactly does openness relate to publicness? Notably, accessibility is tightly linked to the visibility of the public. Visibility relations are not simply visual relations, but form a more complex field, defined by the capacity of being aware of someone’s existence and, consequently, being meaningfully affected by someone’s action (Brighenti 2007). Visibility is a feature of the social world that makes it possible to establish a series of thresholds between visible and invisible, noticed and unnoticed, relevant and irrelevant, foreground and background activities, actors, and processes. Only apparently is the visible homogeneous, given that in practice it never ceases to introduce series of discontinuities between elements. And these discontinuities determine the formation of organized ways for exercising visibilities, i.e., visibility regimes. The management of visibilities is a social enterprise whose output is a field of interactions defined by cones and vectors of visibility. Behind these geometric images lies one of the crucial aspect of visibility: namely, the social construction of subjects through their positionings within a field that creates and distribute visibility symmetries and asymmetries. The specific effects of the different forms of visibility, in fact, allow one to conceptualise the creation of subject positions in the field of visibilities. Clearly relevant here is the political and normative dimension of the visible: corresponding to every definition of a field of visibility is a series of demands, tensions, and clonflict which seek to establish a connection between the possible and the proper, between what can be seen and what should or should not be seen, between who can and who cannot see others. This is a type of ongoing, endless task that takes place in urban environments. Visibility is a property of the social sphere which is grounded in the territorial dimension of interaction, i.e., in the interplay between the two spheres of the material and the immaterial. The field of visibility thus consitutes a zone of indistinction between the social and the technological. To have it with LéroiGourhan (1964) and followers – among which, of course, Régis Debray – every anthropogenesis is a technogenesis. But such intimate link between the social and the technological should not lead to overlook the ritual and political

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dimensions of visibility. As already noticed above, the public realm is a domain in which the management of reciprocal visibilities assumes a symbolic and ritual significance. As Goffman reminds us, the ritual does not simply refer to the repetition of a series of actions, but rather to the persistence of the sacred – in our terms, of radical territorial heterogeneity – in everyday life.

6

New media as territorial prolongations

The usefulness of the concepts of territory, prolongation, and visibility to understand the impact of new media on city life lies in the fact that these concepts cut across the spheres of the material and the immaterial – urban space and public sphere. This is of course a doubly articulated opposition. On the one hand, not all that is urban is public; yet, on the other hand, the public is undoubtedly a type of urban territoriality. Media determine the complexity of the relationship between the regimes of the public, the parochial and the private; new media do so to an even higher degree. By acting as prolongations of the here-and-now, media edit urban environments and shape their specific territorialities. The role of media in multiplying and stratifying urban territories was acutely noticed by Walter Benjamin (1935: §xiii). In his famous passage on cinema’s ‘dynamite of the tenth of a second’ he noticed: ‘Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its farflung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject’. With new media, the expansions and extensions of the hereand-now described by Benjamin are all the more enhanced. Indeed, new media make it possible to virtually mark points in space and bound multimedia information to specific places. In this way, increasingly stratified prolongations are obtained. From a methodological point of view, we think that the impact of new media on the constitution of territorialities can be best assessed through ethnographic case-studies. At the same time, because, as noticed above, media are 94

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part of the editing of the environment, a media ethnography necessarily results into an ethnography of environments, or, as we may say adopting the concept developed by Bateson (1972), an ecological ethnography. Consequently, a new urban ecology – we call it ‘new’ to distinguish it from traditional urban ecology developed by Robert E. Park and his collaborators at the First Chicago School – is needed to study new media environments. The ‘new’ in ‘new urban ecology’ shares some similarities with the ‘new’ in ‘new media’. Indeed, as – following McLuhan – Bolter and Grusin (1999) have argued, media always operate upon other media. Media not only mediate: when observed in relation to other types of media, they in fact always re-mediate. The ‘new’ in new media thus refers to the process of refashioning and recasting that a new medium enacts on other (‘older’) media. An ecological ethnography of new media is premised upon the idea that mediation is remediation. From a remediation perspective, what are the specific environments created by new media? Some of the key characteristics associated with new media are digitality, portability (or dispersal) and interactivity (or hypertextuality). Lev Manovich (2001: §1) enumerates the following five operational principles of new media: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. These logical operational principles have practical consequences. Spreading in everyday life, new media are capable of creating spatially mobile territorialities that carve urban spaces from the inside. As observed by Martin Lister et al. (2003: 30), ‘ubiquitous computing offer a future in which there are no media free zone in everyday life’. On the one hand, new media are embedded in domestic and urban everyday life settings. On the other hand, new media enable a peculiar stratification of territories, insofar as users are simultaneously engaged in multiple interactions of different types that prolong into each other.

7

The editing of the urban environment

Because new media introduce stratified territorialities with differentiated visibility thresholds, through prolongations that link the material and the immaterial, relational and positional determinations and interactions are fundamental in the process of shaping the urban environment. Social practices that shape territories and subsequently intervene upon them are increasingly mediated through new media and the space-time prolongations that they

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enable. Urban social territories consequently become a sort of palimpsest of different material and immaterial practices. The case of ‘digital bohèmes’, urban hi-tech mobile workers, nicely illustrates the stratification of territories made possible by new media. Digital bohèmes are workers of new generation, who meet in places such as bars and shops they use as their own office, creating their digital workstation with laptops, webcams, mobile phones, and palm devices. Usually they are graphics, fashion and web designers, marketing consultants, arts critics, and curators who foster international synergies by community, forum and network in the web space. So called ‘journalists 2.0’, free-lance journalists who use websites and blogs to report independent news, could also somewhat be counted ad digital bohèmes. Digital bohème is a type of economic, social and spatial lifestyle well represented for instance in Berlin Mitte district. Actually, according to official municipal data, in Berlin Mitte there are about 25,000 entrepreneurial one-person activities of this kind. Through the use of new media, digital bohèmes shape their peculiar type of urban territoriality. The digital bohème case also reveals that the editing of the environment by a medium is most effective when the medium itself becomes environmental, i.e. invisibile to users. In the words of McLuhan (1969: 22), ‘media effects are new environments as imperceptible as water to a fish, subliminal for the most part’. The urban environment is likewise infra-structured, but its infrastructures tend to systematically remains relatively invisible to users (Bowker and Star 1999). For instance, increasingly diffused citywide wireless information networks (Mackenzie, in Cronin and Hetherington, eds, 2008) represent one such stable but relatively invisible infrastructure that enables multiple and stratified territorial usages. The traditional concept of user as individual is not particularly useful to grasp the stake involved in the enhanced environments populated by new media. Of course, fashionable contemporary theories such as acteur-réseau theory are concerned precisely with demystifying the modern ‘subject versus object’ dichotomic conception. In particular, Bruno Latour (1993) spoke of ‘proliferation of hybrids’, and suggested to replace the subject/object dichotomy with the semiotic concept of actant. But an earlier suggestion in this vein, specifically applied to the task of interpreting the city space, can be found in the independent research of Vílem Flusser (2004[1988]). Flusser described a model of ‘new urbanity’ as a set of immaterial interconnections and relations, rather than a number of material independent egos. ‘The new city – he wrote – 96

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would be a projection of interhuman projects’ (ibid. 197, our translation) made possible by the development of ‘authentic networks’, which he characterised as polycentric and interactive. Similarly, the ecological approach to urban ethnography we advocate draws attention on the heterogeneous plenum represented by the locale, the hereand-now. Here, users can be conceptualised as the poles of a series of prolongations that concur in the shaping of territories. In other words, users can be described as thresholds in the field of the visible. The ecological perspective understands users as parts of the processes of territorialization that define simultaneously the urban space and the public sphere. That is why new media can be explored on the basis of the territorial processes they sustain. In the course of such processes, visibility may become empowering (qua recognition) as well as disempowering (qua surveillance). Indeed, the characteristics that determine the success of new media also make them particularly suitable as surveillance devices. Since surveillance is increasingly based on flow-tracking (Lyon 2002), visibility turns into a battlefield of strategies: new media are suitable for sur-veillance (visibility top-down) as well as sousveillance (visibility bottom-up). Examples of the first kind include the monitoring of the flux of people during the ‘Notte bianca’ event in Rome. On this occasion, a special WikiCity Roma website (http://senseable.mit.edu/wikicity/rome/) was set up, in which information usually available only to police forces and city planners was made widely accessible. The project’s statement of intent included tracking the movement of people within the city ‘in response to this exceptional pulse of activities and events happening’. Tracking was made by recording the overall volume of cellphone usage in the various sectors of the city. Data were of course treated at the aggregate level, but moving from the aggregate to the individual level is, technologically speaking, a small step. Examples of the second kind include the use of phone cameras and voice recorders during demonstrations as counter-surveillance tools. This type of media activism reveals that contemporary urban mass events have been profoundly affected by new media. Many of them, such as Critical Mass movement demonstrations, were organised and made possible through web forums and mailing list discussions. During the antiG-8 demonstration in Genova in 2001, evidences of police brutality were abundantly documented through portable devices. The documents which were not destroyed by the police themselves were subsequently collected in a Libro bianco (white book)

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and used in court during the many trials that followed. More generally, the case of urban activism reveals that contemporary mass events have been profoundly affected by new media. If indeed, on the one hand, new media appear to be deeply inscribed in the capitalist horizon – as the massive use corporate companies are doing of new media as means for ever more and more effective forms of advertisement demonstrates – on the other hand they may as well propel new ways of reclaiming the right to the city beyond current socioeconomic hegemony. Affecting visibility relationships, new media also affect the social perception of one’s body in relation to others, thus enabling new ways of gathering together and interacting. So called ‘flash mobs’ are a case in point. Flash mobs are an example of ‘instructed’ crowds, where the instructions for the creation of the crowd are circulated through web protocols and SMS texting. At first sight, flash mobs may not look very different from other political rallies. But, in fact, a flash mob resembles more closely a rave party, or some performance art event. Flash mobs take place as happenings, usually in public spaces such as railway stations or large stores. Their aim is precisely to transform the nature of urban space gathering people together in an out-of-the-ordinary interaction regime. The human presence brings about a kind of new surface (Virilio 1993) that amplifies the use of such places. Some flash mobs consisted of a large silent hall crowded of people dancing at the rhythm of their own I-pod music. The first flash mob took place in Manhattan in 2003. Its inventor Bill Wasik described it as a ‘sociological experiment’ designed to poke fun at the ‘cultural atmosphere of conformity it was breathed’. Another very interesting case is reported by Vincente Rafael (in Chun and Keenan, eds., 2006). Rafael analyses the role played by the use of SMS texting in strengthening ‘People Power II’ movement during the coup that overthrew President Estrada in the Philippines in January 2001. ‘Cell phones – Rafael reflects – were not only invested with the power to overcome the crowded conditions and congested surrounding [in Manila’s streets] brought about by the state’s inability to order everyday life, they were seen to bring about a new kind of crowd that was thoroughly conscious of itself as a movement headed towards a common goal. While telecommunication allows one to escape the crowd, it also opens up the possibility of finding oneself moving in concert with, filled with its desire and consumed by its energy. In the first case, cell phone users define themselves against a mass of anonymous others. In the

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second, they become those others, accepting anonymity as a condition of possibility for sociality’ (ibid. 299). All these resistant uses of the new media can be appreciated as tactical in de Certeau’s sense, as opposed to the strategical. Strategy is the dominant model in the political, economic, and scientific realms. It is essentially a territorial form exercised upon proprietary bounded loci, and articulated into discourses. In it, outsiders are subordinates or adversaries. By contrast, tactic is deterritorialised, because those who practise it have no territory of their own and have to act on a territory that belongs to others. It is not articulated into discourses, but into practical ways of operating, and it does not recognise outsiders (this would be impossible, because it has no bounded territory that enables identification of people as insiders or outsiders), but only allies. Whereas strategy is self-centred, territorial, and spatially bounded, tactic is fragmentary, deterritorialised, and temporally (rhythmically) structured. Tactic has no cumulative character, it cannot capitalise on victories, nor achieve any overall coherence; it can only combine heterogeneous elements and constantly try to turn events into opportunities, or, again with Derrida, to open up the futur into an avenir. Resistance is always of tactical nature. Its social locations do not correspond to any institutionalised field of knowledge, but rather to the realms of the informal, the implicit and even the trivial. Resistance is the acknowledgement that one cannot win on the enemy’s field, but this acknowledgement does not stops short of the attempt to create constantly new fields for the game. Tactics are composed with the vocabulary of established media languages, and thus subordinated to their official syntactical form. But at the same time they trace territorial trajectories informed by ‘other interests and desires that are neither determined, nor captured by, the system in which they develop’ (de Certeau 1984: xviii). New media can also be employed as technologies to project territories, to make them visible before they actually take place. This is what happens in some participatory design projects and in some experiences of independent mapping. Web protocols and communities enable people to take part in the transformation of cities themselves. Open forums on planning are in many cases becoming an integral part of official decision making processes. This kind of interactive planning is possible on the premise that people can access quickly and freely online territorial information systems. In other cases, independent mapping projects, based on an autonomous exploration of the

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space that recalls the Situationists’ endeavour, aim at the re-construction of shared urban memory. People draw their own living map and link it to maps made by others. Independent, personal mappings become part of open source searchable databases, created with softwares such as Twiki or Worldki. This type of software has been employed, for instance, in the Cartografiaresistente project. Based in Florence, Cartografiaresistente (http://www.mappeaperte.net/cartografiaresistente/) is an open, online project of urban territorial mapping aimed at promoting collective, independent knowledge of Florence urban area. The pivotal point of such projects is that databases are not simply accessed, but edited and in large part built by users themselves. So called web space therefore makes it possible to map territories and associated affects in novel and unprecedent ways in order to imagine and put into practice new transformations (Mattiucci ed. 2008). More generally, digital cartography generates representations of the city that centred around events rather than objects (Picon 2008). Other technologies upon which new media are based, such as locative devices, potentially enhance this type of experience. The Headmap manifesto (www.technoccult.com/library/headmap.pdf), for instance, argues enthusiastically that new forms of network organised dissent are emerging through collective use of location aware devices. Indeed, portable devices easily allow users to locate each other, record their own spatial diaries, navigate urban space with instant webmapping support, and localise web forums and discussion groups into specific places. However, it would be a mere delusion to believe that, for this reason, new media technology is intrinsically liberating. One cannot fail to notice that the very list of technological possibilities just reported is as suitable for resistance as it is for control.

8

Conclusions

In this the chapter, we have attempted to conceptualise the relationship between new media and urban environments. We have argue that territory, prolongation, and visibility can be adopted as conceptual tools to produce rich naturalist ethnographic descriptions of the working of new media in the city as an ecology. More specifically, the environments sustained and edited by new media in the urban realm can be observed as specific territorial and visibility regimes in the city. This means that media edit the human environment setting 100

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the extent and boundaries of relationships in a way that cuts across and joins the material and the immaterial features of social life, i.e., respectively, urban space and public sphere. At the same time, however, we have rejected any form of new media exceptionalism. What new media do does not represent something thoroughly unprecedented, but rather an amplification of certain effects that rest upon fundamental techno-social variables, i.e., upon that ‘middle realm’ that determines, to have it with Vandenberghe, the materialisation of the spirit into technology and, at the same time, the organisation of the the material as social. New media bring about an actualisation of some specific possibilities in the configuration of territories and visibilities. They stratify territories and concur to the definition of visibility regimes. As such, they are technical deviced but at the same time they integral part of the social realm. The concept of prolongation has helped us to capture precisely this spanning process. Ultimately, territory and visibility are categories that may be useful to understand the different meanings, conflicts, and controversies that are associated to mobility, circulation, and, more generally, the uses of space in the city. We have considered a series of case studies to illustrate this. While, admittedly, our present effort is far from complete, we wish the points we have highlighted about the interweavings between the media and the city might be further enquired upon by future research.

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GOFFMAN, ERVING (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. GOFFMAN, ERVING (1963). Behavior in public places. Notes on the social organization of gatherings. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. GOFFMAN, ERVING (1971). Relations in public. Microstudies of the public order. New York: Basic Books. HABERMAS, JÜRGEN (1989[1962]). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. HANNERZ, ULF (1980). Exploring the City. Inquiries towards an Urban Anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press. HUSSERL, EDMUND (1970 [1936]). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. IVAIN, GILLES (1953). ‘Formulaire pour un nouveau urbanisme’ Report for the Internationale Lettriste, published in Internationale Situationniste, No. 1, June 1958. KÄRRHOLM, MATTIAS (2007). ‘The Materiality of Territorial Production. A Conceptual Discussion of Territoriality, Materiality, and the Everyday Life of Public Space’. Space and Culture, vol. 10(4): 437–453. KOTÁNYI, ATTILA, RAOUL VANEIGEM (1961). ‘Programme élémentaire du Bureau d’Urbanisme Unitaire’. Internationale Situationniste, No. 6, August 1961. LATOUR , BRUNO, (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. LE BRETON, DAVID (2000). Eloge de la marche. Paris: Métailié. LEFEBVRE, HENRI (1968). Le droit à la ville. Paris: Anthropos. LEFEBVRE, HENRI (2004[1992]). Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London and New York: Continuum. LEROI-GOURHAN, ANDRÉ (1964). Le geste et la parole. Paris: Albin Michel. LISTER , MARTIN ET AL. (2003). New Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. LOFLAND, LYN H. (1998). The Public Realm. Exploring the City’s Quintessential Social Territory. New York: De Gruyter. LYON, DAVID (2002). ‘Surveillance Studies: Understanding visibility, mobility and the phenetic fix’. Surveillance & Society, Vol. 1(1): 1–7. MANOVICH, LEV (2001). The language of new media. Cambridge MA; London: The MIT press. MATTIUCCI, CRISTINA (Ed) (2008). Maps/Mappe. lo Squaderno, No. 7, March 2008. Online at: www.losquaderno.net MCCULLOUGH, MALCOLM (2007). ‘New media urbanism: grounding ambient information technology’. Environment and Planning B. Planning and Design, Vol. 34: 383–395. MCLUHAN, MARSHALL (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. PARK, ROBERT E., BURGESS, ERNEST W., MCKENZIE, RODERICK D. (1967[1925]). The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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PICON, ANTOINE (2008). ‘Towards a City of Events: Digital Media and Urbanity’. New Geographies, No. 0: 32–43. PINDER , DAVID (2005). ‘Arts of urban exploration’. Cultural Geographies, No. 12: 383–411. RICE, RONALD (1999). ‘Artifacts and Paradoxes in New Media’. New Media & Society, vol. 1(1): 24–32. SENNETT, RICHARD (1994). Flesh and Stone. The body and the city in Western civilization. London: Faber & Faber. SHELLER , MIMI, JOHN URRY (2003). ‘Mobile transformations of “public” and “private life”. Theory, Culture, and Society, Vol. 20(3): 107–125. SIMMEL, GEORG (1950[1908]). ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. In KURT WOLFF (ed) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press, 409–424. TARDE, GABRIEL (1989[1901]). L’opinion et la foule. Paris: Puf. VANDENBERGHE, FRÉDÉRIC (2007). ‘Régis Debray and Mediation Studies, or How Does An Idea Become a Material Force?’. Thesis Eleven, No. 89, May 2007: 23–42. VIRILIO, PAUL (1977). Vitesse et politique: essai de dromologie. Paris: Galilée. VIRILIO, PAUL (1993). L’espace critique. Paris: Bourgeois. WACQUANT, LOÏC (2007). ‘Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality’. Thesis Eleven, No. 91, November 2007: 66–77. WIRTH, LOUIS (1938). ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’. The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 44(1): 1–24.

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Practices

L AURA C OLINI

The Looming Mediacity: Framework for participative ICT spatial practices

Today, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have moved from the status of novelty to rapidly diffusing into all walks of life. Their presence is even banal, becoming more and more taken for granted as part of the fabric of urban life, even ignored now as producers of the ordinary (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 103). Digital networks are embedded within both the technical features and standards of the hardware and software, and in actual societal structures and power dynamics (Sassen, 2002; Latour, 1991; Lovink & Riemens, 2002; MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1999). Access to learning, economic opportunities and jobs, public services, cultural activities, are pillar liberties of a democratic society which cannot today be tackled and supported without considering access to infrastructures of digital communication. Media represent the identity of our contemporary, hyper-relational, post-colonial, neo-liberal society by characterizing the pursuit of speed compression as enhancing efficiency, towards fastpacing development in all human fields. The research on Mediacity grows from this assumption, and the consideration that while modern cities remain hubs of intertwined social, economic, political and cultural interactions – any discourse around their urban life can no longer avoid being confronted with ICT. Given this scenario, an awareness of how we use, act and interact through contemporary digital technology becomes critical. Global trends and the symbolic economy foster the production and distribution of a large variety of innovative tools enhancing communication via text, audio, video. The resulting digital communicative syndrome tends to sedate the question of “how and why” we act together and represent our lived space through digital media. Different space-related disciplines, such as traditional geographers’ art of representing spatial patterns serving political and economic power, are being challenged by newly distributed geospatial intelligence. Data and information come not only from the established institutional places of the city, but also from those liminal spaces (Arnold van Gennep, 1961; Zukin, 1995) where spontaneous practices, active and critical observations of the lived space occur

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without cease. In sum, geospatial media can become a unifying public and civic domain, producing common goods, capacity-building transactions among subjects as political participative acts. The debate on understanding the relation between city and technology follow two broad research interests: (1) a more theoretical and detached branch focusing on the city/ICT relations, analysing power structure, marketing, economy, and cultural issues creating new patterns of social and physical changes; and (2) a more engaged and practice-driven research, which recognises the city/ICT relation as an opportunity for expanding the arena of political deliberation and participation. The latter found its roots in activism, social movements, innovative and radical urban planning approaches which exploit etools as instruments for more inclusive decision-making processes, while stressing the visible or invisible risks of concentration of technologies in the hands of often corporate elites. Both research perspectives are two faces of the same coin, often running parallel discourses, raising questions on effective and ambiguous uses of ICT in urban planning and deliberative processes. The research on Mediacity thus begins as an looming abstraction, that then tries to find a shape in urban theories to help unravel these intertwined discourses. This chapter presents an overview of different interpretations of Mediacity, enquiring into the promises of infotech in the participatory process of citymaking. This will be explored with an attempt to categorize examples of ICT based spatial practices, questioning their ability to engender socially and politically engaged actions in contemporary cities, unveiling limits, mere rhetoric, and visible/invisible corporate interests underlying their diffusion.

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Why Mediacity

“It is obviously […] to the emerging trends in the communication system and to the production and distribution technology that has come into existence with modern civilization that we must look for the symptoms which will indicate the probable future development of urbanism as a mode of social life. The direction of the ongoing changes in urbanism will for good or ill transform not only the city but the world.” (Wirth, 1938: 24) The mentality brought forward by the modernist movement created the concept of a city itself as a mediated technical machine. The city could be 108

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experienced very mechanically and the aesthetics of the machine produced such an outburst of abstractions that even its physical organization and its logics could be understood as an ensemble of technical operations (Boyer, 1983: 283). Nevertheless, the mythos of modern technology and electronic communication never deeply influenced urban studies in a comprehensive way. Apart from a few (Meier, 1962; Abler, 1974, Sola Pool: 1977 et al.) urban scholars preferred to focus on those modes of communication that tangibly affected the form of the cities such as transportation systems (Mandelbaum, 1986). According to Graham (Graham 2004) studies advanced along three different perspectives: transcendent, co-evolutionary and recombinant. From the late Sixties on, the rhetoric of transcendence and excitement for electronic communications was nourished by scientific and narrative literature. These produced and spread visions in which the very nature of cities was challenged, upset by cyberspace virtuality displacing real space, portending ubiquitous immersive telecommunications redefining community without proximity (Webber, …). Alarmist and enthusiastic views, conceptually relying on different disciplinary languages, heralded the perspective of an incoming media city substituting, threatening or deeply transforming the essence of the traditional city – towards a new telepresence mediated across a simulated, semiotic, postlocal or even post-urban networked world. ICT and urban life are then studied in a co-evolutionary (mutually evolving) perspective, rather than in parallellized separate trends of growth and development: urban fabric and telecom trends shape each other in complex “recursive interaction” ways. However, the generalized deterministic discourse examining the effects of ICT exclusively on real space was largely exhausted after several euphoric popularizations of the Net (Bolter & Grusin 2000, Wellman & Hogan : 2004 et al.). Others consider the relation of urban spaces and technology framed in a “recombinant perspective” (Graham 2004), a view that allows analysing linkages between communication, information flows and urban space following reciprocal combinations1 according to different parameters such as space, culture, economy and time. Such interrelation analyses between city and media coined a variety locutions such as Virtual City, Digital City, Cybercity, City of Bits, Liquid city, Informational city, Technocity, Mediacity (Laguerre, 2005; Boyer 1996; Castells 1989, Graham 2004, Mitchell 1995, Kräkte 2002 et al.) presenting many-faceted interpretations. ............................................ 1

Cfr. the ANT/Actors Network Theory by sociologists Callon and Latour.

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In Laguerre, three main aspects characterize the identity of the Digital City: the transformation of urban practices brought by the interface of reality with virtuality; the social and global networks of interactions that urbanities develop thanks to Internet connectivity; the social and physical infrastructure that sustain the deployment, operation and reproduction of urban-virtual practices. More engaged and catastrophic is the vision of Virilio, who sees real cities overtaken by the virtual. Traditional cities are disappearing or dematerializing as result of digital technology, and its public space profoundly endangered. “The real city, which is situated in a precise place and which gave its name to the politics of nations, is giving away to the virtual city, that deterritorialized meta-city which is hence to become the site of the metropolitics, the totalitarian and rather globalitarian character of which will be plain for all to see” (Virilio, 2005:10–11). Similarly, in her postmodern vision, Boyer describes a progressive invasion of the physical city by the virtual city. In Boyer’s Cybercity, “city and its public sphere become increasingly virtual, as we move toward interpersonal systems of communication in physical and public space” (Boyer, 1996: 229). Cybercity inhabitants seem to be “continuously in motion living in a space of flows defined by global networks of computers” which are “free-floating membranes of connectivity” restructuring the identity of the inhabitants themselves (Ibid: 18). Its public sphere is reconfigured by the net of electronic communication at the expense of face-to-face interactions. Because ICT engenders the global interaction and communication of people, information and goods, Castells theorizes a network society that overcomes spaces and places, in a new dimension of flows. His Informational City is a “matrix of institutional and economic organization” that is a result of the informational-based form of development of our capitalist economy. Cities in Castells, and in particular global cities, are transformed in the “process” of being absorbed in the IT network rather than in place. Of course Informational City inhabitants may be rescued by the unexpected and unpredictable faith in the ability of reinterpretation of technology itself. One fascinating characteristic of most technologies being that people end up employing them for something different than what they were initially created for, generating new spaces of possibility for the public. In Castells this randomness is the foundation of social creativity and of business innovation. On the contrary, the real tangible city is going to prevail on the city of flows with the “revenge of space” (Mitchell 2001). Physical space is taking over for 110

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economic reasons which are creating new centralities and new marginalities (Sassen 2002: 181–201). The miniaturization of digital devices, together with the enhanced mobility of people and goods, reduces the costs of technology and movement. The only sure cost will be physical space, possibly also due to increasing urban densification and natural resource scarcity. There is therefore a competition among places, among those who may offer a larger number of services to city users, investors, tourists. The competition will be at the core of new urban patterns functioning as attractors of sophisticated and fastdeveloping technologies, of research and development poles and of cultural facilities supported by investment strategies: “[u]biquitous and efficient networks […] will produce the commodification of accessibility” (Mitchell 2001). It will be the uniqueness and specificity of a place guiding the competition and the development of technologies and not the other way around. In this sense, the Medienstadt (Kräkte 2002), is the materialization of this hyperspecialization of localities for ICT purposes. Krätke describes the Medienstadt as a phenomenon of monocultural development of specific parts of the city dedicated to the “intelligent” neighbourhood, knowledge districts, regions dedicated to the creative industries. Medienstadt is a geographically defined space such as cultural and media centers where social aspects of community living, new media economy and culture bring about contemporary metropolitan areas, regions and global cities. This variety of approaches helped liberate the discourse around urbanism and communication technology from shackled enthusiast-vs-skeptic dualistic views, in favour of a more complex, nuanced, engaged discourse. Their conceptualizations are intended to encompass the complex structure of what may be called media urbanism in the realm of “ICT urban studies” (Graham, 2004). Within this research, Mediacity remains a deliberately vague neologism, welcoming a range of different perspectives and approaches. It is an “interpretive flexibility” (Bijker 1989) reflecting the struggle of Urban theory to find a domain for implications of the paradigmatic change brought for by the capillary presence of ICT and related social and technologically-mediated practices.

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2

Mediacity and the promises of participatory ICT

“Cities are what they are because their citizens are what they are” (Plato) By their very nature cities have always been crucibles of technological innovations, influencing their culture as well as their formation, organizing their functions and morphology. Cities are by definition a medium for interplay of chance and rules, as for the ancient Greek “polis” was a word for both a board game and for cities. Cities concentrate the simultaneity of multiple ongoing stories, being constantly under construction politically and materially, never finished, never closed, created by citizen interactions. Beyond the many definitions, we can assume cities are sites of collective spatial practices and discursive processes, procedures and codified protocols leading to social, economic, material and cultural transformations. City-making entails the art and discipline of city planning traditionally connected to the work of experts, but here is understood as a passionate collective action fostering participation, non-discrimination, opportunity for self-sustainable development of individuals, communities and their environment. Hence Mediacity is used here a framework for reflecting on city-making, analysing the benefits, pitfalls, and trade-offs of the combination of spatial practices with ICT. In particular, the criterion adopted in this article to discern and categorize such practices is the capacity to empower local communities and to engender citizens’ participation. Some may ask how it is possible to encourage political participation through ICT in an urbane world constructed out of segregated suburbs, gated communities and parks, privatized spaces, shopping malls under surveillance and monitored downtown streets with video camera at every corner (Harvey, 2006: 17). Clearly, the creation, application, dissemination of innovative media is never value-free: it directly affects the way urban public space is produced, perceived, controlled, endangered or reclaimed in contemporary neoliberal society, challenging the concept of public space itself. Nevertheless, “the neoliberalism of public space is neither indomitable nor inevitable, and however much public space is now under clampdown, it is not closed.” (Low & Smith, 2006: 16) Public space is negotiable through those practices that are able to create alternative new settings of and for public political expression. In this framework, “space” is understood as an ontological category to investigate place, incorporating individual and collective actions, never to be treated as 112

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“the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile” (Foucault, 1977: 70) but rather as a construction of various “processes of assembly” (Lefebvre, 1991: 31–33). Spatial practices are those actions which are a constituent and a result of assembly, in the process of space-making. Consequently, spatial practitioners are essentially those who are engaged in producing, understanding or altering of spatial condition as a pre-requisite of identifying the broader reaches of political reality (Miessen & Basar, 2004: 23), including urban planners, institutions and organizations, economic actors, informal and formal association and citizens at large. They show different expectations on spatial production subject to biased interests, power struggles, purposes and assumptions, narrated through different voices constantly creating contested meanings, raising conflict over what could be a city’s future. Public participation in urban planning constitutes an approach to deal with and to [overcome] “reciprocal suspicions, recognize conflicts and antagonist positions” (De Carlo in Sclavi 2002: 245)., in order to create – through the art of listening – a dialogic process leading to transformation. ICTs, and above all the development of the World Wide Web, are considered a powerful resource for enhancing public participation, worthy to be increasingly expanded. They have been welcomed as a political medium to enable people to transcend traditional limits and constraints of politics in representational democracies, to empower underrepresented voices and to support, and directly or indirectly, participatory city-making processes. Just as ICTs have changed the way people work, shop, read, play, communicate, stay informed, and possibly even think, they also establish new potentials creating a relational environment. New technologies permitting the blending of audio, visual, and textual language – freed by spatial constraints and given open access protocols – allow multitudes to generate unprecedented forms of interaction and collaborative databases. Community-driven ICT practices, aimed at positively affecting the quality of life, are promoted from both the private and public sector, from research centers, activist groups, institutions, informal organization or by individual initiatives. The variety of experiences, a full accounting of which is impossible, belong to sectors such as arts, education, political administration, or by international and local NGOs. Such projects are subsidized to fulfil completely different interests such as those of business, industry, and academic research (not uncommonly market-driven as well), to enrich governance systems and to empower the political process for activist and philanthropic purposes.

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Yet still critical is the issue of the digital divide, and the controversial ethical purpose to disseminate digital tools and techniques, especially in low income areas of both less and more developed countries. Notwithstanding the enlargement of the digital infrastructure, the miniaturization and shrinking costs of digital devices, social technology still remains a faraway aspiration because of the lack of skills and funding for many potential participant citizens. In the optimistic view of some thinkers, the digital divide is not any longer a matter of access but mainly a matter of technological skills and education, as in the case of the One Laptop per Child program “It’s an education project, not a laptop project” (Negroponte, 2008). The provision of digital technology to all communities is the precondition that will bring forward an “equalizing force” (Mitchell, 1999). If we see a chance to enhance education and participation in the public sphere through mediated and digital tools, there remains uncertainty in how this will make communities become self-sustainable, learn from each other, and how cities will resultingly become more publically participatory, better places to live. Technological determinism tends to persist in this manner of overstating ICT. I argue that less attention has been paid to ICT’s effective employment towards structural changes of the deliberative process, leading to authentic transformations of the social and physical fabric of the city. In the face of the growing interest and diverse experiences all over the world, grassroots use of technology, social media, or participatory technologies are not necessarily a liability in democratizing and awakening the process of city-making, whenever their necessity, purpose, applicability and capacity for leading towards social change are accepted. But the present emphasis on access for new forms of democracies should be painstakingly considered, questioning which ideals of participation are taken for granted by those who design, simply utilize, or tactically subvert the intended use of certain tools—with an eye towards constant evaluation of the character, application, purpose and effectiveness of ICT in the city-making process.

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3

Participatory city making

In the public spaces of the city, stories create publics and by creating publics build democracy. (Beauregard 2003) Before exploring participative uses of technology and collective spatial practices, first let us refine what we really mean, among different concepts of participation in the urban terrain. Giusti defines three different phases of public participation in urban planning – which resemble the three waves of Dorcey’s citizens’ participation (Dorcey in Gurstein 2007: 94) – starting from the Sixties onward: in the first phase citizens’ participation is Political, in the second it is Technical and in third it becomes Art of interactive participation (Giusti quoted by Paba 2004: 36). The first phase, called Political, envisioned political engagement in participatory processes, and is closely connected the political climate of 1960s and 1970s, to the perception of injustice in the distribution of resources and opportunities, to social movements. This phase grew out of the critics to the Rational Comprehensive Approach dominating modern planning philosophy, starting mostly in the USA, from the social and economic failure of urban regeneration programs (Jacobs, 1961; Gans, 1969; Berker, Banham, Hall, 1969; et al.). Not unlike the transcendental faith in the capacity of technology alluded to in the previous section, for many years the discipline of urban studies and planning relied on instrumental rationality, technical knowledge and professional class expertise in governing the life and evolution of cities. Being a western expression of modern planning, the Rational Comprehensive Approach (RCA) focused almost exclusively on physical problems rather than urban social and cultural constructs (Faludi, 1986). This reliance on expert quantitative/scientific methods often offered an illusory aura of objectivity. In contrast, public participation is predominantly seen as an instrument of social struggle, with an advocacy attitude— participatory planning is understood as a more socially fair and just collective project, welcoming the pluralities of voices, especially of those underrepresented (Davidoff, 1965). Citizens, intellectuals, theorists and planners are supposed to participate in societal engagement, revealing the subtle and entangling dominant power structures based on expert-driven knowledge, which traditionally regulate the development of urban fabric and the planning practice.

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Early urban thinkers such as Mumford and Geddes touched upon reforming the planning process, well before community advocacy gained respect among planners.2 Mumford recognised the need for a shift from the command and control mentality to one of partnership and participation, with the planner as animateur, enabler, guide, mentor, and monitor, striving to represent all community interests (what Geddes intended as “civics”), while respecting natural limits (what Geddes intended as “biotechnics”). “The elemental unit of planning then is no longer the house or the house block: the elemental unit is the city, because it is only in terms of this more complex social formation that any particular type of activity or building has significance. And the aim of such planning is not the efficiency of industry by itself, or the spreading of culture by itself: the aim is the adequate dramatization of urban life: the widening of the domain of human significance so that, ultimately, no act, no routine, no gesture will be devoid of human value, or will fail to contribute to the reciprocal support of citizens and community” (Mumford, 1938: 484). The second phase in the 1980s and 1990s sees public participation as a technique ready to solve those considered intractable problems (Christensen, 1985). The objective is the efficiency of the governance of territory, employing formalized methodologies of interaction such as mediation, negotiation, facilitation of multiple stakeholders. Those methodologies however often lose their innovative capacity, becoming mere techniques used with cynicism. Consultative techniques unfortunately have the tendency to become empty rubber stamps, of limited participative value, when top-down implementations are foregone conclusions. The third phase is the more recent trend emphasizing the strategic importance of revitalizing democratic governance. More than specific techniques, this revitalization is grounded in the Art of interactive participation. Common elements include: hermeneutic listening, dialogue through active solicitation of situated knowledge, value of diversity of experiences and backgrounds, development of individual and collective subjectivities and mutual learning towards empowerment. The root elements of the art of interactive participation can be found in diverse theories and practices such as in the radical communitarian approaches to self-determination of local communities (eg. the work of community organizers, educators, activists, researchers and thinkers such as Freire P., Illich I., Alinsky S., Wards C., Dolci D., Doglio C. et al.), in the transactive ............................................ 2

cfr. the interpretation of Mumford and Geddes in Paba, (2003).

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approach towards structural social transformation (Friedman, …), in communicative planning (Forester…) and in the narrative/storytelling view to citymaking (Sandercock 2003 et al. ). In the more communitarian approach, a path towards a comprehensive participatory view across urban terrain is guided by figures who are not urban planners in the traditional formation. They pledge the right for the underprivileged to have an entry in the decision-making process, developing cohesive grassroots relationships to evaluate more suitable forms of self-government for their communities. In Freire and Illich, as well as in Dolci, citizens, practitioners, and activists are called to take part in an educative project towards communitarian development involving the society at large. It is worth emphasizing that the process of city-making here is not mere participation to decision-making, but a transformative bottom-up sociopolitical project. In particular for Dolci’s maieutic approach, problem setting as well as decisionmaking are both process and results, that grow from self-recognition or “conscientization” of the local community embodied in a specific context hic et nunc (here and now). Words that belong to ICT literature such as survey, forums, open meetings, based on a dialogue weaving individual and collective narratives are used in this context as methods for establishing a “popular selfanalysis”. Producing narratives is not only a process of informing, but a mutually communicative act, towards social mobilization. “People should develop a consciousness of their issues and potentials, should participate in local actions, even small but well done, which should give the sense of the enormous chance of acting together in perspective” (Dolci, 1968 in Mazzoleni 1997). According to Forester, the communicative and participatory approach to planning entails, through listening, “restructuring strategies” that address the dynamics of power and powerless combining practical action and political visions (Forester, 1989). Listening is crucial, but insufficient if it does not lead to subsequent action, to the possibility that what is told can actually make a difference. Otherwise listening “becomes merely condescension, wasting or manipulating others’ time, an act less of taking the other seriously than of insulting them by failing to respond to their deeply felt concerns” (Forester op.cit.). Communicative planning can then help public deliberation to work, rather than being a vague ideal, fostering “public learning about social significance and values as well as about positive fact, about historical identity and difference as well as about shared common ground” (Forester, 2001: 61; quoting Abers, 1998; Abrams, 1991; Banhabib, 1996; Sandercock, 1995).

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The power of listening and telling stories is indeed seen as an element of policy advice towards inclusive forms of participatory democracy (Sandercock, 2003; Throgmorthon & Eckstein, 2003; Baum, 1997; Krieger, 1981; Mandelbaum, 1991). City-making is performed through stories, in myriad ways, because they can speak beyond the “traditional social sciences, […] providing a far richer understanding of social conditions” (Sandercock, 2003: 12). Stories can of course also be misleading, can create stereotypes as well as challenge them – “the only cure for false, manipulative or inappropriate talk is more talk that exposes or corrects it, whether as a string of reasons, a mode of recognition, a way of making points or a narrative” (Young, 2000: 79). Still the word of participation remains a “plastic word” (Porsken in Colini, 2004) whose flexibility can be used in deceptive ways. “The definition of participation covers today a large variety of meanings and the most suspicious intentions” which can still be discovered through critical approach (De Carlo et al., 1980; in Paba, 2003: 39). How can the variety of media whose use and presence entail the word participation be analyzed and discerned, in theory and in practice? In the era of Mediacity and media urbanism – are we facing a new phase of public participation in city-making?

4

Understanding participated ICT spatial practices

In order to find a path to these questions we will refer to a well-known classification. By the end of the Sixties, S. Arnstein published a ground-breaking article dedicated to examine different stages of public participation in urban planning, from mere manipulation at the bottom, rising up to citizen control at the top. Despite being published almost 40 years ago, Arnstein’s ladder has been an implicit and explicit reference for researchers and practitioners analyzing and evaluating participatory practice, even if more sophisticated models (e.g. Wates, 2000) reinterpret it. Arnstein’s classification of citizens’ participation is expressed in a clear scheme, which contributed to opening up a discussion on the epistemologies of participation, and in particular its purposes. However, it can be criticized for being somewhat dogmatic in the sharpness of its schematics, whose rigidity is seldom conform to the complex reality of planning processes, and for its insufficient focus on power relations to make sense of participation at a conceptual or practical level. In effect, the ladder is based on a strict dualism 118

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among what Arnstein calls powerholders and citizens, categorizing subjects having – or not having – a voice in decision-making processes. This reductionism is justified by the supposed reciprocal perception of the opponent players as monolithic systems. In reality, dynamics rarely manifest as such clear Manichean-like divisions of power. Arnstein conceptualised participation as a schematic ladder ranging from “empty rituals of participation” to citizens having real power needed to affect the decision-making process, dividing it into rungs, among three main tiers: NON PARTICIPATION, TOKENISM and CITIZEN POWER. At the bottom rungs of its scale, in the group of Nonparticipation, Arnstein situates the concepts of Manipulation and Therapy. In her vision, the real objectives of these kind of practices are those to guide, “educate or cure participants”, distorting the “participation into public relations vehicle by powerholders” (ibid.). The second (middle) tier is covered by Tokenism, an attitude that permits participants a voice to be heard: Information, Consultation and Placation are important step toward legitimatizing participation. Criticisms of such processes however include: • one-way flows of information, with no channel for feedback and no power for negotiation • public consultations without commitment to taking account the result of the consultation • The apparent access to decision-making process without a real right to judge the legitimacy or feasibility of a decision retained by powerholders Yet a common outcome of similar speak-truth-to-power exercises is that involved citizens have merely “participated in participation”. In the third (top) tier of the ladder, Arnstein pictures the increased degree of decision-making clout into the levels of Partnership, Delegated Power and finally Citizen Control. Citizens can enter into Partnership that enables them to negotiate and engage in tradeoffs with traditional powerholders, sharing planning and decision-making responsibilities. With Delegated Power citizens acquire decision-making authority over a specific plan or program. Finally, Citizen Control refers to participants’ joint coordination of managerial activi-

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ties and policies, while retaining the ability of self-organized outsiders to negotiate institutional conditions (Arnstein, 1969: 222). Pursuant to the categories envisaged in Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation, we will look at and label different types of ICT-based spatial practice, referring to selected case studies. Note this reinterpretation is far from being an exhaustive recognition for a new epistemology for participatory infotech in spatial planning. Rather, it is an attempt at schematizing the large variety of experiences in this realm, reflecting on their ability to engender – or endanger – genuine, effective participation. Many market-driven spatial practices regarding the development of technological centers and the like fall in the Nonparticipation category3. They are often promoted through the appeal of implicit participative qualities of hightech infrastructure. This is the case of large urban districts (if not entire cities) dedicated to media and digital technologies, adopting expansive slogans to promote themselves, exalting keywords such as innovation, flexibility, education, freedom and collective synergies. These are practices generally follow a total top-down approach, misusing the concept of participation as access to contracts, jobs and education through connectivity, development, knowledge, while restricting more structural self-governance, e.g. Dubai Media City4 or the Euroepan IT city Katrinebjerg Arhus: Denmark5.These new urbanities result from media-driven spatial practices directed at attracting global capital, connecting entrepreneurs, professionals and experts with a flexible labour force and local consumption. In such a context, the discursive capacity of citizens is often illusory, a mere promotional rhetoric. Citizens are the end users, treated as passive participants without any capacity to intervene or ............................................ 3

A similar effort of adapting the ladder to e-tools has been undertaken by Gurstein (Gurstein 2007). She considers first the use and presence of media from the rung of Tokenism, limiting Nonparticipation to failures of supposed information or consultation practices. 4

“Dubai Media City creates a world-class environment for every kind of media business, which broadly includes media and marketing services, printing and publishing, music, film, new media, leisure and entertainment, broadcasting and information agencies. In this open and flexible environment, you and your company can operate with collective synergy and individual freedom”. http://www.dubaimediacity.com 5

IT city Katrinebjerg Arhus: Denmark “a similar framework for high technology innovation is not found anywhere else in Denmark. Katrinebjerg is the place where large and small companies, scientists and students meet and inspire each other mutually in a cross-disciplinary, creative and open network. […] The IT city offers unique opportunities for companies that decide to set up at Katrinebjerg. The close geographical concentration of knowledge companies and world class IT-research forms the basis for knowledge sharing and synergy. This produces favourable conditions for growth and development”. http://www. katrinebjerg.net

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transform the social and physical landscape. In this case, paradoxically, the capacity of interaction is annihilated exactly in the sites where communication technology is concentrated. To the rungs of Tokenism belong the E-informative practices fostered by private or public subjects, enhancing access to information and new forms of consultation. These practices utilize digital applications for public participatory processes meant to actualize traditional forms of representative democratic processes. These include e-government, e-voting, e-democracy and egovernance initiatives employing websites, data banks, multimedia discussions, online participatory spaces, digital tools for facilitating forums and public hearings and Virtual Decision Making Environments (VDME). Media are employed to enlarge governance capacity, covering different sectors such as e-Health, e-Inclusion, e-Learning, specialized e-Services, Trust & Security6 – these promise to engender reciprocity and encourage pluralism and transparency. Indeed, they represent a vital resource in strengthening the effectiveness of public services, a fundamental step towards a more inclusive deliberative process and a better quality of life. Nevertheless, their concept of participative ICT often returns to conveyance messaging, far from encouraging proactive and critical reflections on critical public issues. By their prescribed nature, they offer informative services, while simultaneously reaffirming consolidated powers limiting consensus to “pre-packaged options”. Worse, E-informative practices risk falling into the lowest group of non-participation, when they become mere rhetoric around the transparency discourse, ambiguously employed to hide interests or to misuse/manipulate political consent. A example of derogatory misuse of this rhetoric, is the T-city project undertaken by Deutsche Telekom7. In 2006 the largest public/private German telecommunication company launched a competition among mid-size Ger............................................ 6

http://www.eparticipate.org eParticipate is the deployment of an eParticipation multimedia platform of a suite of "best of breed" applications (called Public-i) to enable public bodies to broaden participation of citizens in the democratic process. 7 DT is one of the most important global ICT/telco actors, leader in Europe and the biggest in Germany. It serves 160.000 mid-size companies, 100m mobile clients, 39m landlines, and 12m broadband connections (2006, DT official website ). Ex monopoly of State owned Post Bundespost, DT is today a multinational company which includes companies whose aims and goals are not easily traceable. The very largest investors in DT include USbased equity powerhouse Blackstone Group, which includes a large variety of investors among which the Equity Office Properties, a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) who recently bought in Germany 20.000 social housing residences.

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man cities8 to become the best wired Telekom-city. By corporate edict, the winning city would become the best networked city, a model for Germany and other countries covered by DT’s territory. Local administrations joining the competition were asked to launch a participatory process in their city, to envision the most appropriate digital solutions and services in e-health, eeducation, e-economy and the cultural sector. Some among the 140 participating cities, including Weimar, Arnsberg, Goerlitz and others, set up city-wide forums with meetings, online participation tools, blogs and mailing list, often facilitated by professional mediators from private companies. Similar to other experiences such as I-city in the Flanders (with participation from Siemens, Microsoft and Telenet)9 and IDA in Singapore,10 DT advertised the initiative with a huge campaign. They employed mass media tool across websites, mobile phones, public phones, video, huge posters covering historic architectures across German cities, and gadgetry adorning public urban spaces, all in their shock-pink branded colour. Each participant in the competition was encouraged to produce short video stories of their own city: video, images and textual promotion, which became at times embarrassingly trivial and repetitive, embracing the fiduciary notion that branded infrastructural services provided by Deutsche Telekom would be the means to a better and up-to-date society. But apart from the marketing and financial support to the winning city, which real improvements in the participative capacity of local society came from this process? In claiming citizens’ participation, but giving less space to discuss the type of development branded by this powerful investor, the company faced heavy criticism for its operation11. In the competition, citizens were indeed proffered by power brokers, only to hear and be heard, not granted power to ensure their views might be heeded. Furthermore, the ability to create options, and to invent alternative futures, was prejudiced by the overarching corporate plan of Deutsche Telekom, an experience falling to the rung of Manipulation (Nonparticipation). In fact, the competition offered sanitized, palatable solutions, sedating any effort to understand and question ............................................ 8

More than 400 cities inhabitants between 25.000 and 100.000 were invited to compete.

9

http://www.i-city.be

10

http://www.in2015.sg

11

expected 25,000 job cuts by the end of 2008 in Herald Tribune THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2005, accuses by Vivendi company for fraud and racketeering http://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/news_analysis/112301/Vivendi_accuses_TMobile_of_fraud_and_racketeering.html

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differences; in turn creating a biased image of needs, experiences and aspirations for the people actually inhabiting the spaces. People taking part in the TCity forum in their own city, could then leave with feelings of having participated in building a common vision for the most competitive city of the future, pacified by the illusion of a an “open mediacity”, manipulated by its rhetoric (Colini 2007). A different type of practices explore true grassroots activities, including the role of those community networks originating from informal groups rather than institutions – ironically both of whom now make use of new tools such as Web 2.0, Wikis, and other forms of community communication spaces. Growing this infotech literacy, among those who do not have a traditional engineering backgrounds, generates new types of socially engaged techno-users: hacktivists who support a contestational design and use of technology; digital artists who reinvent, decontextualize or subvert the use of technical devices by giving us new meanings; advocacy developers who serves the needs of a specific community, as well as citizens and activists who support socio-urban tactics (De Certeau 1984) using technology (Kahn, R. and D. Kellner, 2004: 87–95). The range of practices involves radically different types of experimental media-making, such as Community and Street TV (Tripodi, 2004), Participatory video making, Digital collaborative mapping, Locative media, many of which radically contest access and definitions of territory, as well as their history of serving elite political-economic power. With necessary distinctions, this cross-fertilized variety of approaches fits into Arnstein’s rung of citizen participation because at the core of the discussion, in employing these social technologies, is an emphasis on the ways they can reveal, alter and transform power relations, in supporting community cooperation and grassroots actions addressing local issues towards selfmanagement. Slanting practices is one way to describe these initiatives performative actions, offering an alternative viewpoint from the dominant perspective in the use of technology, introducing disorientation toward new articulations. They focus on raising awareness, creating strategies to involve people through rituals, happenings, streets interventions, public actions. They tackle the limits of the concept of technologically secure cities, revealing the myths around control paranoia, our culture of fear, efficiency and progress. Examples are the

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pioneering Surveillance Camera Players12 in New York, mapping and revealing the omnipresence of surveillance devices in public space, or the German group FoeBuD13 with a long history of public interventions dealing with privacy issues and RFID tags, to encourage public debate about privacy and data protection. Similarly, in the “Life: a user’s manual”14 project, Michelle Teran invites groups of citizens to capture invisible narrative streamed by private wireless CCTV, eliciting attentiveness on how they intersect with the visible and spatial environment. Given wireless surveillance cameras within public and private places transmit unencrypted analog audiovisual signals in the 2.4 GHz frequency band, these easily intercepted using a consumer model video scanner, capturing live images of private spaces, create a sequence of readings and views of the city and its inhabitants which are observed while walking through the streets. Staged as a silent “mise-en-scène” which no explanation offered, silent participants in these 21st Century surveillance performances take part in a production of meaning, through their observation and interpretation (Teran et al. 2006). A prerogative of slanting practices is to use media existing from the city fabric, redirecting digital tools on themselves, tactically exploiting their capacity to vehiculate alternative messaging, to reveal hidden points of view which provoke critical thinking. Their transformative capacity suggests a critical mass of “insurgent” actions, constituting of a constellation of tiny forms of citizens empowerment (Holston, 1995; Friedman, 1999). In this form of participation, the bargaining process with power-holders may not necessarily be a final goal. Similarly other community based practices rely on the use of media aggregation to represent social and physical space. They can be called narrative practices and their goal is to reveal and challenge consolidated power, while binding community belonging. Narrative practices using visuals and cartography give sharp visibility to contextual perceptions of places, reinterpreting them, re-defining boundaries, representing power relationships and political frameworks. Some projects understand the effectiveness of the participation as the ability to make publicly accessible and comprehensible existing stacks of data, eg. governmental ones; and some others are aimed at the creation of collective, informal, distributed and unofficial databases; often, a ............................................ 12

http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html

13

http://www.foebud.org

14

http://www.ubermatic.org/misha/

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combination of both. The approach to cartography as mapping social information spans history, including 1890s maps done by settlement house pioneers, such as Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago, who did a sociological survey of the neighborhood and published Hull House Maps and Papers (Sibley, 1995: 170) – to the 1930s by young people under the guidance of a communityminded principal named Leonard Covello at Benjamin Franklin Community High School in East Harlem (Johanek & Puckett, 2006). In the last fifteen years, long after the revolutionary digitization of geographic data by Geographical Information Systems (GIS), the debate around the democratization and social use of maps encountered a new wave with Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) or bottom-up GIS (BUGIS) (Talen, 2000). Their social potential to foster inclusion has been amply debated15, including voices who warned about their false promises of decentralization and growing popularity. Critics predicted that the complexity of these technologies would disempower participants (Utting, 1994; Klosterman, 1990), drastically reducing participation towards a “techno-utopia” (Pickels, 1993), reinforcing the control of local population (Rundstrom, 1995; Yapa, 1991) and feared a retour to positivism (Taylor 1990)16. Today both the discussions on threats/opportunities and the availability/creation of data for participatory cyber-cartographies are still generally valid. Since the significant boom following the release of Google Earth, Google Maps, as well as much open source software (WordPress, MapOMatix, geowikis et al.), GPS and wireless technologies, an unprecedented mass of data is increasingly shared by newly imaginative communities of interest, often neophytes to cartography. Customizable applications allow the creation of dynamic “mashup” cartographies visualizing multi-relational human/spatial perception (Tulloch, 2007). Online community maps work at their best when deeply rooted in the situated concerns of a community, being a result of a collective action, visually analysing local social, cultural, political, environmental data, assets and problems. In this perspective community online maps can be used as topics-based collective surveys (eg. air noise pollution17, access to public services for people with ............................................ 15

NCGIA and Varenius initiatives in the 1990s

16

For the contributions of those authors check NCGIA publications

17

http://www.citidep.pt/eurolifenet/index.html CTIDEP EuroLifeNet project: its objective is to build an innovative, cost-effective way to gather environmental scientific data, with citizen education via their direct participation in the data gathering, giving priority to young people. In a first pilot project, high school students

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handicaps18 etc) via inhabitants’ direct participation in the data gathering, or as early warning systems (eg. to warn citizenry on the physical decay of their neighbourhood) or as an instrument to advocate a specific point of view with emancipatory aspirations. Geographic collaboration tools open up public debate on the future of inhabited space, strengthen the networks of activists and informal groups, claiming and supporting agency in their struggles for the right to the city. This is the case of Instanbulmap,19 mapping “urban regeneration” projects endangering public space, natural resources, local economies and cultural heritage for profit in the face of tourism and land value speculation, forcing underrepresented groups as low income families and immigrants to relocate in less profitable parts of the city. Similarly, oldbeijingmaps20 allows visualizing historic demolitions, listing protected sites under threat, while Daravimap in Mumbai uses a „deki wiki“ system to discuss and look into alternatives to the redevelopment project of an informal settlement.21 Online community maps – updating hand-drawn English Parish maps – try to focus on localities in which life is played out,22 reporting people’s perceptions through combinations of sound, pictures, videos, text blogs with desk and mobile tools. Citizens atlases such as Towards23 or The Organic City24 (promoting the community of Oakland, California, by collecting and preserving its stories online) may encourage a new epistemology of space and place, thanks to non-conventional descriptions of contemporary human landscape. Although not necessarily associated with mapping, participatory video making25 and digital storytelling are other practices used to collect, tell and share stories weaved in specific socio-spatial contexts. Such narratives focus on building ........................................................................................................................................................................... gather data on personal exposure to PM2.5, using recent portable technology and protocols defined by scientists and experts interested in the data. 18 http://www.lila.ucla.edu LILA is a consumer-directed and regionally focused online project to benefit people with disabilities living in Los Angeles County. LILA uses a GIS-based, interactive information resource database, created by local residents with disabilities using their personal "expert knowledge" to identify and map local independent living resources. 19

http://www.istanbulmap.org

20

http://oldbeijing.net

21

http://www.dharavi.org

22

http://www.england-in-particular.info/parishmaps/m-index.html

23

http://www.towards.be

24

http://www.theorganiccity.com/wordpress/

25

Above many example it is worst to highlight the work of Mark Saunders at http://www.spectacle.co.uk/

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communicative transactions among subjects: “food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living. They are what make our condition human” (Kearney 2002: 2). Digital storytelling,26 among many, is a powerful technique developed to encourage inhabitants to produce short video stories, integrating stills, drawings and oral narration through a collaborative methodology requiring no specific expertise. Workshops are held in small group of people, where there is a basic training session. In Springfield, Massachusetts, digital storytelling was employed, together with other participatory methods and techniques, for the strategic planning of a neighbourhood known to be the nogo area. Its anthropological scope was to invite the local population, mostly low-income migrant communities supported by local activists, to tell their own personal life stories and their legacy with the inhabited place. One powerful result was a starkly graphic, multifaceted narrative extending far beyond the “no-go-area” stereotype (Colini, 2004). In this sense, stories are a project as they reconfigure the past endowing it with meaning and continuity, entailing the present and imagining the future. Narrative and storytelling can be crucial when we lack shared understandings – narrative forms of communication, rather than argumentative, can speak across our differences to promote understanding and mutual listening (Young 2002). These considerations urge one to rethink the way public policies, architecture, urban planning and place-based social studies approach narrative as powerful tool. These practices contribute on many different levels to restoring “citizens power”, as in Arnstein’s highest rungs, providing a framework to engage citizens in an active political role, raising awareness and empowering local communities. For these reasons, slanting and narrative practices should be understood as new potential contributors to interactive participation, fostering social cohesion that engages in an open process of city-making. Nevertheless, their high potentials may easily turn into plain, although interesting and passionate artistic, research exercises (or worse co-opted into disenfranchised Tokenism) if they don’t keep it real, on a path of action, making a difference restructuring public space.

............................................ 26

http://www.storycenter.org/, www.creativenarrations.net/

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5

Conclusions

“Are we facing a new phase of public participation in city making, in the era of Mediacity and media urbanism? How can the variety of media, whose use and presence entail participation, be analyzed and discerned?” To answer such questions I offered a brief classification of media-based practices for city making, a guideline towards understanding this relation. At a higher level, the current 21st century wave of social media experimentation cannot help but facilitate the networking necessary for participatory engagement. Digital public spaces indeed offer fascinating new bridges towards deliberative community building. Still, the right to express diverse voices in city making remains our paramount challenge, above even the fluctuating landscape of digital enablers. The multifaceted characters of civic governance, and the plethora of interaction mechanisms leading to complex decision-making, remain dependent on factors beyond digital technologies themselves – no less the power interests of those who design, use and misuse them. The cliché based on the blind democratic accountability of technological systems for development will be of no help, and may harm the participatory process per se, leading to disillusionment. Nevertheless, technologies of participation can be effective when they support the collective capacity to construct a common scenario, relying on a variety of methods and techniques for representing, facilitating decisionmaking and facilitating mutual bargaining power. These approaches should support trust-building among participants, in contrast to the passive role of citizens as mere users. They must question the shape-making role of institutional/corporate powers in managing data, staying rooted in the complexity of public policy – including the socio-economic, cultural and environmental situations within which our lives are embedded. In the end, the risk of technological determinism is ever-present, even when practices focus explicitly on opening access to express outsider opinions. Unintended consequences of technology limit options, and short term projects eternally reaffirm existing hierarchical structures, often expediently discouraging honest and open debate. Participatory practice is a subtle art of iterative interactions which demands mutual understanding, shared responsibilities, critical listening, learning from 128

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experience, engaging us in new geometries of power toward co-production. ICT space-based practices will be considered truly participative when used for social transformation, demonstrably searching out alternatives and seeding reflective approaches to dominant models of development.

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HANA I VERSON /R ICKIE S ANDERS

The Neighborhood Narratives Project: New Dialogues with/in the Mediated City

“when you go back to Sicily visit my home in Borgetto it would be my pride and joy go, embrace my mother for me I was born in that house All my feelings are there All my memories are of that place And our little piece of land – My brother will take you to see it We have vineyards and orange groves. . .” From the poem, “What Pasquale wrote me. . .” In Vanzetti’s Fishcart By Justin Vitiello Location aware art and media technologies expand the dialogue around concepts such as place, space, and location. What surfaces in the new dialogue is a focus on the transformations associated with ubiquitous computing, in particular our expectations regarding what computers are, what they might do for us, the role of digital objects in everyday life; how places and spaces are transformed in social and cultural practice; and most importantly the distinction between two aspects of spatially organized environments – those that arise out of their material and geometric properties (space) and those that arise out of the ways in which human activity takes place within them (place). In geography place and space are not only ‘strategic concepts’ that have a particular political purpose but also are ideas to be investigated in their own right. Yet even strategic use of space/place provokes the question of why these notions have the deliberate, calculated effectiveness that they possess. Some-

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times a concept has strategic importance because of its relation to some other term (male/female, mind/body) and in which one term is given a privileged role while the other is repressed. In the case of place/space neither seems to occupy a privileged position over the other. Indeed they might better be viewed as antipodal positions along a continuum. For both, their importance seems to derive from their indispensability and ubiquity in human thought, experience, and agency. The very structure of the mind as well as important existential, ontological, and philosophical questions is intrinsically tied to place and space. Physical landscapes like that of Vitiello’s Pasquale are but one representation of place/space. They influence how we process, experience, and represent our activities and thoughts but there are other much less straightforward ways in which our relation to landscape and environment influences our sense of self. Location aware art and media encourages the viewer/user to unearth the layers of information that occupy a space and make known the complex of historical, cultural, socio-political and economic contexts that affect location specific interactions. In this paper we discuss the Neighborhood Narratives (NN) project and its relationship to these concepts. Neighborhood Narratives is an international education project that explores the issues that surface when new ideas made possible by locative arts and locative media technologies are applied to real places and trigger social interactions that in turn create new dialogues. Despite the perception that new media arts and technologies fall short of capturing the spirit, personality, communicative power, and sense of place of Vitiello’s Pasquale, they do confer on places and spaces a narrative and scientific reflection of the world. Strangers and non-strangers alike leave traces of themselves in the places they inhabit; their desires, anxieties, memories, and histories are communicated thru social histories made meaningful thru an archeological process of unearthing multiple layers of narrative. The exercises draw on the readings of invisible notes that location aware media attach to spaces, place, people and neighborhoods. In the exercises, the urban landscape is a canvas where analogue and digital media, text, sound, and image are applied to locations in order to document the definable (visible) and undefinable (invisible) aspects of place that simultaneously reveal and construct their essence. The objective is to create site specific annotations such as sound maps, community histories augmented by websites, audio interviews distributed over the cell phone, installations that integrate radio and other communications tech134

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nology, scavenger hunts, and visual tags that when connected would produce a neighborhood narrative. The process encourages participants to combine the skills of the storyteller (the grounded expert with detailed everyday knowledge) with the flaneur (the mobile observer of the city with a broad overview). Through the Neighborhood Narratives projects we are able to unearth a Foucaultian like archaeology of place, space, and location. By delving into what lies beneath or on top of what is visible on the landscape, the exercises have the potential for expanding the dialogue around place, space, and location while they also rest at the core of contemporary geographical inquiry. Since much locative media/arts rely on the Cartesian idea of a base map they are intrinsically geographical in nature. With this as foundation, rather than merely following the contours of location specific variables, the NN projects described here offer a narrative path to understanding the philosophical and psychosocial aspects of concepts such as surveillance, public/private and local/global relations. These concerns are at the core of how we begin to envision our future. Neighborhood Narratives explores three themes-place/space, embodied practice and the merger of mixed reality and mobility.

1

Place

Place, according to Yi Fu Tuan (1977) combines a sense of position within society and a sense of identity with a spatial location. Places have historically been viewed as physical sites, with natural and emotional endowments that speak to the limits of human freedom. Not only are our human identities bound up with the hills and valleys in which we live but our very humanness and humanity is bound in this way. It is place that gives rise to humanness – in the form of feelings, attachments, longing, nostalgia, desire, melancholy, and fear. The relationship of person to place and the idea that human identity is somehow tied to location is a recurrent theme in Western philosophical inquiry and romantic nature poetry. The life of the mind is given form in the places in which we dwell and places themselves shape and influence our experiences, memories, feelings and thoughts. Both traditional and new media artists have striven to capture the subjective, phenomenological conception of place. Bachelard (1964) talks of both the love of place, topophilia, and the investiga-

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tion of places, topoanalysis, as essential notions in any phenomenological study of memory, self, and mind. For him, the life of the mind is given form in the places in which human beings dwell and places themselves shape and influence human memories, feelings and thoughts. For Derrida (1981a) the outside of any category is already found to be resident within, permeating the category from the inside through its traceable presence-in-absence. Proust conceived of human life as essentially a life of location, of self identity as a matter of being situated in place and of places themselves as somehow suffused with the human. It is even possible that the idea of human identity being tied to locality is bound up with biology or evolutionary history, not at all a contingent feature of human character varying as culture and society vary. Heidegger (1962) claims that the Cartesian conception of the world (space) fails to account for the pragmatic and distinctive structure of place. In Being and Time his consideration of the work floor tells us that humans are deeply involved in place; so much so that the place/self nexus is practically fused together. To be somewhere is to be in some particular place with its own unique there and yonder. Place is indispensable as the basis for locatedness. Places and regions provide a basis for the everyday demands and relations in which human beings are ineluctably entangled. To recognize them as necessities is essential to understanding what it means to be in the world to begin with. Others, Merleu Ponty (1962) in particular add that the human body is never without a place or that place is never without body; indeed the lived body is itself a place that is indispensable in the constitution of the place world. The places we inhabit are known by the bodies we live in. Similar to Proust, for Merleu Ponty a place is somewhere I might come to and when I do come to it, it is not just a matter of fitting into it. I come to a place as providing an indefinite horizon of my possible action. Even more strongly, Malpas (1999) suggests that place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience; it is not founded on subjectivity but is rather that on which subjectivity is founded. For Casey (1998) and these writers, the “where” is back in place once again and finally” (Casey, p. 340). The idea that human identity is somehow tied to location and place is not new, but for persons interested in locative arts/media, places/neighborhoods are more than the nostalgia and longing that Pasquale has for his Borghetto. They are infinitely more complex. The locations/neighborhoods created by new location based art and media rely not as much on experience and physical proximity as on the social experience of being connected. Media artists create 136

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a new form of information narrative – one that relies on data to describe the world we live in. The primal, nostalgic sites of longing and loss are overlain with the dialectics of experience, culture, politics, and economics. They are also overlain with narratives invisible to the naked eye. Accordingly, places not only reside in the contemporariness of today but importantly, they are assemblages of memories, experiences, ideas, dialogues, and technology that rest on a foundation of the past and the present at the same time. It is this simultaneity of these dimensions of locatedness that makes new dialogues possible. Our consideration of place includes a discussion around Public Art and there we explore the issue of permanence/immutability set against the contemporary penchant for that which is indeterminate/ephemeral or transient and temporary. This latter category occupies the middle ground between the fixed, material and the virtual and reflects postmodern sensibilities.

2

Space

Space is perhaps best thought of as a three dimensional void where things are held to exist only if they occupy volume. Location based technologies negate the consideration of volume and view space along the lines of abstract Cartesianism. According to Drew Hemment (2006), locative arts are indexical or statistical; they work within a highly constrained understanding of spatiality, one encountered via a system in which all things are reduced to a set of geographic coordinates. Accordingly many view new media or the digitization of all media as creating a distancing from the humanities and thus contributing to a reconsideration of what it means to be human. Similarly, beginning with the 16th century, the conception of space which relied on the Cartesian coordinate system set in motion a marginalization of place. Space with its numerical properties was regarded as absolute and finite. Thus it was perceived as scientific and crucial to the goal of imperialism. Place, a la Pasquale’s Borghetto as the subject of longing, nostalgia, desire, and as a social construction had no existence apart from that of space itself. Certain activities are accorded special spatial status, while others are not. Driving a truck is spatial (hence, work), talking on the phone is less spatial (hence, bureaucratic), and pondering an idea is simply ethereal (Sack, 1980, p. 17) hence, indolent.

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Dourise (2006) in his second essay on “Re-space-ing Place”, urges us to exercise caution in this line of thinking and suggests that space is as much a social product as is place. Although our experience of space refers to an external world or a Cartesian extension, the mathematical and conceptual resources that we use when we talk about space are the products of particular kinds of social practice. The critical turn he notes, is to recognize that mathematical practice itself is socially constructed! In geographic inquiry space is produced by social relations that it also reproduces, mediates, and transforms. According to Soja place is the result of a process commonly referred to as the socio-spatial dialectic. Contemporary new media technology has the effect of disrupting the empirical space of everyday action. As the technologies become more sophisticated, faster, more ubiquitous, they end up demolishing former distinctions, boundaries and categories, by their ability to collapse space and time. The work of Michel Foucault is relevant here. In “Space, Knowledge, and Power”, Foucault (1986) discusses utopias, dystopias, and heterotopias. Utopias are sites with no real place since they represent a perfected state. Dystopias can be real or imagined places in which the condition of life is characterized by deprivation, oppression, or terror. Heterotopias on the other hand are real places that contest and reverse sites within a given society. Heterotopias are at once absolutely different from the surrounding places they reflect and yet at the same time actually locatable in geographic reality. As such, they occupy a third space, a marginal location. Michel de Certeau takes this one step further and posits the existence of atopias – social constructions without territorial boundaries. For our work here heterotopias and atopias speak to crucial “other spaces” spaces made relevant to a mixed reality. In such a reductive understanding of spatiality, place and the body become a mere residue of the coordinate system (Hemment, 2006). De Certeau (1984) suggests that the grand panorama of the city is only understood by the ordinary practitioners who inhabit it, who live “down below” the threshold of this grand visibility. They walk; creating an urban “text” that is invisible. It exists only in the traces of everyday action (De Certeau, p. 93). The street view counters the political and economic meanings that are inscribed by the materiality of the buildings, monuments and town plan of urban space. This cataclysmic realization occurs when we move our bodies through space. The

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ubiquitiousness of computer technology – upon which locative media arts and technology derive their sustenance – creates new spaces to move in.

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Embodied Practice

A consideration of embodied practice is the next theme in Neighborhood Narratives. A study of movement opens the discussion to questions around how we respond to sound, smell, taste, image, memory as well as issues of the body – weight, mass and un-enhanced physicality and daily events. Moving bodies through space alters the stasis of the built environment. We invited a group of choreographers1 to collaborate in the teaching setting, and participate in the investigation of how a constantly changing sense of place affects the way in which we stabilize our sense of orientation. Poets (e.g. Vitiello’s Pasquale), artists, and philosophers (e.g. Merleu Ponty) have long recognized and acknowledged the privileged status of the body. According to Freud the best way to return to place is through the body and its senses – smell, sight, touch, hear, taste – and through movement. In space, the body’s role is that of providing directionality. Without this, material entities would be disoriented, lacking the definite directionality of “right and left,” “up and down,” “front and back.” Things are not oriented in and by themselves; they require our intervention to become oriented. Nor are they oriented by a purely mental operation: the a priori condition that exists independently of experience, orientation, belongs to the body, not the mind. What supplies the missing ground and fills the lacuna is the body. Only as ourselves in our own body are we able to grasp that the spatial world is oriented in certain directions. The true basis of directionality is not absolute space but our own oriented/orienting body – the absolute source (Casey, pp. 229–231).

............................................ 1 The Center for Creative Research (CCR) is a multi-year pilot project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), designed to create and implement, innovative long-term strategies for artist-university interaction. The Center is currently made up of eleven Founding Fellows (Ann Carlson, Pat Graney, David Gordon, Margaret Jenkins, Bebe Miller, Ralph Lemon, Liz Lerman, Eiko Otake, Dana Reitz, Elizabeth Streb and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar); Artist-in-Residence, Ain Gordon; Project Director, Dana Whitco; and Senior Advisor, Sam Miller, President of Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC).

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4

The Merger of Mixed Reality and Mobility

The final theme draws on the merger of mixed reality and mobility. Here the concern is with the relationship between the idea of ubiquitous, locative media and the site specific project. When real places are merged with virtual worlds, the result is a completely new environment where physical and digital objects co-exist in real time. The development of this enriched environment has appeared alongside major breakthroughs in our understanding of the brain – how we process sensory information and adapt our sensory functions. We explore all of these relationships by delineating the elements that constitute this new environment. In particular, we focus on the experience created by the use of mobile devices, and so the concept of a migrational city, where everyone is walking around, adds to our analysis of mobility. In addition to these themes, we also look to current discourses from geography, philosophy, art, architecture, and engineering to inform our work. There are two philosophical issues – one from humanism – what does it mean to be human. How do we locate ourselves in the new mixed reality environment in the mediated city? The second philosophical issue revolves around the questions, “Who am I?” “Where am I?” Ultimately these are the important concerns facing the world as we ponder our future. They form the framework of investigation for the Neighborhood Narratives Project.

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Neighborhood Narratives

Neighborhood Narratives is part of an ongoing series of site based socially engaged initiatives, as such it shares a collaborative pedagogy with other location based media programs such as Social Tapestries, a project sponsored by the Proboscis organization in the U.K. Social Tapestries describes itself as “exploring the potential benefits and costs of local knowledge mapping and sharing,” what they have termed, “the public authoring of social knowledge.” Proboscis has explored how networks and modes of communication – virtual and physical – foster and build communities of people and interests (http://socialtapestries.net). Similar to Proboscis, Neighborhood Narratives is creating different methods of reciprocal investigation, between artists, scholars, universities and the communities that are associated with them. Using as its central thesis that artists can provide a unique prism through which inter140

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secting and parallel lines of intellectual inquiry can be initiated and examined, NN is creating a transdisciplinary coalition that facilitates meaningful engagement with the practice of research. Neighborhood Narratives uses alternative technologies, basic mobile recording devices, on-line open-source tools such as blogging, and Google Maps along with analog resources such as sketch maps to produce context rich stories that portray the world, city, or neighborhood. It explores the real and metaphorical potentialities of mapping, walking, and wayfinding as methods of developing attachments, connecting, and constructing narratives in a virtual and spatial locality (neighborhood). Neighborhood Narratives offers a specific and unique situation from which to critically consider the locative arts and locative media in relation to the context of the city and to explore new and old models of communication, community and exchange. The project invites public participation, engages interactively, and encourages participants to consider their vocabulary of movement in space. The collaboration with movement artists provides a lens by which to look at the body and movement as physical architecture in urban space. The particular choreographers who are involved in the project draw on the influences of their generation such as chance, happening, do-it-yourself aesthetic, anarchy, and the unconscious, considering movement in the randomness of the everyday pubic sphere. At the core of Neighborhood Narratives is its inclusion into the arena of public art. In researching the history of Washington Square Park in Philadelphia, one project focused on public art’s concern with the indeterminate, the ephemeral and the transient. Each of the twelve benches in the park had a plaque dedicated to someone who had died. The student made twelve digital collages on which she wrote the story of each person memorialized. The one remaining empty bench was dedicated to her ailing grandmother who had emigrated from Henan, China. In the project, the student unearthed unseen histories of the people marked on the benches, and anticipated the impending loss of her grandmother. She anchored these photos to the benches and left them there. Over the course of the next few days, she went back to see how long the photos lingered. Neighborhood Narratives does not obligate sophisticated technology or design skills into its methodology. Instead it asks students to conceptually understand some of the processes of the mediated city such as negotiating geographic, political, ideological spaces and reconsidering the issues that they

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deal with in everyday life – the things they carry with them, the cell phones they use, the soft city they walk in, etc. To reconstruct their everyday assumptions in order to use them as a vocabulary and set of tools for looking at themselves and the world creatively and to articulate a personal vision in that form as a final project. Perhaps the best example of this negotiation of geographical, political, and ideological space is the project “Death and Homelessness on Callowhill Rd.” In this installation, the disparity between homeless squatters on one side of the street and gentrification on the other provided tools for introspection and reflection. Walking her dog around the block, the student was acutely aware of the difference between these contrasting ways of life. The juxtaposition of the homeless squatters to the newly refurbished homes represented an internal and external vulnerability, which had personal resonance. The installation led participants from Callowhill Road to a tent set up in her backyard. To get the full experience of the installation, participants had to walk a defined walkway filled with blocks – “stumbling blocks” – each one marked by a fabric that represented someone who had died. They had to step over the blocks to arrive at the tent, which was filled with her personal items, a construction of her inner world. In this project, the student juxtaposed the real world – Callowhill Road, with her mental and emotional one. Beyond the local focus of the projects, Neighborhood Narratives is international in scope. It has been piloted in Philadelphia, Tokyo, London, Rome and New York so far. These classes are networked and linked together in order to investigate the local/global dialectic and how that relationship is being transformed in a mediated world. Each city presents a distinctive canvas to draw on. NN offers a unique vehicle to preserve the individual traces of each student’s path through an archiving of the projects. A map interface provides the conduit to visualize both the individual and overall experience of the local/global dialogue.

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Fig. 1: Student Project: Mariko Kosaka, Neighborhood Narratives Tokyo, Spring 2006

In the experimental learning environment of Neighborhood Narratives we engage with these issues to test first hand how space is transformed, negated or amplified (Hemment 2006). Fundamentally, the goal of engaging with this location data and/or site specific installations is to tease out new awareness and appreciation of place and space. Here we highlight a few exercises generated by students that capture the aims and intents of NN. The exercises provide students with an opportunity to construct narratives in a virtual and spatial locality, research critical issues of the mediated city, and analyze complex relationships found in everyday reality.

6

Exercises

6.1

Mapping: Emotional Maps

The “new” map has become a collage of experiences, using tools and information that are created by a diverse populace. Emotional Maps ask the students to use the idea of a pop up map – the overview on one side, the detail on another – to map their week or their route on one side and the subjective, emotional experience of that time period, on another. They may use paper or technology, or any material including clothing, to create this “map”. The significance is to measure time, to visualize an internal process and to relate it

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to route or wayfinding. In another interpretation, they are asked to map their personal path in the city – “my New York”, or “my Tokyo” – to layer their experience on the Cartesian view of the landscape. It is a way to set up a process of “re-storying”, whereby students are asked to respond creatively to amplify their experience of place in order to position themselves, imaginatively and actually within the continuum of nature and technology. This exercise is related to Bio Mapping, a,, community mapping project in which over the last four years more than one thousand, five hundred people have participated. In the context of regular, local workshops and consultations, participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-explore their local area by walking the neighborhood with the device and on their return a map is created which visualizes points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualize the social space of a community (http://www.biomapping.net/).

6.2

Orientation: Push/Pull

The Push/Pull exercise we have adopted is used in treatment for vertigo. Two people walk together, one pushing, and the other pulling by holding each other’s arms. The person being pushed closes their eyes. The person pushing narrates what they observe around them in a continual stream of association, while the person pulling allows themselves to be “steered” by the other. Not only does one have to rely on the other person for their visual sense of the world, but they start to separate the senses within themselves. Balance is no longer achieved through visual orientation; it shifts to the legs, the sense of sound, and importantly, the physical proximity of one person to another. The exercise immediately disassociates all these elements and forces the sensory system to reorient itself in real time. This has led to several projects where the students employ some kind of presence and absence by eliminating or displacing one sense – whether it be sight, or sound. Pairs of students were asked to walk around a block. One partner would lead another who wore a blindfold. They were taken to specific locations on the block, where the student with vision would describe the 144

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location in detail. The blindfolded student used their cell phone to call a phone number in order to narrate what they imagined would be in that location in ten years. The result was an audio repository of the imagined block in ten years, mapped to location. In another exercise, called Body, Movement, Environment, two students set out to explore how the body correlates to the physical landscape and everyday places and objects in unexpected ways. Related to the French game of Parkour, an activity that is based on moving from one point to another as directly as possible – overcoming the obstacles of fences, walls, or gaps – these students encountered all the physical obstacles in a block radius. They sought to discover how their bodies created a new spatial experience, which they mapped to place via photographic documentation and video displayed in a monitor. The students here are asked to explore their relationship to the everyday environment, their sensory orientation, and embodied sense of place. The work of the artist Akitsugu Mayebayashi, in his project Sonic Interface, suggests some of the sensory alteration we may yet encounter in the future. Sonic Interface is a portable hearing device that is made from headphones, microphones, and a laptop computer. The participant is invited to walk around the city, and experiences modified sonic environments processed real time from the sounds it picks up. Mayebayashi has focused on the auditory sense as an interface between the body and the environment. By uncoupling sound from vision, his project questions what we assume as “real”. “Presence” requires the constant stabilizing and synchronizing of vision and sound; an uncoupling of the two opens up the possibility for other presences, other experiences of “self ”. This separation also importantly has the effect of destabilizing the experience of “place”.

6.3

Surveillance: Following

The Following exercise was inspired by both Janet Cardiff ’s audio walks2, an example of the expressive, generative version of ambulant geo-notative locative art practice; and Sophie Calle’s Suite Vénitienne, where she used a conceptual ............................................ 2 Two of which are Walk Münster by Janet Cardiff with Georges Bures Miller, 1997. Skulpture Project Münster 97, curated by Kasper König, Münster, Germany and The Missing Voice (Case Study B) byJanet Cardiff with Georges Bures Miller, 1999. Whitechapel Library organized by Artangel, London, England, June 17 – Nov. 27, 1999.

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strategy to create a document with photos providing evidence of her search to Venice to look for a stranger she met at a party. One student chose to follow five different people at his usual stop on the subway. Three of these people were “intimate strangers”, people he had observed frequently on his route, but whom he did not know. Two people he followed, as a first encounter. He documented the experience of each trajectory, the time and distance traveled the fantasies and assumptions of each life, housing them all in a web-based map project.

Fig. 2: Student Project: Mike Benner, Neighborhood Narratives Philadelphia, Fall 2005

Jean Baudrillard writes, “To follow the other is to take charge of his itinerary; it is to watch over his life without him knowing it. It is to play the mythical role of the shadow, which, traditionally follows you and protects you from the sun – the man without a shadow is exposed to the violence of life without mediation – it is to relieve him of that existential burden, the responsibility of his own life. Simultaneously, she who follows is herself relieved of responsibility for her own life as she follows blindly in the footsteps of another. Again, a wonderful reciprocity exists in the cancellation of each existence, in the cancellation of each subject’s tenuous position as a subject” (1983 p.82).

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Somewhat similarly, the responses of the students to the assignment ranged from one student’s realization that in her heart she loved to follow people – in fact, she realized that she had quite an “affinity for following people.” A city where walking is the main mode of transportation constantly puts people face to face, often the same people over and over. Since she moved to New York, it had frustrated her to find herself constantly surrounded by people she recognized but had never met. This assignment was her chance to figure out who these people really are. Yet, once she was asked to turn her curiosity into an exercise, the idea of following turned sour. She said, “I felt like I was invading not only their physical space, but their mental space too.” A different reaction was elicited from another student, who was extremely threatened by the idea of following someone and allowing someone else’s physical itinerary to determine her movement in the city. Her sense of territory had distinct racial and economic boundaries that determined her awareness of safety. Following another route was deeply disturbing. Her solution was to solicit the help of a friend to go with her. However, throughout the experience of following someone on an unfamiliar route, she commented that she had to “watch her back,” which became the next exercise for the class. The Following exercise is similar to the Loca (Location Oriented Critical Arts) project. According to Evans et.al. Loca was initiated out of an interest in how surveillance and social control emerge as a residue or unforeseen effect of virtuous information systems and network technologies. Loca observes people’s movements by tracking the position of the Bluetooth enabled devices that they carry. Over seven days more than two thousand five hundred people were detected enabling the team to build up a detailed picture of their movements. People were sent messages from a stranger with intimate knowledge of their motion. Over the course of the week the messages became gradually more sinister, the would-be friend mutating into stalker, “coffee later?” changing to “r u ignoring me?” For participants the experience of Loca is intangible, it unarths what is not seen. The aim is subtle affect. As the developers note, “Loca is like a picture glanced at sideways, a message caught in the corner of the eye, or a mosquito swatted on the arm (http://www.loca-lab.org/).” It makes apparent the kind of peer to peer observations that become possible as a result of the discomforts and dislocations associated with everyday surveillance.

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6.4

Public/Private: Put Something Here

Site-specific art carries the potential to redefine the intention of public place. Put Something Here, an exercise which is purposely oblique, teases out a variety of responses, all related to issues brought forward by the insertion of “something,” or intrusion into public space. Students are asked to “put something here” to which they usually respond, “What is the something and where do we put it?” In reply we present Krzysztof Wodizcko’s “Alien Staff,” a pole with a mini video screen on the top and a loudspeaker in the middle that plays a video projection of the person carrying the staff. Wodizcko designed the Alien Staff in response to the dilemma of the outsider, the immigrant who is invisible (and also silent) as he moves through public territory. The Alien Staff is meant to make the bearer (the alien) visible by creating a double presence, one in “media” and one in “life,” inviting a new perception of a stranger as imagined (on screen) or as experienced (real life) (Wodizcko 1999, p.104). In examining projects of this nature, we are attempting to bring forward how engaging new media technologies offer new conceptions of place as a space of resistance, interference, and enunciation in opposition to those augmentations of surveillance and control they also enable (Myers, 2006). One project, titled Palimpsest FM, consisted of a device that houses a hidden speaker which plays back the sounds of the same spot from an earlier time, anywhere from thirty seconds to a day before. The replayed recording serves as an audio version of a palimpsest, a proof of what had been there before. Using sound as her medium, the student created a nearly seamless overlapping of past and present where the sounds of today cannot be discerned from the sounds of the past. Like a palimpsest, it will be unclear where the past ends and the present begins. Bachelard speaks of centering oneself in stable surroundings, but if your surroundings are constantly in flux (and also incidentally not just your surroundings) like they are in New York, it is no wonder a sense of ontological anxiety can result. New York City has often been described as a place where the physical environment changes so quickly that rebuilding without being able to erase what came before it becomes very obvious to anyone who has lived there long enough to call New York their home. “You’ve become a New Yorker once you have the urge to point out a place and say, “that used to be … The “that used to be … that every New Yorker expresses is part of the inerasable past that is being built over, it is an expression of memory of a piece of 148

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their home and consequently a piece of their identities that is gone but not forgotten. It is embodied in the senses. The urge to tell others what used to be is an attempt to reassert one’s identity and the home they had carved out of the city. This project serves as another means of describing the “that used to be.” But instead of subjectively telling the narrative of one person’s New York, it objectively captures what the place witnessed. The audio palimpsest played back in this project serves as a kind of memorial of what used to be in the immediate past. It stands to commemorate the same everyday New York that its citizens quietly mourn when it is torn down and built over. It memorializes the trivial happenings that many may overlook, but still plays an important role in a place’s narrative and consequently a person’s identity. By placing Palimpsest FM in Washington Square Park under the shadow of the statue of Garibaldi and the Washington Arch, a comparison can be drawn between the monuments that commemorate the selective history of the victors to one that records and replays all voices of the city equally. The neighborhood narrative can then become more complete as it plays back everything it hears.

6.5

Local/Global: The International Exercise

In the complexity of the contemporary city, we need to create new experiences of community to fill the need for significant encounter. The international aspect of the class, seeks to create networked relationships of place and alternate spaces of encounter. One of the ways we measure these interactions is to share relative experience from one place to another. By doing so we succeed in articulating a third space using digital tools and presenting it on the web. The International exercise brings together students from Rome, London, Tokyo, and the US. In each location, the cultural investigation has a different focus, depending on the traditions of the community. London, with a large history of map-making and local lore focused on location and social order. Tokyo begins with the media landscape of the urban environment. Rome is perfectly suited to the use of historic sites as a portal to the mining of the layers of history and anecdote. The students in Rome and Tokyo were asked to map their route from home to school. By contrasting one city experience to another, and mapping the relationship, we have a new way to visualize and experience different qualities of urban mobility.

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In one of the more powerful examples of the international character of Neighborhood Narratives, a Japanese exchange student decided to take the Neighborhood Narratives class in Tokyo, Philadelpia and Rome, creating a world-wide project that had autobiographical connections traced to each city. For Rome, she created an installation called “Bridge.“ She saw the bridge as a transitional space that linked central Rome to Trastevere, and served as a metaphor for her own states of transition between center and periphery. She gathered clothes from the gypsy market in Trastevere, concious of their narrative history. Onto these garmets she attached a web address for people to discover when gathering the clothes. At that site they would find a map of her path made up of text that narrated her experience of being an outsider. The clothes were laid down on the bridge and left there; the class checked back hours later to see what had happened. Some elements of the installation had been taken, and some kicked to the side of the bridge.

Fig. 3: Student Project: Mariko Kosaka, Neighborhood Narratives Rome, Summer 2007

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Fig. 4: Student Project, Detail, Neighborhood Narratives Rome, Summer 2007

In describing bridges, Heidegger observes, “To be sure, the bridge is a thing of its own kind; the location is not already there before the bridge is. Before the bridge stands, there are of course many positions along the stream that can be occupied by something. One of them proves to be a location, and does so because of the bridge” (Heidegger 1971). This is yet another illustration of the ephemeral character of public art.

6.6

Place/Space: Cross/Walks – Weaving Fabric Row

Situated storytelling is a way in which digital media are applied to real places, using wireless communications to map narrative to place. Connecting this kind of technological system to the design of a neighborhood story network, extends the interplay of absence and presence and facilitates the dynamic input of viewers and users in building a virtual portrait/archive; it provides the opportunity to add their own stories and pictures, annotate them, add comments, and respond to each other. It engages elements of photodocumentary, psychogeography, ethnography and environmental design to construct living narratives that tap into the impassioned stories and needs of a given community. These works underline the relationship of place to the larger historical and demographic movement of the area, bringing out personal articulations of cultural events. A special project generated by Neighborhood Narratives was Cross/Walks: Weaving Fabric Row, which constructed a portrait composed of interviews

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with merchants and personalities from the neighborhood, which had sitespecific delivery via cell phone on Fabric Row (4th Street between Bainbridge and Catherine) in Philadelphia. From these elements, an installation was composed in a gallery that combined the remote/local connection in an interactive audio component, along with a web site. The stories were accessible by cell phone in the location where they were told, and the public could add their own contributions from the street; or remote locations via the web. Although the stories are available on the web, but the project’s dynamic achieved more resonance when heard on Fabric Row, while walking in the place that was narrated. Merchants on Fabric Row, once a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, are now ethnically diverse, but share the desire to preserve the sense of place that Fabric Row has acquired through generations. “Cross/Walks demonstrates that both the art and the subject are in transition” (Marder, 2007). The emergence of online shopping and jumbo stores has heralded the demise of small, independent stores, like the ones on Fabric Row. The unique thing about narrative delivered over the cell phone is that it can preserve and distribute a sense of one place to everywhere. Cross/Walks engages the critical third space of mixed reality by standing on the street and accessing sounds and stories of the location through cell phones. It amplifies the sense of locality and alters the sense of time by adding narratives of people who are simultaneously engaged in live interactions in the same place. Situated story sites have grown up around the availability of cell phone technology to augment our experience of place. These projects, such as Murmur Toronto, offer “history from the ground up, told by the voices that are often overlooked when the stories of cities are told. We know about the skyscrapers, sports stadiums and landmarks, but Murmur looks for the intimate, neighborhood-level voices that tell the day-to-day stories that make up a city. Once heard, these stories can change the way people think about that place and the city at large (http://murmurtoronto.ca/).”

7

Conclusions

The Neighborhood Narrative project offers a view of how location aware art and media technologies can be appropriated to initiate new dialogues around concepts such as place, space, and location. It fosters new ways of engaging 152

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with/in the mediated city. By relying on walking, mapping and creating installations located between real and virtual space, the NN projects inscribe emotional and artistic visions on the canvas of geographical space. In so doing, they reconstruct collective and individual memories and provide a mechanism for sharing local histories and knowledge. Despite philosophical and existential concerns raised by new media (What does it mean to be human? How do we locate ourselves in a mixed reality environment in the mediated city? Who am I? Where am I?), the projects described here succeed in illustrating how the new sites opened at the interface of place, space, and the body amplify experience. Visualizing internal emotional processes and relating them to route or wayfinding; constructing narratives in a virtual and spatial locality/neighborhood that reveal attachments and connections; positioning oneself imaginatively and actually along a continuum of nature and technology; exploring the ephemeral quality of public art assume heightened resonance when they are located in place. In the NN projects, it is place that provides the richness of experience. For students in Philadelphia traveling on the bus to the site based installations, it is the shared experience of occupying a common space, a neighborhood unto themselves that was primary. For international students, the richness of the installations achieved the most salience and vibrancy in the place itself. The experience came from actually spending time in Tokyo, Rome, and the neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Place is fundamental. In this way, Neighborhood Narratives offers a specific and unique situation from which to critically consider the primacy of place to the locative arts and locative media. Neighborhood Narratives uses open source technologies and easily accessible tools. It does so in order to conceptually ground the processes that characterize geographic, political, and ideological spaces in the mediated city. It asks students to reconsider the issues they deal with in everyday life and to reconstruct their everyday assumptions in order look at themselves and the world in a new and creative way. The projects inside of Neighborhood Narratives explore the something else in-between the Cartesian understanding of space and grounded location. They are original and inventive ways to experience Pasquale’s vineyards and orange groves, new narratives of place.

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References BACHELARD, GASTON (1964). The poetics of space. Translated from the French by Maria Jolas. Foreward by Etienne Gilson. New York, Orion Press, pp. 2–10. BENJAMIN, WALTER (1968). The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov. In: Walter Benjamin-Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by HANNAH ARENDT. New York: Schocken, pp. 83–110 CASEY, EDWARD S. (1998). The Fate of Place: A Philosophical Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press. CALLE, SOPHIE. BAUDRILLARD, JEAN (1983). Suite Venitienne. Please Follow Me. Seattle: Bay Press, p. 82 DE CERTEAU, M. (1988). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. DERRIDA, J. (1981a). Positions, trans. A. Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. D OURISH, P. (2006). ‘Re-Space-ing Place: Place and Space Ten Years On.’ Paper presented at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference, 2006, November 4–8, Banff, Albert, Canada. FOUCAULT, M. (1986). ‘Of Other Spaces.’ Diacritics 16, 22–28 HEIDEGGER , MARTIN (1971). ‘Building Dwelling Thinking.’ In Poetry, Language, Thought trans. Alfred Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row. HEIDEGGER , MARTIN (1962). Being and Time. New York, Harper. LOCA. http://www.loca-lab.org/ MALPAS, J.E. (1999). Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MARDER , DIANNA. (June 14, 2007). The Philadelphia Inquirer, year 179, No. 14. MERLEU PONTY, MAURICE (1962). The Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Humanities Press, 248–254. MYERS, MISHA (2006). ‘Homing Devices for Unhomely Times.’ Leonardo eJournal, Vol. 14, No. 3. PROBOSCIS. http://proboscis.org.uk SOCIAL TAPESTRIES. http://socialtapestries.net SOJA, EDWARD W. (1989). Post Modern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. TUAN, YI FU (1977). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, pp. 3–10. TUTERS, MARC AND KAZYS VARNELIS. http://networkedpublics.org/locative_media/ beyond_locative_media VITIELLO, JUSTIN (1991). Vanzetti’s Fishcart. San Francisco: Mellen Poetry Press, p. 49. WODICZKO, KRZYSZTOF (1999). Critical Vehicles. Cambridge: The MIT Press, p. 104.

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S HANNON M ATTERN

Silent, Invisible City: Mediating Urban Experience for the Other Senses

Day after day my Daily Candy email shares a little taste, whisper, touch, peek, or sniff of what’s new and hot in New York. The newsletter’s editors make sure I know about all the latest sample sales, the newest designer dog spas, the bars and restaurants I’ll never get into. I occasionally take a glance before hitting delete, but more often than not, these empty calories go straight to the trash, unwrapped. In early January, however, I received an invitation to participate in Daily Candy’s 2007 “best of ” poll (see Figure 1). It wasn’t Web 2.0’s promise of democratic taste-making that pulled me in, but the site’s multisensorial conceit: “If we threw a year’s worth of ideas at you and asked you to pick your favorites,” the message read, “you’d undoubtedly experience sensory overload. So to make it easy, we’ve broken it down into categories…that correspond to the five senses.” In “Sight” I was to seek out New York’s “most innovative, inspiring, and promising designer or boutique.” In “Sound,” I selected “the best thing I’ve heard this year.” In “Smell,” I was to sniff out New York’s “most creative florist, soothing aromatherapist, or other purveyor of ode-worthy odors,” and in “Taste,” I was to select “the hottest new chef, baker, or other foodie front-runner.” Finally, in “Touch,” I tapped my favorite barber, manicurist, or facialist. I hadn’t patronized, or even heard of, the vast majority of the nominees, so I abstained from voting. But I poked around the site, pleased by the coincidental harmony between this online guilty pleasure and my recent research on the multisensory city and its mediation. Daily Candy offered a convenient object lesson. Sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch were translated through text and image: the site offered a clean design with plenty of white space, and its body copy, in Georgia, was accompanied by flat, playful, pastel illustrations. A mask, an ipod, a bouquet, a cupcake, and a lobster each served as an apparent icon of its respective sense. The site addressed primarily the eye, although in “Sound,” visitors could click through to external sites to find audio recordings of the featured artists.

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Fig. 1: Copyright 2008, DailyCandy, Inc.

Because there was no implied third dimension, no graphic texture, to the site, the only tactile experience was off-screen: between my fingers, mouse, and keyboard. My tongue and nose would have been engaged if the illustrated flowers and cupcake had evoked a synaesthetic response. I wondered if Daily Candy, despite its flat, text-and-image presentation, could be said to have somehow captured the five forms of sensory perception through their mediated presentation – or if the site’s sensory conceit was merely a convenient means of categorizing the “best of the city” awards. Representing myriad forms of sensory perception is perhaps more feasible when the media are material, as in an exhibition. Between 2005 and 2006, the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal hosted Sense of the City. Seeking to “challenge the dominance of vision,” the exhibition “propose[d] a rethinking of latent qualities of the city, offering complex analyses of the comforts, communication systems, and sensory dimensions of urban life – thus advancing a new spectrum of experience and engagement” (Canadian Centre for Architecture). The show was divided into five sections. In Nocturnal City, we examined the night-time city and its illumination, and, through Braille and audio-tactile maps, we imagined a sightless means of navigation. In Seasonal City, videos showed plows digging Montreal out from under feet of snow, and photographs imaged architectures of ice. In Sound of the City, we donned

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headphones to hear the unique soundscapes of various cities throughout the world. Surface of the City drew attention to the color, texture, and smell of asphalt by encouraging us to touch and smell samples of the materials that coat the city’s surface. Air of the City (see Figure 2) explored air quality and the regulation of the urban atmosphere with heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems. Here we also sniffed vials of bottled “urban” scents ranging from subway detergent to garbage. The exhibition covered new territory for the CCA and offered options for mediating the multisensory city: its graphics, models, recorded sounds, bottled aromas, and tangible artifacts appealed directly to the eyes, ears, nose, and skin. Still, the exhibition relied primarily on wall text and imagery, and, according to McGill University’s David Theodore, “never quite overc[ame] the difficulty of how to explore senses other than sight through visual material” (2006: 69). If not in execution, then at least in theory, Sense of the City offered, as its catalogue’s subtitle proposed, an “alternative approach” to architecture and urban design.1

Fig. 2: View of the installation Sense of the City @ Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; Photo Michael Legendre

“[T]he whole gamut of ‘sensorial’ phenomena that figure prominently in daily experience, and largely determine the design of buildings, are strikingly absent from urban studies,” wrote Phyllis Lambert, the CCA’s founder (2005: 14). Urban studies’ neglect of “sensorial phenomena” parallels absences or biases in

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other fields of research and practice – all of which, if brought into communication, could contribute greatly to an understanding of the multisensory city. Within media studies, two growing areas of study – urban communication and sound studies – promise to bring the field in touch with other scholars and practitioners interested in the design, representation, and perception of the “material city.” There has been longstanding interest within media and design studies in the “mediated” city: literary, cartographic, photographic, and filmic representations of the city; the role of urban media in defining community identity; and, more recently, urban wireless networks and locative media. Much of this work focuses on the textual, visual city. Meanwhile, the nascent field of sound studies has been calling attention to sonic experiences in material landscapes. Many studies of, or creative interventions in, the city have already integrated the concerns of urban communication and sound studies. Media historians and theorists (e.g., Jonathan Sterne, Michael Bull) have recently joined technology and environmental historians (e.g., Raymond Smilor, Karin Bijsterveld, Emily Thompson) in exploring how new sound media play out in nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century urban soundscapes. Even before the scholars reached this terrain, artists and composers – including R. Murray Schafer, Bill Fontana, Janet Cardiff, The Urban Sound Institute and a plethora of new artists and collectives – began mapping, measuring, and modulating the sounds of cities. Yet the city is more than image and sound – and mediating the city requires attention to urban dimensions beyond the visual and sonic. Some researchers, designers, and artists are investigating how media might be used to capture and convey urban experience for the other senses – for smell, taste, and touch. Recent exhibitions and publications – including Sensorium at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center and Sense of the City – have explored the embodied experience as an “alternate approach to urbanism.” Joining the project is a growing body of recent scholarship on sensory history. How might “other-sensory” mediations of the city inspire, corroborate, or supplement this recent scholarship on urban sensory experience? Mirko Zadini, in his introduction to the Sense of the City exhibition catalogue, proposes that these mediations have the potential to pose a different way of talking about, describing, and planning our cities; they suggest thinking of them as places for our bodies…; they remind us how mutable is our way of perceiving the urban environment; they offer 158

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us a history of the changes in the Western city from new points of view that have been hitherto neglected; in addition, they reveal to us the possibilities provided by the urban environment in its various aspects – those of sound, smell, touch, vision, and climate – and invite us to look at them in new ways (Zardini 2005: 24). Or hear, smell, taste, or touch them in new ways, he might rather have said. These urban mediations would enhance and expand the field of resources available to researchers, who still attend primarily to graphic sources. They also have the potential to enhance exhibitions exploring urban history or city life, to play a role in the development of multisensory and urban pedagogies, and to open up new directions for media art. Because the challenges of mediating the multisensory city are shared by a variety of disciplines, I will begin by reviewing some relevant work in sensory, urban, and media studies to see what each of these fields can contribute to this collaborative project. I will then examine how designers and artists are already experimenting with ways of mediating the city for the full sensory spectrum. As artists, engineers, designers, and researchers from various disciplines continue to explore sensory mediations and sensory design, they grapple with aesthetic, epistemological, and political questions – about the capacities of media, about the nature and culture of sensory experience, about the biases of our disciplines and practices, about our models for understanding and planning our cities. Mediating the multisensory city offers an ideal opportunity for “project-based” inquiry: in this project all of these significant questions converge – and the search for answers promises to be much more rigorous and fruitful when we see how each question comes to bear on the others.

1

Sensory Studies

“In recent years”, Zardini explains, “the human and social sciences, from anthropology to geography, have undergone a ‘sensorial revolution’ in which the ‘senses’ constitute not so much a new field of study as a fundamental shift in the mode and media we employ to observe and define our own fields of study” (22). The “revolution” was just that: a return to concerns that were once central to philosophy and the nascent social sciences, but eventually cycled out of fashion. The separation and prioritization of sight and visual modes of

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thinking is a modern phenomenon: “In premodernity,” anthropologist David Howes writes, “the senses were considered as a set.” This elemental understanding of the architecture of the senses came undone during the Enlightenment, when the association of vision with reason became entrenched, and the progressive rationalization of society became identified with the increasing visualization of society and space (2005a: 324). Smell, in particular, was marginalized. As art historian and Sensorium curator Caroline Jones explains, “Smell, at least since Locke, Kant, and Condillac, has been relegated to philosophical abjection, with fragrance, odor, scent, aroma, perfume, and stench all placed at the bottom of the epistemological hierarchy” (2006: 12). Through the past decades, academia has twisted through a series of intellectual “turns” – including the linguistic turn of the 1960s and 70s and the pictorial turn of the 80s. Emphases on the text and the image are still pervasive in the humanities, although there have been subsequent turns toward the corporeal and its focus on “embodiment,” and the material, which drew attention to the “physical infrastructure of the social world,” yet still “occlude[d] the multisensoriality of objects and architectures” (Howes 2005a: 322–3). Sensorial – specifically, non-visual – models have been, and continue to be, suppressed, Howes suggests, out of lingering fear that “an emphasis on sensation entails a loss of critical awareness and precipitates a slide into a morass of emotion and desire” – that sensation does not lend itself to intellectual distance, to critical investigation (2005b: 6). Yet there is a growing body of recent scholarship on sensory history and culture, including Alain Corbin’s (1986) and Constance Classen’s (1994) work on smell; Peter Charles Hoffer’s (2003) research on the Sensory Worlds in Early America (2003); Elizabeth Harvey’s (2003) work on touch; Mark M. Smith’s (2001, 2004) research on race in sensory history and his 2008 anthology, Sensory History; and the new academic journal The Senses and Society. Howes and his interdisciplinary colleagues in Concordia University’s Sensoria Research Team have undertaken many fascinating, interdisciplinary studies on sound, taste, touch, and smell. Some of this work is presented in Howes’s 1991 edited volume, The Varieties of Sensory Experience, and his 2005 Empire of the 160

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Senses. In the latter volume, Howes proposes a necessary link between this work on sensation and the spatial practices: “emplacement,” a conceptual thread that links the various essays in Empire of the Senses, presupposes a “sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment,” and regards the “environment” in this triad as both social and physical (2005: 7).

2

Urban Senses

While it is true that the full sensory spectrum has, until recently, been neglected by urban studies and architecture, the senses are not as strikingly absent as Lambert claims. Howes and Zardini, director of the CCA, suggest that we might look to the environmental research and activism of the 1960s and 70s; to Henri Lefebvre’s, Michel de Certeau’s and Guy Debord’s interest in “everyday urbanism”; to Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1974, 1977) work on environmental perception; and even to Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the “sense ratio” and Edward Hall’s “proxemics” – all of which informed designers of their time – to find early interest in the sensory aspects of design and urban experience (Zardini 2005: 18–19; Howes 2005a). Today, architects Jacques Herzog, Juhani Pallasmaa, Steven Holl, Peter Zumthor, Shigeru Ban, and Kengo Kuma regard architectural design as a multisensory endeavor. “Critical thinking in this context is no longer driven by language, semiotics, text, and signs,” Zardini writes, “but by a rediscovery of phenomenology, experience, the body, perceptions, and the senses. This ‘sensorial revolution’ has been matched in architecture and urbanism by a rediscovery of the element of character” (2005: 23). The notion of spatial character addresses a place’s specificity; it “embraces all the various sensory experiences that one can have in a place” (ibid.). Richard Sennett’s Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, published in 1994, examines the specific characters of Perikles’ Athens, early Christian Rome, medieval and Revolutionary Paris, Renaissance Venice, 19th-century London, and 20th-century New York. Sennett presents a “history of the city told through people’s bodily experience: how women and men moved, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed their noses, where they ate, how they dressed, when they bathed, how they made love in cities from ancient Athens to modern New York” (1994: 15). The essays in Alexander Cowan’s and Jill Steward’s (2007) The City and the Senses offer additional examples of historical urban sensory “character,” including the smells of 16th

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century Venice, the socio-sensory life surrounding beer in 19th century Munich, and food cultures of modern Vienna. Urban food spaces – their sights, smells, textures, and tastes – have proven to be ideal case studies for exploring the multisensory city. In 2005 Karen A. Franck edited a special “Food + the City” issue of Architectural Design; contributors examined the varieties of eating spaces in the city, including food carts and sidewalk dining; the tastes, smells, and sounds of food activities in urban cultural enclaves; roof and neighborhood gardens and greenmarkets; and the growing and selling of food as a necessary concern for urban planners. While food has been shaping the multisensory character of cities since the beginning of civilization, studies of modern cities have had to grapple with the impact of new technologies – particularly transportation and media technologies – on urban form and experience. For instance, street cleaning and paving, and other techniques and technologies intended to sanitize and standardize the urban landscape, have contributed to the “continual erosion of the perceptual sphere” (Zardini: 21). Zardini writes, [C]ity planning has long privileged qualities of urban space based exclusively on visual perception. Above all, sounds and odours have been considered disturbing elements, and architecture and city planning have exclusively been concerned with marginalizing them, covering them up, or eliminating them altogether. (20-1) Sennett argues that modern “technologies of motion” have contributed to this marginalization and masking. Modern transit has made possible the dispersal of the urban population, while facilitating effortless movement, collapsing geography and insulating travelers from external stimuli. “The new geography,” Sennett writes, “reinforces the mass media. The traveler, like the television viewer, experiences the world in narcotic terms; the body moves passively, desensitized in space, to destinations set in a fragmented and discontinuous urban geography” (1994: 18). Of course the mass media are not simply a convenient metaphor for the alienation of the urban dweller; media are among the primary contributors to this desensitization. More recently, researchers have drawn attention to the “invisible media” of the city – particularly its wireless and mobile networks – and how they inform urban planning and the way people navigate and interact with the city and with one another. The SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT and the Urban 162

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Atmospheres group at Intel Research Berkeley, for instance, have focused on “senseable” or “sensory” media – that is, the use of sensors and hand-held electronics in studying the built environment. Yet much of this work, as evidenced by Brian McGrath’s and Grahame Shane’s “Sensing the 21st-century City” (2005) issue of Architectural Design and the recently published Encountering Urban Places: Visual and Material Performances in the City (2007), focuses on the gathering of data via sensors, and the subsequent visualization of that data.2 “Sensing,” in these cases, refers not to sensation, but to data collection and visualization – to the engagement, once again, of the eye, and on rare occasions, the ear. But what about the other senses? How might we heed Howes’ advice to move beyond “‘reading’ or ‘visualizing’ the city,” and think about how to represent “‘sensing’ the city through multiple sensory modalities”? (2005a: 323).

3

Sensory Media

There has been a great deal of recent scholarship in media and film studies on the materiality of media, even ostensibly immaterial digital media, and the sensory nature of media reception – yet much of this work still focuses on the auditory and visual.3 Laura U. Marks, in The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, aims to understand “how meaning occurs in the body, and not only at the level of [audio and visual] signs” (2000: xvi-xvii). She looks beyond the image and sound to discern “how film and video represent the ‘unrepresentable’ senses”: touch, smell, and taste. Echoing Howes, she admits that these “elements of an embodied response to cinema…have until recently been considered ‘excessive’ and not amenable to analysis,” yet she insists that “they can indeed by analyzed – or, more properly, met halfway.” There are of course media that are inherently tactile, and there are mediated experiences in which the senses of smell and touch are reproduced, rather than represented through media.4 Marks, drawing on the work of art historian Aloïs Reigl, mentions various historical “tactile modes of representation,” including late Roman metalwork, the “‘low’ traditions of weaving, embroidery, decoration, and other domestic and women’s arts” (2002: 6). Since the “cinema of attractions,” filmmakers like D. W. Griffith, Marcel Pagnol, John Waters, Yervant Ghiankian and Angela Ricci Lucci have used incense, scratch-and-

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sniff cards, and scents diffused via bunsen burner to make the exhibition of their films multisensory experiences (ibid.: 212). The exhibition site – including, for example, Walter Gropius’s Total Theater, Frederick Keisler’s Film Guild Cinema, and the Labyrinth Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal – is sometimes regarded as an integral part of the cinematic experience, adding tactile and kinesthetic dimensions to the audio and visual signs on the screen. Similarly, theme parks and immersive branded spaces are intended to function as holistic sensory spaces. Stationery has long been scented, and leather covers have long imparted to books a distinctive olfactory character – but even electronic media are sometimes made to feel and smell. Video game designers seek to perfect tactile feedback systems to enhance the “real-feel” of the game. In her 2002 book Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Marks wrote about Digiscents, a start-up that aimed to “scent-enable movies, games, music, animation, or any digital media” in an attempt to “create a more immersive and captivating environment” (http://digiscents.com). Digiscents folded in mid-2001 – but other inventors continue to experiment with the mediation of smell: in 2005 ZAN, a Georgia-based pop/funk/New Age group, reportedly released a CD that emits choreographed scents via a ScentDomeTM that plugs into the listener’s home computer. In early ScenTeck Technologies announced the release of Scratch-N-Sniff Pro, a “scent card” that “broadcast[s]” from a user’s computer speakers a “unique vibrating tone” that “asks the brain to recognize it, not as a sound, but as a scent”; the download came with a free Trojan virus (http://www.scenteck.com/). These entrepreneurial developers, in collaboration with companies like Symrise, a large global manufacturer of flavorings and fragrances, might someday announce that consumers can now smell- and taste-test online recipes, via our ScentDomesTM and TasteSpoonsTM, before deciding what to make for dinner. Yet Marks claims that this objectification and instrumentalization of smell precludes a sensory experience that is inherently “embodied, precognitive, and sensuous” and denies the variety of rich, personal responses, and non-semiotic meanings, that smell evokes (2002: 116). She proposes instead that the “unrepresentable” senses are most effectively presented not as physical productions supplementing audiovisual or digital media, but as mediated evocations. The body then translates this evocation into a unique sensory experience. Mark Hansen similarly argues that, for digital media, the body plays a crucial role in converting a pure flow of data into perceptive frames – the photograph, the 164

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filmic image, the video, and even the auditory and tactile “image” – each of which is a“rich, singular experience”; “the body undergoes a certain empowerment, since it deploys its own constitutive singularity (affection and memory) not to filter a universe of preconstituted images, but actually to enframe something…that is originally formless” (2004: 3, 11). When the “unrepresentable” and“preconstituted” sense is filtered through the body, the perceiver is able to call on affect and memory in order to“frame” a rich, singular sensory experience. Marks and film scholar Vivian Sobchack propose several means by which audiovisual media can evoke non-visual and non-auditory experiences. First, they might do so by promoting narrative identification; we see a character eating a hot dog at Coney Island or sunning in Central Park and, by identifying with that character, we sense the experience as he or she might experience it. Second, film and video might evoke smell, taste, or touch through “intersensory links,” or synaesthetic references. We might hear the jingle of windchimes and feel a light breeze, or we might synesthetically experience the “visual aroma” of a film like The Scent of Green Papaya (Sobchack 2004: 65). Marks explains how this works: By appealing to once sense in order to represent the experience of another, cinema appeals to the integration and commutation of sensory experience within the body. Each audiovisual image meets a rush of other sensory associations. Audiovisual images call up conscious, unconscious, and nonsymbolic associations with touch, taste, and smell, which themselves are not experienced as separate (Marks 2000: 222). Third, film or video might promote what she calls haptic perception by encouraging a “bodily relationship between the viewer and the image,” a relationship that Benjamin described as mimesis (2002: 3). Film or video that “indexes the physicality and mortality of its medium” – via grainy, pixellated, decaying, pixellated, or digitally manipulated images; images dispersed over the screen surface; images varying in quality, color, or tone – require the viewer to participate in reconstructing the image (ibid.: xxii). This participation, Sobchack argues, is “a form of sensual catachresis”: “the spectator’s lived body in the film experience…fills in the gap in its sensual grasp of the figural world onscreen by turning back on itself to reciprocally (albeit not sufficiently) ‘flesh it out’ into literal physicalized sense” (82). “Haptic images pull the viewer close,”

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transforming the eye into an organ of touch, and vision into a “multisensory, intimate, and embodied perception” (Marks 2002: 16, 133). Did the CCA’s grainy images of a snow-covered Montreal make me lean in to the photographs, to complete the city scene pixellated by snowflakes – and, in leaning in, did I feel a blast of cold air? Did Daily Candy’s flat, grainy cupcake illustration “overwhelm…[my] vision and spill…[over] into other sense perceptions,” teasing my nose and mouth with a hint of chocolate cake and vanilla icing? (Marks 2002: 133). Would a hazy photograph of a steamy afternoon at the Staten Island Fresh Kills landfill have evoked a more personal, more intense olfactory response than the CCA’s vial of “garbage” aroma? How can we draw from this work on mediated sensation to enhance mediated representations of the multisensory city? In the following section we will explore a few examples of urban mediation.

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Mediating the Multisensory City

To interrogate the city; to extract knowledge from what is on the surface unknowable; to render visualizations beyond the dictates of official cartography or planning; to discover secret movements and connections: From the pioneering photography of Nadar to the psychogeography of the Situationists, it is by these Baudelairean methods and motives that artists have sought to comprehend the city and their own place in it, often responding to the technological imperatives of the day even as they employ those same devices (Vanderbilt 2007: 119). Artist Christian Nold seeks to understand how people explore and experience urban space by “capturing and visually conveying our moments of psychological ‘arousal’ in the city” via “emotional mapping” or biomapping (2007: 119– 20). He outfits his subjects with finger cuffs that measure emissions of galvanic skin response as they wander through various urban areas, and cross-references those measurements with comments the participants make in walking notebooks. The result, critic Tom Vanderbilt says, is a “narrative, ambulatory version of the polygraph” (ibid.). Nold takes as his raw material people’s affective, sensory, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive responses to the urban environment. But then he ultimately renders this data in graphic form, thereby collapsing a multidimensional experience into a flat representation. 166

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How might similarly situated practices, projects that take place on the streets and sidewalks of the city, use media to call attention to the multiple channels of urban sensation? Conflux, a psychogeography festival held (almost) annually in Brooklyn, includes several participatory projects that promote situated experiences, and many of these projects are enhanced by or coordinated through media technologies – primarily sensors, personal digital devices, or audiovisual media. Yet in others, “mediation” is as simple as verbal communication, chalking the sidewalk, or, in the case of Jaclyn Meloche’s “Making Winter” at the 2007 festival, punching holes from sheets of white paper. Meloche used thousands of these holes as paper snowflakes to evoke the sensory character of winter: “I want to cover the area around me with snow, and play in, roll in it, and make snow angels in it. In the context of global warming and our ever-changing environment, this performance comments on the so-called erasure of winter” (“Making Winter”). The medium of white paper visually represented snowflakes, and was intended to synaesthetically evoke the feel of snow – and perhaps, if the experience of making snow angels was sufficiently immersive to drown out the stench and swelter of a New York July, the project would also call to mind the muffled sounds and crisp smells of winter. Yet the contrast between the real and imagined environments highlighted the disparity between the iciness of her native Canada and the snowless-ness of New York, and elicited the disturbing realization that, thanks to a changing climate, snow in July may be no more unlikely than a white January. Hybrid on-site/mediated experiences were also the work of Red Dive, a now inactive cross-disciplinary performance group that sought to create “artistic experience in which audiences could engage with many different kinds of art and performance on a multi-sensory level and interact with each other and the surroundings in a heightened way”; their performances often encouraged civic engagement and addressed such social issues as gentrification and immigration (Red Dive, “About Us”). The collective’s guided “performance-tours” throughout New York involved impromptu dances and musicians that sometimes appeared alongside the tour, “animating an overlooked piece of architecture through rhythm and sound” (ibid.). Of particular interest here is their 2000 work, “One Less Sense,” a tour of an old school building in which participants were blindfolded and encouraged to hear, feel, taste, and smell their way through the space. Alexis Soloski of the Village Voice found the tour to be a very “girly” experience: “The participant is subject to very little conflict or confrontation”; “the piece mostly proceeds one sense at a

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time,” rather than capturing the simultaneous, sometimes cacophonous, multisensoriality of most spatial experiences (2000). Still, Red Dive’s work sought to engage each of the senses and connect them to the character of a particular place, and they inspire us to consider how these senses of spatial experience might be represented through mediation. How might we capture the directness of this experience off-site? What if this old school, or another historic site, were about to be demolished: How might we capture for posterity the unique smells of its rooms and rhythms of its staircases? While these works defy categorization into “the old genre categories” of “video art,” “sound art,” or “tangible media,” Caroline Jones says, they also represent a new “aesthetic attitude” in which “modernist segregation of the senses is giving way to dramatic sensorial mixes, transmutations, and opportunities for intensified and playful mediation” (Jones 2006: 3, 6). This work functions variously – sometimes by orienting the subject within his or her urban context, by using sounds or scents or textures to connect one to his or her surroundings; and other times, as with the summertime snow in “Making Winter” and the impromptu dances in Red Dive’s work, through “displacement, dislocation, distribution, and disorientation” (Jones 3). This is not the disorientation of the 1960s, when “the senses were identified as a site for counter-culture,” Jones writes. “The politics of today demand a conscious culture rather than a counterculture… [T]he same capacity for intellection” that contributed to the modern hierarchization of the senses, with vision on top and smell on the bottom, “can be enlisted in its critique. And now we can try to tap body senses as additional ways to think” (42). Meloche intends for “Making Winter” to involve the body in a critique of climate change. The bottled aromas at Sense of the City highlight the contrast between the stench of decaying garbage and the artificial non-odor of sanitation in the urban environment. Even on-screen representations of the city, when haptically perceived, pull the viewer in close to taste the foods of a busy multicultural metropolis, to feel the contact of others’ skin in a crowded urban square, to smell the aromas of these bodies and foods. These mediated sensory experiences can promote “empirical thinking” about such issues as air quality, noise pollution, ergonomic design, gentrification, or environmental conservation. They can also contribute greatly to scholarship in urban studies, geography, history, media studies, and other disciplines that address sensory experience. For instance, Juncture, a joint project of UCLA, the California Department of Parks, and Disney Imagineering, allows citizens to use mobile phones and 168

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digital cameras, along with global positioning devices and geographic information systems, to map their urban networks and identify social forces informing the evolution of Los Angeles (UCLA CENS, et. al.; “Remapping LA”). This input, represented in maps, still images, audio and video recordings, and text, is ultimately brought together in media installations and performances at various sites throughout the city. Similar work has taken place at Parsons The New School for Design; the Department of Communication Design and Technology’s “Mobile Geographies” project uses mobile phones and data types similar to those used at UCLA to create a platform for “geo-tagged urban information”: “The goal is to connect virtual narrative layers to tangible places, providing a ghosted space where stories, histories and statistics reveal patterns of association and visions of the future” (“About Mobile Geographies”). Yet, one wonders how these sensing technologies capture non-audiovisual experiences and responses, and how the representations of this data, in text, image, and audio, evoke the silent, invisible city – the one we cannot see or hear. One final project grapples intelligently with these questions, and warrants a close examination. Anthropologists Ruth Tringham’s, Michael Ashley’s, and Steve Mills’ Remediated Places Project “aims to share the multisensorial experience, construction and memory of places, specifically cultural heritage sites” – in this case, the 9000-year old mound of Çatalhöyük, Turkey (Tringham et. al. 2007). This project doesn’t deal specifically with cities, but its techniques can certainly be applied to the representation of urban places. The project developers have collected representations and recordings of the mound in a wide variety of media formats: photographs, drawings, video, virtual reality renderings, GIS maps, texts, and numerical data created during archeological digs, videowalk logs recorded with binaural microphones, video interviews with archeologists about their “remembered sense perception” at Çatalhöyük, and ambient sound clips. All of these media are then tagged to identify their relevance to various themes; the developers have identified four that are central to the project: “Life Histories of People, Places, and Things (incorporating memory); the Senses of Place (incorporating the sensorial experience); Viewing the Past at Multiple Scales (incorporating information); and Communicating and Collaborating with the Public (which lies at the heart of the Remediated Places Project).” The project is scalable, modular, and portable for reception in various formats and by difference audiences. On-site in Turkey, the project could serve as an installation at an interpretive center; visitors could take an ipod and head-

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phones with them while touring the site, and they could choose an audiovisual tour that represents any of the four themes. One option is a “sensuous tour,” which would describe the scents of the early morning; the sound and feel of the snow underneath your feet…; you will see intimate close-ups of the excavation where you cannot go; you can walk (virtually) amongst the actual remains of the houses and experience the rhythm of excavation in the hands and tools of the archaeologists, and hear the multi-lingual quiet chatter of voices. The “life history” tour recreates memories of past excavations through recorded voices, readings of diaries, images, and videos chronicling the site at various stages of its history. Imagine applying similar techniques in Red Dive’s “One Less Sense” tour of the old schoolhouse.

Fig. 3: Courtesy of Remixing Çatalhöyük

The project could also be experienced remotely as a website (see Figure 3): you might take a virtual tour that provides some of the same content presented in the on-site audiovisual tour, including video and photographs, but online, the still and moving images stand in for direct experience. The imagery and narration strive to recreate the senses not directly experienced: there is a “slow

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pace of movement, a focus on hands and trowels and feet to express the sense of touch, the sounds and slow pace of excavation.” Finally, the project could be a live performance, which the developers describe as “something between a play, an opera, and a circus” – a form of improvisational theater that appeals to embodied sensory knowledge of the place. Tringham et. al. regard the user as the primary agent in organizing and imparting structure to the site’s content. Mark Hansen argues that, in perceiving digital media, the body “deploys its own constitutive singularity not to filter a universe of preconstituted images, but actually to enframe something…that is originally formless” (2004: 11) Remediated Places seeks to “enable the user – at whatever level of experience and skill – to draw out these innumerable fragments of multisensorial places, memories, life-histories, and interpretations of the archaeological data at multiple scales…and recombine or remix them”; a “key point of the project,” the developers say, “is to demonstrate transparently the intentionality of authoring and the shared experience of author and audience that is created through interactivity.” The project developers and users share in this process of authoring the mediated experience of Çatalhöyük. Tringham et. al. also think critically about the pedagogical value and rhetorical potential of the visualizations – photos, videos, and virtual reality reconstructions – in the project. Rather than striving for photorealism, the authors advocate “incorporating and engaging with elements of uncertainty and process” – like the grainy, pixellated, decaying images that foster haptic perception. “Only in this way,” the authors say, “can digital visualisations move beyond a sole concern with imitation and embrace issues of creativity and ambiguity that more fully engage and challenge audiences.” The sense and past of a place should be represented not as linear and universal, but as something pieced together, colored by affect and personal memory – and the media used to represent this spatial past should be chosen to reflect this patch-worked history. The developers are also particularly concerned with the mediation of the non-audiovisual senses. They note that archaeology is a predominantly visual and tactile field, but that archaeologists “are not practiced in thinking about the role of non-visual senses and do not take pleasure in recording them.” They suggest that non-audiovisual aspects of a site can be relayed through textual description – yet the challenge is to “dynamically share those … sensations with wider … audiences and in combination with other modes of sensory engagement.”

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Their proposals for accessibly representing these “other” senses bear significant resemblance to Marks’ strategies for representing the “nonrepresentable” senses through audiovisual media. The anthropologists’ first strategy is what Marks calls “narrative identification”: in Remediated Places, “sweat dripping off an excavator’s forehead triggers a feeling or memory of heat in the user; a close-up of hands excavating will trigger through their rhythm the memory of a song or a dance.” Their second strategy addresses the embodiedness of even virtual media use, which both Marks (2002) and Michelle White (2006) have discussed. Remediated Places requires the user to “swing from virtual touch and movement to physical movement and touch”; “even the on-line format,” they note, “requires the hand-movement of the keyboard and mouse.” They seek additional ways to “increase the bodily haptic experience,” by, say, instructing the user to move her hands and feet, or to move away from the screen and perform a particular action. Even in the onsite video-walk, narrators issue instructions to visitors to carry out specific tasks “to trigger imagined tactile experience.” Video itself, as opposed to other more static representations, imparts a sense of movement to the mediated site: its “immersiveness and immediacy of kinesthetic experience,” they suggest, cannot be replicated in other media. “The videos take advantage of movement through space and proximity to various textures and objects, tactile sensation of the feet, even the … breathing of the videographers.” The use of first-person game engines has the potential to offer differently embodied means of moving through the mediated space. Their final strategy is essentially what Marks calls haptic perception: they seek to create footage that expresses a more “intimate scale.” “Intimate” refers first to the proximity to the mediated subject; the anthropologists aim to capture this intimacy on film through “close-up video walks within the ‘forbidden’ excavation area” – by granting access to secret spaces – and through “ultra close-ups of the hands and trowels at work.” Capturing the “hand-ballet” of excavation work imparts a rhythm to the work and might again encourage narrative identification or projection into the image. Yet the project developers also use the term “intimate” to refer to “the lack of orchestration, direction, and explicitness, to reflexivity” of their recorded images. These are the blurry, distributed, disorganized images that pull the viewer in close and encourage heightened engagement with the on-screen image. The theories of media materiality and sensory mediation put forth by Hansen, Marks, Sobchack, Munster, White, and a host of other artists and scholars 172

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come alive in the anthropologists’ project. We began with an object lesson – Daily Candy – and we end here with another – Remediated Places, which demonstrates that an emphasis on sensation need not entail “a loss of critical awareness” or a “slide into a moral of emotion and desire”; rather, it demonstrates that “critical investigation” need not bracket out feeling – that these are not exclusive categories of cognition and experience (Howes 2005b: 6). This project crosses epistemological boundaries and raises questions, including those we mentioned earlier, about the capacities of media, about the nature and culture of sensory experience, about the biases of our disciplines and practices, about our models for understanding space. This project, and several we examined earlier, raises questions about the effectiveness and ethics and of reproducing versus representing various sensory experiences; do we attempt to simulate the feel of clay, or do we capture that experience through haptic perception? How do we address these questions in mediating the simultaneous, often cacophonous, multisenoriality of everyday urbanism? How do we mediate without flattening the experience, instrumentalizing sensation, or denying the variety of rich, personal responses? The mediation of taste, in particular, requires additional research and experimentation. How might the exciting research on urban foodways, for instance, be enhanced by or represented through mediated olfaction and taste? Furthermore, what are the methodological implications of examining the already-pervasive mediation of urban experience – and the unique sensations of, say, navigating by GPS, or perambulating inside an ipod “sound bubble” – by “employ[ing] those same devices” of mediation (Vanderbilt 2007: 119)? These questions are best addressed through collaborative work involving scholars and practitioners in various fields invested in the city, who are concerned with writing histories and analyses and criticism that engage more than the eye and ear – that capture the silent, invisible city. Ultimately, such work has the potential to enhance the exhibitions in our city museums, to contribute to the development of multisensory pedagogies, to inspire new media art, to open up new “other sensory” resources to scholars in myriad fields. And, as Zardini reminds us, urban mediations like those described here “pose a different way of talking about, describing, and planning our cities” (2005: 24). These mediations may in turn shape the very cities they represent.

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References “About Mobile Geographies” (n.d.), Online: http://a.parsons.edu/~mobile_geographies/ ?q=node/124 (accessed 4 January 2008). CANADIAN CENTRE FOR ARCHITECTURE (n.d.), “Sense of the City,” Online: http://www.cca.qc.ca/pages/Niveau3.asp?page=sensecity&lang=eng (accessed 4 January 2008). CLASSEN, CONSTANCE (1994). Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, London: Routledge. CONCORDIA SENSORIA RESEARCH TEAM (n.d.), Online: http://alcor.concordia.ca/~senses/ (accessed 4 January 2008). CORBIN, ALAIN, (1986). The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. COWAN, ALEXANDER AND STEWARD, JILL (eds.) (2007). The City and the Senses: Urban Culture Since 1500, London: Ashgate. DAILY CANDY (n.d.), Online: http://www.dailycandy.com/sweetest_things/2007/ new_york/(accessed 4 January 2008). FRANCK, KAREN A. (ed.) (2005). Food + the City: Architectural Design, Chichester: Wiley-Academy. FRERS, LARS AND MEIER , LARS (eds.) (2007). Encountering Urban Places: Visual and Material Performances in the City, London: Ashgate. HARVEY, ELIZABETH D. (ed.) (2003). Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. HOFFER , PETER CHARLES (2003). Sensory Worlds in Early Modern America, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. HOWES, DAVID (2005). “Architecture of the Senses” In MIRKO Z ARDINI (ed.), Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism, Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture, pp. 322–331. HOWES, DAVID (2005). Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, New York: Berg. HOWES, DAVID (1991). The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. JONES, CAROLINE A. (ed.) (2006). Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. LAMBERT, PHYLLIS (2005). Preface, In MIRKO Z ARDINI (ed.), Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism, Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture, pp. 14–15. MARKS, LAURA U. (2000). The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Durham: Duke University Press. MARKS, LAURA U. (2002). Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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“MAKING WINTER” (2007). Conflux, Online: http://www.confluxfestival.org/ conflux2007/making-winter/ (accessed 4 January 2008). MAXWELL, ROBERT (1964). “The ‘Living City’ Exhibition at the ICA” In THEO CROSBY AND JOHN B ODLEY (eds.), Living Arts, 3, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts and Tillotsons, pp. 98–100. MCGRATH, BRIAN AND SHANE, GRAHAME (eds.) (2005), Sensing the 21st-century City: Close-up and Remote Architectural Design, 75 (6). MUNSTER , ANNA (2006). Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics, Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press. RED DIVE (n.d.). “About Us” Red Dive, Online: http://www.reddive.freeservers.com/ html_pages/programs.html (accessed 4 January 2008). RED DIVE (n.d.). “Programs and Events” Red Dive, Online: http://www.reddive.freeservers.com/html_pages/programs.html (accessed 4 January 2008). “Remapping LA: Cultural Civic Computing in Los Angeles” (n.d.), REMAP, Online: http://bigriver.remap.ucla.edu/remap/index.php/Remapping_LA (accessed 4 January 2008). “Remixing Çatalhöyük” (n.d.): http://okapi.dreamhosters.com/remixing/mainpage.html (accessed 4 January 2008). SADLER , SIMON (2003). “The Living City Survival Kit: A Portrait of the Architect as a Young Man” Art History, 26 (4), pp. 556–575. SENNETT, RICHARD (1994). Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, New York: WW Norton. SMITH, MARK M. (2001). Listening to Nineteenth-Century America, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. SMITH, MARK M. (ed.) (2004). Hearing History: A Reader, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. SOBCHACK, VIVIAN (2004). Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment in Moving Image Culture, Los Angeles: University of California Press. SOLOSKI, ALEXIS (2000). “A Senseless Act” Village Voice, 25 April, Online: http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0017,soloski,14365,11.html (accessed 4 January 2008). STEINER , HADAS A. (2006). “Brutalism Exposed: Photography and the Zoom Wave” Journal of Architectural Education, 59 (3), pp. 15–27. THEODORE, DAVID (2006). “Sense of the City: An Alternative Approach to Urbanism” [exhibition review] Journal of Architectural Education, 60 (2), pp. 69–70. TRINGHAM, RUTH, MICHAEL ASHLEY AND STEVE MILLS (2007). “Senses of Places: Remediations from Text to Digital Performance” [unpublished manuscript], Online: http://chimeraspider.wordpress.com/2007/09/19/remediated-places-final-draft/ (accessed 4 January 2008). TUAN, YI-FU (1977). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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TUAN, YI-FU (1974). Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values, New York: Columbia University Press. UCLA CENS, WALT DISNEY IMAGINEERING, CALIFORNIA STATE PARKS, UCLA REMAP, “Juncture” (n.d.), Online: http://la.remap.ucla.edu/juncture/ (accessed 4 January 2008). VANDERBILT, TOM (2007). “The Body Electric” Artforum, 45 (7), March, pp. 119–20. WHITE, MICHELLE (2006). The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ZARDINI, MIRKO (2005). “Toward a Sensorial Urbanism” In Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism, Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture, pp. 17–27. ........................................................................................ 1

We might look to Archigram’s 1963 “Living City” exhibition at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts as a precedent. “Through image, text, sound and light, this ‘assault on the senses’ that physically enveloped visitors attempted to convey ‘a vision of the city as an environment conditioning our emotions.’” (Sadler 2003: 556; quoting Maxwell 1964). Archigram member Dennis Crompton reported to Hadas Steiner that the group considered integrating “city smells,” as well; “You must have noticed the different characteristic smells of Pars, Milan, London and New York…” (Steiner 2006: n27). But as Sadler points out, “The potential of an exhibition to operate as a total, sensorially conditioning environment had already been demonstrated at the Institute of Contemporary Arts by the 1959 Place show, coordinated by a team that included the erstwhile Situationist Ralph Rumney” (2003: 567).

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For an exception, see the SENSEable Media Group’s Sandscape project, developed in coopration with MIT’s Tangible Media Group: http://senseable.mit.edu/projects/sandscape/sandscape.htm

3

See, for instance, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, Eds., Materialities of Communication (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994); Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form Technics Media (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Bernadette Wegenstein, Getting Under the Skin: Body and Media Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). Film scholar Vivian Sobchack argues that film theory usually “locates the sensuous on the screen as the semiotic effects of cinematic representation and the semantic property of cinematic objects or off the screen in the spectator’s phantasmatic psychic formations, cognitive processes, and basic physiological reflexes that do not pose major questions of meaning” (2004: 59-60).

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In their “Beyond the Aesthetic Gaze for an Aesthetics of the ‘Other’ Senses” project, the Concordia Sensoria Research Team have explored the work of numerous artists who work with the recreation of scent, touch, and taste (http://alcor.concordia.ca/~senses/Consert-Gaze.htm).

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L ORENZO T RIPODI

Cartografia Resistente: An Experience of Participatory Mapping Implementing Open Source Technology

1

Framework

As a consequence of the economical globalization process, the concept of ‘city’ is being strongly redefined in its nature by connective processes transcending its scale, dimensions, and institutional status (Moulder 2002). The city limits are redefined by means of communication, while urban space is increasingly mediated by electronic devices (Graham and Marvin 2001; Reinhold 2002). Media, as well as mobility, assume a fundamental role in the construction of new diasporic identities substituting traditional forms of citizenship (Appadurai 1996). Nowadays, we think about urbanity as a spatial condition more related to access protocols, culture and communication than to physical constraints and form (Virilio 1984). The urban field is no longer defined by administrative or physical borders, by quantitative demographic parameters, by political autonomy or homogeneous cultural identity alone, but by the capacity to be connected and to develop specific roles in a global net, to access distribution systems and to be visible on the global stage (Castells 1996; Harvey 2006; Sassen 2007). While material production of goods is displaced to peripheral or dispersed locations, symbolic production assumes an increasing relevance in structuring the urban economy (Lash & Urry 1994). On the other hand, the concept of community is increasingly less dependent on contiguity and co-presence and more on shared interests, on networks, and cultures. (Castells 1997) In a similar scenario, the space experienced by urban dwellers is increasingly a mediated/mediatic landscape, strongly influencing the common perception of the physical environment (Mitchell 1996). The everyday life space of the citizen tends to conflate with an exogenous, privatized and commoditized mediascape that provides the effective environment (or platform) for an increasing quantity of personal interactions.

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Such a mediated space becomes one of the fundamental reincarnations of the declining public space, opening a controversial debate (Tripodi 2004a). On the one hand, geographical representations, planning visions and, in general, all spatial narratives constituting what Henri Lefebvre (1974) characterized as conceived space are mainly determined by concentrated powers, strong economical and political actors which exercise a subtle and often neglected hegemony on media channels. On the other hand, such top-down spatial narratives, that historically have always been the product of concentrated powers and specialized institutions, are ostensibly challenged today by a new distributed capacity of representation (Colini 2004) developed in the overarching lived space. Preliminary assumption of this paper is that the increasing complexity of urban reality calls for new complex, plural, flexible forms of narrative in order to describe the fast evolution of the human and cultural landscape in present time. New digital technologies are not only essential tools for describing the emerging urban reality, but also constitutive elements of such a reality (Baudrillard 1993); thus, the search for new narratives should provide not only essential means for the transmission of contemporary urban cultures, but also for the reproduction and the empowerment of local communities. They respond to a necessity of establishing new forms of commons, linking up representations of space to spaces of representation. Yet new technological developments provide a variety of tools that can be used in order to build shared knowledge from a bottom up perspective. In particular, much attention is currently being placed on locative technologies that, in connection with the explosion of the social web, offer an unprecedented capacity of building and sharing data bases on local contexts (Gordon 2007). Nevertheless, the results in terms of concrete participative action and community empowerment do not seem to be impressive. Driven mainly by commercial purposes, the development of such tools still seems to be lacking the capacity to build actual social empowerment and to enable effective practice of knowledge sharing, rather instigating a fragmentary explosion of egocentered representations, as the so called blogosphere often appears to be. Furthermore, one of the critical points of this paper is to underline the excessive relevance given to locative features based on global positioning systems, fostering a form of surveillance syndrome while not engendering an effective thickness of the resulting knowledge in regards to the lived space of citizens. On the contrary, the capacity to associate objects with coordinates in a Cartesian grid is only one partial and limited way to map the complex reality of urban

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life, that calls for differentiated, multiple forms of narrative. Last point at stakes here is the control of the physical environment hosting the socially built representational landscape. As a matter of fact, the so-called web 2.0 development faces the uncontested domination of corporate entities that tend to monopolize the construction of global geographical databases, creating a situation where the common production of knowledge becomes subordinate to infrastructural systems provided by corporate economy. Such a concentration calls for a radical reflection on the development and sustainability of the incoming public sphere, one which is reliant upon the premise of a privately owned, designed, and managed infrastructure.

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2

Case study

The Cartografia Resistente (Resistant Cartography) project, initiated in 2004 in Florence as a laboratory of urban exploration, is an offspring of similar considerations and concerns. The aim of the project was to develop a psychogeographical practice of assessment and representation of the city of Florence, from a bottom up, shared and politically committed perspective, producing different, antagonist visions for the city: a city increasingly affected by a global capitalist economy, victim of overwhelming fluxes connected to tourism economy, and pathologically crystallized as a profitable cultural heritage (Tripodi 2004b; Colini et al. 2008). The final, ambitious objective was the shared construction of an alternative urban atlas of Florence, while developing a specific communication platform accessible to the widest public. The project was started by an informal group brought together by a critical perspective on the city’s transformation, mostly activists that formerly shared experiences of conflict for social space and young people squatting dismissed areas or creating temporary autonomous zones (Paba 2002, Maggio 2004). The group involved students coming from different disciplines, activists and citizens, and some students and scholars of urban planning and architecture, among which I assumed a coordination role. The laboratory was first developed in the context of the Elettro+, a self-managed cultural center gathering numerous cultural and social projects (Tripodi 2006), but successively went on as an independent and nomadic experience sharing a virtual space. As a first step, during a two days kick-off workshop, the group established its objectives through an articulated brainstorming. The discussion spread in multiple directions, generating many suggestions, identifying possible fields of application. It highlighted different aspects of the urban configuration that would have been interesting to investigate, in order to produce maps and other possible narratives about the political, the physical and the mental landscape of the city of Florence. A first wish list of assessment operations included such maps as one of the “intensity of public life”, one of the denied – inaccessible, prohibited – spaces, one of “bodies’ counter-geography” – everyday life practices redefining planned spaces – a map of powers, and so on. This first phase revealed a variety of different approaches, interests and personal competences of the participants; that on one side represented a risk of being dispersed and ineffectual, but on the other side was a richness to be exploited and a stimulat-

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ing challenge to imagine plural and articulated forms of representation for the complexity of the urban reality we all were immersed in. The project was ambitious, although totally lacking any financial and logistic resource. The participants’ involvement was on an entirely voluntary basis. A central problem was how to tackle this task given the limited time provided by activists and amateurs, occasionally supported by a professional interest on the topic. The successive step has been to adopt collaborative online tools to acquire and organize the collected information: having an online data storage is an effective way to coordinate a distributed and discontinuous document activity and a relatively cheap way to make the produced work accessible. Indeed, we activated a website responding to the double objective to be a workshop for elaboration and a publication site. The leading concept here was to cancel the distance between provider and consumer of information, between cartographer and inhabitant, between who analyzes the urban space’s reality and who lives in and is subjected to that reality. Potentially, everyone can participate in the elaboration of the dynamic atlas, adding or modifying an item, describing a place or an event or offering a different interpretation. It is a model corresponding to the philosophy of many social web experiences, as for instance wikipedia, indymedia et cetera, but at that moment, almost 4 years ago, even for ourselves many implications of this model weren’t clearly formulated. The configuration initially adopted used an open source collaborative writing software wiki and a photo gallery. The wiki system allows to insert text, add pages and upload different sort of files. The gallery collects images organized in folders. Access to the edit function is without restriction, as a generic username and password are published on the site itself. We defined some basic analytic categories to organize the collected materials: places, exploration paths, topics – categories that will be soon completed and developed with the use. This was the starting point for assembling a collective narration, later integrated with a map enabling participants to tag texts and images on a topographic representation. After researching the OS software freely available, we chose WorldKit1, providing a map that users can modify online, adding points, lines and areas and connecting them with text pages, pictures and hyperlinks.

............................................ 1

http://worldkit.org/

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A photographic aerial view of Florence has been uploaded as cartographic base.2 The online map allowed to superimpose different layers to which were assigned grosso modo the same analytical categories present in the wiki. Layers can be turned on and off by the user. At this point, the online map provided a further simple and intuitive way to index and navigate the contents of the website. An open database, prefiguring our atlas, was taking form. Important detail, all the parts of the system, wiki, gallery and map, were hosted by independent, ............................................ 2

That raised an issue about rights on cartographic data, the need for conceiving cartography as a common resource and the ongoing European directive Inspire. See Jo Walsh, Exploring the Eurospatial Cartel accessible at http://www.cartografiaresistente.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/CartografiaOpenSource

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non-commercial servers, part of activist networks. This was an important ethical choice in order to maintain total control of our material, but also a source of trouble and instability, due to the reduced reliability of such providers.

3

Exploration

The second step has been to start a physical exploration of the urban space, balancing the knowledge mediated by digital devices with a concrete experience of the territory, and introducing a psycho-geographical approach (Sadler 1998). Somehow, two opposite but not irreconcilable attitudes merged in the collective: on one side, a more situationist vision, influenced by the tendency to “get lost” in the city, by a certain flanérie, consequently interested in noncartesian forms of representation of the landscape (La Cecla 1988; Solnit 2005). On the other side, a more analytical and critical vision, interested in developing a critical gaze on city’s transformation, on speculative processes, on politics and repression, providing practical information and supporting activism and any form of resistance to the dominant processes. These two souls constitute since the beginning the core of the CR project, feeding an interesting creative tension that still has not been sedated, without one prevailing over the other.

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Indeed, we started a practice of urban drifts (derive), exploring Florence’s periphery and exploring, at the same time, new modes of looking at the city (Careri 2002). The first cycle, named “triangulation”, has been carried out tracing a triangle on the map of Florence, a highly symbolic form indeed, connecting three pivotal landscape elements of the Northern zone of Florence, in the part of the city subjected to the most important expansive processes: the former FIAT factory, a dismissed brownfield being reconverted in tertiary and residential area, the hugest, contested speculative development project in Florence today; the IKEA building, an emblem of the global post-modern non-place; and the Sollicciano prison, a modern and progressive version of an extreme total institution in the Foucaultian view. Three places representing an interesting combination of powers and symbolisms, but which could be also considered as a total pretext. The idea was to try to follow as faithfully as possible the straight line drafted on the map, dealing in practice with all the implicit limits of the territory, with all its natural, legal and psychological borders, confronting all sort of obstacles that one can run into walking through the city. The attempt to follow an abstract line on the field becomes a way to read the fragmentation, the parcelization and the chaotic distribution of internal borders of the city. The route has been accomplished in four full days, one segment being too long for a single day trip, distributed in several weeks. Participants took note of the experience in different ways, writing, taking pictures, capturing sounds or videotaping. A variety of impressions and unexpected discoveries, places, characters and signs inhabits the territory; details vary from the minimum scale to the huge; turns, dead ends, divagations and recognitions; incoherencies, ruptures, connections and disconnections. The city appeared in its unboundable and multifaceted nature. A choral narration has therefore been weaved, starting from single contributions, from personal impressions, using the Wiki as a notebook, connecting text with images and other files uploaded on the internet. 3 An open, dynamical narrative developed, open in progress, progressively enriched adding comments, digressions and links. To tell a linear course in the city evolves rhizomatically, connecting categorically similar objects and images, opening up internal links to related topics as well as enabling related external links in the internet. Starting from the specificities we run onto in the concrete explo............................................ 3

http://www.cartografiaresistente.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/Derive

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rations, we identified general phenomena and topics triggering new classifications: this consequently engendered new clusters of pages in the hypertext and new layers in the map. Starting from a very practical, linear, contextual experience of the city, we ended with tackling a complexity of different aspects and implications composing the urban reality. The analytical categories initially adopted in the website multiplied through the practical confrontation with the territory and generated subcategories: in addition to linear paths of explorations, to punctual places traditionally indexed in alphabetical order, and to general topics, we individuated, for instance, “hot zones”, areas of the city particularly affected by transformations and conflicts. The observed transformations led us to ask who was producing such transformations: we therefore started a classification regarding the so called metro-political relations, gathering information about economical and institutional stakeholders as well as grassroots organisations and all kind of subjects participating in transformative and discursive actions about the city. In other words, from a first direct observation of phenomena captured in contact with the urban surface, we started to question which forces where behind them, and tried to make manifest obscured influences transforming the physical and social landscape of the city. Different sources were progressively added to the direct observation, gathering contributions from citizen committees, grassroots organizations, but also from mainstream media, local political forces and from the official websites of stakeholders as public and private companies etc. The hypertextual structure of the Wiki helped to emulate the hypertextual nature of the city, and the ease of the system in creating new pages and new links allowed to reproduce its multifaceted complexity of relations, even at risk of reproducing also its chaotic, labyrinthic, ultimately unspeakable character. Successively, in summer 2005 the experience of the three initial derives has been elaborated in a public multimedia exhibition at the Elettro+. The materials collected through online collaborative tools were proposed in diverse output forms, experimenting multiple kinds of narrative. Again, all the work was voluntary and the operation was conducted almost with no funds, but creativity and enthusiasm made it possible.

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The whole installation was organized around a huge layout of the triangle traced on the floor: three photographic sequences were suspended over the course, coupled with a cut-up of texts taken from the website. An audio installation reproduced fragments of sound-scape. Video installations and interactive computer stations completed the exhibition.4 Furthermore, a computer connected to the website gave the possibility to the audience to trace back the materials exposed to the online database. Substantially, it has been a successful workshop about the representation of an evolving urban landscape, closing the first year of activity of the project. Since that time, other explorations have been done; for instance, a cycle of assessments about the present condition of places formerly squatted (called before and after the cure), associating narrations and evidences about how they have been lived and transformed in the past with information and images of what they have become now:5 an operation that has also increased the pages of a parallel classification of the ugliest and bizarre architectures of Florence. 6 Later, a drift made along the path of the new line of tramways under construction – one of the biggest and more contested infrastructural projects in Flor............................................ 4

The video of the three derives installed in this occasion is downloadable at http://www.ngvision.org/mediabase/716

5 6

http://www.cartografiaresistente.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/PrimaeDopolaCura http://www.cartografiaresistente.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DelirioArchitettonico

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ence today – gave the opportunity to deepen the attention on power relationships deployed in the metropolitan area.7 An effort has been done in providing information about political and economical actors managing the spatial production in this city. It is the moment when strongly emerged the issue of a map of metro-political relations, revealing connections, interests, partnerships, and pyramid structures ruling the metropolitan territory.8 Progressively, the group developed a trans-scalar attitude, widening its perspective, reconnecting punctual observations to the macro transformations affecting the city and the relative politics.

4

From a community without tools to tools without a community

On the other hand, after the first year, collective participation and enthusiasm started to decline, and more and more the project found difficulties in surviving on shared interests and distributed action. The activity concentrated progressively on the website, becoming more similar to a blog than a widely shared common project. Few people are still paying attention to the maintenance of the website, affected by instability, frequently damaged by spam and hacking actions, somehow experiencing forms of vandalism typical of every common space lacking a consistent community taking care of it. Successively, also the implementation of the website had a significant inflexion, and finally it ended up in surviving today more as a documental testimony of a past activist experience than as an active and updated archive. Taking a stock of the experience to date, Cartografia Resistente has been able to experiment an innovative methodology and opened up several interesting mapping operations. The software system adopted remained rudimentary and instable, nevertheless it has been sufficient to support in the first phase the construction of an open, dynamic, collaborative database, able to trigger a substantial knowledge exchange process and support elaborated representations. What the project has not been able to achieve is the continuity of engagement necessary to reach some conclusions, a minimum level of completeness of the atlas and a sufficient technical autonomy to preserve the continuity ............................................ 7 8

http://www.cartografiaresistente.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/TramVai01 http://www.cartografiaresistente.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/RelazioniMetropolitiche

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of the experience. Somehow, a big part of the spontaneous propulsive energy of the group has been lost in the process, as it often happens in voluntary experiences. The main problem CR had to face after the initial “enthusiasm phase” was to get a constant involvement of people motivated and able to keep the information updated and to complete the assessment of the city’s territory. If, in the beginning, the project had strong participation, launching numerous mapping projects, opening up many pages on the website and many layers of the map, in the course of time precariousness and practical life priorities distracted the biggest part of the participants from the activity, reducing the core of the group mostly to the ones professionally involved in urban geography and planning. Making it simple, it started as a community without tools and ended with tools without a community. Nonetheless, an external interest about Cartografia Resistente grew up, being a project recognised for its quality, quoted, invited to public events and exhibitions. Interestingly enough, that happened mostly in the frame of art events and in the hype on psycho geography, as in the case of the exhibition Resistant Maps,9 held in Genua, that partly borrowed the name of our project to present a wide range of art and activism experiences. However, the project found few resonance within the fields of community organizing, among social workers and in other urban related disciplines.

5

Final issues

It is difficult to come to some kind of conclusions from a story without conclusion. Rather, it is worth reiterating some issues that have been cyclically raised during the experience of Cartografia Resistente, proposing partial answers and fragments of reflections for further discussion. First of all, a basic and only apparently naive question is: why start a distributed mapping project? Here I will recall the initial assumptions: in present days we face to dramatic shifts in the way we experience urban life, affecting social relationships as well as the way we relate with the physical environment surrounding us. The ............................................ 9 Resistant Maps, artistic actions in the interconnected urban territory. Villa Croce Contemporary Art Museum, Genua 25-26 November 2006

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extensively mediated landscape transforms the way we perceive city and community, somehow alienating us from the direct contact with tangible phenomena happening around us. Increasingly the ground on which something such as a community can be built, whatever this word means today, is a discursive weave of mediated acts supported by technological infrastructures. The physical boundaries determining new communities in formation have to be searched in the connective tissue provided by communication means. To reclaim the inherently public nature of this mediated space is a fundamental issue. To increase the social capacity to build and share spatial representations is therefore essential in order to reconnect people with their own lived environment. It is crucial to contrast the tendency to redefine citizenship as an almost passive experience, as spectatorship, as audience exposed to the spectacle of the city (Tripodi 2008); however, assuming that the contemporary urban experience is essentially a representational one, in terms of democratic empowerment the emerging citizenship should be consolidated by the capacity to produce its own representations of space. One of the aspects that the experience of Cartografia Resistente revealed to its participants is that, in fact, a huge quantity of information about the current transformations of the city is theoretically available to the general public. Nevertheless, rather than constituting a useful source of knowledge and democratic participation, the overwhelming overproduction of information, with its disordered form, its frequent tendentiousness and contradictory character, its variety of bureaucratic jargons and specialized language, tends to be perceived as a puzzling, disorienting white noise. Information overload ends up in disinformation, often engendering a retreat of the citizen from a real participation to local democratic processes. In particular, for a non specialized public, it is difficult to capture in clear pictures the complexity of the apparent forms in which capital agglomerations and political actors tend to diversify, dissimulating and redirecting their practice of governance through temporary associations, sybilline brands10 and ‘creative’ language. It is consequently very important to develop practices aimed at reorganizing local knowledge about metropolitics (Dollé 2002), filtering, translating and reorganizing information in user friendly, comprehensible and manageable maps (Holmes 2006). ............................................ 10

Source of inspiration for CR have been the work of Bureau d’Etudes, the Collectivo Hackitectura Barcelona, They Rule and many other activist experiences. For a more complete list of similar projects see http://www.cartografiaresistente.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/Links.

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On the other hand, the practice of field exploration is an effective means to reconnect the immediate knowledge of the territory with the relative alternative representation: a form of concerned counter-tourism, producing critical visions for the urban landscape, revealing what often is too close to be seen clearly. The practice promoted by Cartografia Resistente has been directed at re-appropriating a haptic, immediate, direct confrontation with the city fabric, with a particular attention to apparently dispensable and less valuable territories, as an antidote to the ocularcentric (Virilio 2000, Bartram 2004), mediated, and indirect knowledge of the territory leading to political indifference and anomy. A consequently controversial issue among the participants has been the use of information technologies as a basic part of its procedure, a choice that to some appeared contradictory with its premises, seen as a sterile exercise of localization, tagging places with a surveillance attitude. In particular, a point often discussed within the project is whether Cartografia Resistente should be considered an experience of participative GIS (PPGIS) or not (Goose and Elwood 2003; ). As a matter of fact, what CR have set up is a rudimentary collaborative geographical information system. Nevertheless, the group basically never thought about the project in these terms, referring to more generic practice of “urban landscape description narratives”, considering georeferencing objects on standardised maps only a possible option among many to achieve such a task. What basically characterizes a GIS is the process of reifying a database as a spatial representation, assuming an institutional (and political) role and becoming a recognized part of a planning processes. That happens through the adoption of specific codifications, technological standards and institutional reconnaissance. It is a process of inclusion of a larger public into a specialized language, based on specialized professional knowledge and standardized codes – a process building political representation through technological standardization. CR’s attitude was rather that of liberating diverse languages and opening up codes for representing the urban complexity. Words, images, sounds have been considered as equally valuable languages to recompose manifold and dissonant narratives. The objective of the project has been less to reify information in the form of a database and more to feed a reflexive capacity of representation about the evolving landscape, escaping excessive codification, specialisation and technicism. As a consequence of this debate, and of the specific interest of some members on participative GIS, a branch of the project developed separately, tackling the issue of the development of collaborative digital tools

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sufficiently open to maintain such premises. A little core of participants of the project, professionally involved in urban disciplines, launched a side project called CoMMA, aimed at developing an OS software platform specifically devoted to collaborative mapping and the connected social narrative practices, and to experiment its use in diverse social contexts.11 The technical challenge is to integrate in a user-friendly, expressly designed interface different features allowing the creation and management of socio-geographical data bases. The platform should-be expressly dedicated to non specialized users, including functions for processing and visualizing data in form of maps, graphs, sketches, video sequences and other conceivable kinds of narratives. Although the starting point of the project is the development of specific digital tools, the main interest of the promoting group is rather to experiment their use in action/research contexts as grassroots groups and community building projects.12 That is, focusing more on social interaction practices than technologies. A related question has been a sort of regular refrain in CR experience, many people asking why to waste time in developing and setting up specific software when you can do almost the same things using applications such as Google maps, Flickr, et similia, that provide for free similar features? Here there are several possible answers and many implications that are difficult to delve into exhaustively; reconnecting to the initial assumptions, the main point is that of the role which information communication technologies are assuming in the constitution of a renewed public sphere. Accepting what is becoming a dominant embodiment of public space to rely totally on technological infrastructures owned and managed by almost monopolistic corporate concentrations is a contradictory and dangerous strategy. We are used to see only the visible face of the social web, in terms of free accessible services that they provide, but it is not commonly perceived how fast we are becoming dependent on features provided by corporate entities to interact in the public sphere, legitimating their dominance through a multiplicity of everyday practices. Today GoogleMaps, to give the dominant example, provides a great tool for the representation and the geo-reference of data, redesigning people’s ............................................ 11 CoMMA (COoperative Multimedia Mapping Action) has been partially developed as collaborative research project to be proposed to EU fundings for interdisciplinary research, but it didn’t find any support either in academic or public institutions. The project has been developed – again – on a voluntary basis, and at the moment it is on stand-by. 12 The project would have found an ideal testing ground within the INURA Network where it was proposed as a possible comparative research/action project connecting different research teams and cases through the adoption of a web based collaborative system.

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geography. But, on the other hand, it represents also the concentration of a common patrimony of knowledge, of an important form of commons, in the hands of a corporate player whose institutional purpose is solely profit. Which guarantees do we have that what has been formed as a collective social resource will remain a common good, and which risks are implied for the future fate of such a resource regarding its dependency on a private business, are open issues. In addition to that, the increasing hegemony of GoogleMaps as a standard layer for every form of social mapping is producing a homogenization in the modes of representing the territory, adopting massively an aerial point of view, from the above perspective of the satellite surveillance. This causes a very rational, functionalistic way to present the territory, perfectly scanned, categorized as a nebula of points and service supplies, impoverishing the concept of mapping to the operation of tagging points on a georeferenced projection. This is a limited and reductionist way to understand the complex art of mapping – and the use made here of the word art is not casual, implying subjectivity, creativity and cultural inflection of such practice. Cartografia Resistente warned of the risk of reducing mapping activity into a technical capacity and to a mere accumulation of data. On the contrary, what has been the main objective in the experience of CR, despite its discontinuity and fragility, is the process of building a common point of view on the city based on a multiplicity of direct cognitive actions. The use of the technology itself did not obscure at all the necessity to deal with the physical, immediate and personal experience of space. Somehow, the digital technology has been intended as a powerful tool in order to re-focus the gaze on the real world and to rediscover interstitial, neglected, dismissed spaces as well as close and present transformations happening right in front of us. What is worth to reassert again is that digital tools are useful means to add to, and not to dismiss, a good pair of shoes as the best tools for exploring and understanding cities. This would be a good point to finish, but still a last question remains at stake, regarding the incapacity that such an experience showed in finding the necessary continuity of involvement and fully achieving its initial objectives. The experience of Cartografia Resistente demonstrates that the profusion of digital and educational means available to the public for the construction of social knowledge networks and political consciousness is substantial. But the increased capacity provided by information and communication technology is not by itself a guarantee of an increased capacity of participation. On the contrary, the overexposed and saturated rhythm of contemporary urban life

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makes the voluntary engagement of people in social projects increasingly difficult. Collaborative online databases and other social web applications are powerful tools to collect and share information, but they are not a guarantee in se of engendering a distributed cognitive practice. The task of recreating social fabric, of empowering community and fostering knowledge and criticism about the urban transformation is definitely not a question of technical means.

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MAGGIO, M. (2004). Rights and Fights. Urban Movements in Florence in: INURA. The Contested Metropolis: Six Cities at the Beginning of 21st Century, Basel: Birkhauser MOULDER A. (2002). Introduction in: TransUrbanism, Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAI Publishers PABA, G.(ed.) (2002). Insurgent city. Racconti e geografie di un’altra Firenze, Livorno: Media Print REINHOLD H. (2002). Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Transforming Cultures and Communities in the Age of Instant Access. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing SADLER S. (1998). The Situationist City, Cambridge, Mass./London: The MIT Press SOLNIT R. (2005). A Field Guide to Getting Lost, New York: Penguin TRIPODI L. (2004a). L’invenzione dello spazio pubblico. Pratiche di resistenza all’erosione della sfera pubblica della città nell’era della Globalizzazione, PhD Thesis, University of Florence. TRIPODI L. (2004b). The AbroGated City in: INURA, The Contested Metropolis: Six Cities at the Beginning of 21st Century, Basel: Birkhauser TRIPODI, L. (2006). Nuovi commons: dai Centri Sociali allo Spazio Pubblico Autogestito. Contesti – Bulletin of the Department of Urban Planning, University of Florence 1, pp. 97–102 TRIPODI L. (2008). Space of Exposure: Notes for a Vertical Urbanism, in: GLEITER J., KORREK N., ZIMMERMANN G. (Eds.) Die Realität des Imaginären. Weimar: Verlag der Bauhaus-Universität VIRILIO P. (1984). L’espace critique: essai sur l’urbanisme et les nouvelles technologies, Paris: Christian Bourgois VIRILIO P. (2000). Information Bomb. London: Sage

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A LESSANDRA R ENZI

Switches, Meshworks and Squatted Spaces: Fragmented Thoughts on Activist Research

A theorising intellectual, for us, is no longer a subject, a representing or representative consciousness. Those who act and struggle are no longer represented, either by a group or a union that appropriates the right to stand as their conscience. Who speaks and acts? It is always a multiplicity, even within the person who speaks and acts. All of us are “groupuscules”. Representation no longer exists; there’s only action – theoretical action and practical action which serve as relays and form networks (Foucault and Deleuze [1972] 1989). We are not a collective, we are a connective. (Nicola Angrisano, Insu TV)

1

Switches1

My research is an instance of social dynamics and political action in the world. Although the “subject” of my project is Telestreet – a network of activist pirate television stations based in Italy – my research performs a pragmatic intervention as a “situated practice” (Haraway, 1988) alongside that of Telestreet. This intervention begins by understanding Telestreet as a “process” and therefore enabling my research to challenge the academic tendency to fix a “subject” of inquiry a priori. By attending to the dynamic movements and constituent features that shape Telestreet, my research engages the necessarily incomplete and continuous expressions of self-determination that subtend the broader ............................................ 1 I would like to thank Stephen Turpin, Francesco Festa, Nicola Angrisano and all the other members of InsuTV for their enthusiasm and stimulating conversations. This piece is presented in rather fragmented form because my research is a work in process and my fieldwork has only started. Thus, my aim here is to simply offer a series of reasons for and ways of simultaneously being a researcher and a political actor. I apologise if I could not yet offer more information on the outcome of my case study.

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political struggle within the Telestreet project. This is done, both as a way of offering another angle from which to look at contemporary political movements and as a way of actively taking part in their practices of selfdetermination. This text draws together the two lines that form my inquiry by incorporating both my academic research and my political activism into a processual mapping of these mutually-engendering registers of practice. Both primary lines – that of academic research and that of political practice – are continually being shaped and redrawn as new connections are discovered and created. Yet, it is only through these practices themselves that the work of mapping begins – contours, lines are drawn through practice – the practices of a researcher in sociology and an activist involved in the Telestreet project, me. Why practice? I see practices as the force that continuously shapes and reshapes social formations and their agents (e.g. Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Deleuze 1988; Foucault 1978). Starting from practice enables me to look at the Telestreet project outside of pre-fabricated analytical criteria that tend to characterise Telestreet as a static, delimited entity, focussing instead on the movement and relationships among the elements that engender the project and inform its actors. Telestreet is often portrayed as an isolated phenomenon, as a direct response to media consolidation, or as a neat play with the medium of television (Garcia 2006), ignoring the Italian and transnational tradition of autonomous cultural production and guerrilla communication which, to various degrees, have engendered and contaminated many forms of social struggle from the seventies onward. As a researcher, my attempt to understand and explain Telestreet’s political role through this dynamism can add more depth to the already available interpretations of its work in the fields of communication and cultural production, while contributing to a better understanding of political movements in general. Starting with practice enables me to actively engage Telestreet simultaneously as an activist and a researcher. Here, my theoretical and practical knowledge of media activism and video production, coupled with the opportunity to carry out on-site ethnographic research, provide me with the time and resources to actively take part in the activities of Telestreet, relieving their workload and contributing an additional perspective on media production. At the same time, I can use my academic know-how to help Telestreet selfevaluate its work and strengthen the project. In this context, my symbolic capital as a researcher from a prestigious institution can also gain access to 198

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government and educational sites which Telestreet’s activists cannot easily reach but that may be key to understand how to make the Telestreet project more functional (Smith, 1987; 2002, Frampton et al. 2006). My research practice draws from scholarly traditions that recognise and acknowledge a researcher’s agency in shaping official narratives on the relation between agency and change (e.g.:Bourdieu, 1990). I take this position as a starting point from which I attempt to shift the meaning attached to social research from one of representation to one of localised creation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1991). Through my approach, knowledge becomes one of the residual effects of investigating practices, during which institutional critique, experimentation and self-inquiry strengthen and carry forward research, and stimulate politics. This operation is located in a field of tension between knowledge production and political activism, offering a productive critique of the institution and a self-questioning of the researcher’s role as informed by the institution itself (Raunig, 2007). Here, an engagement with context-bound, cooperatively developed methodologies and data-gathering techniques can turn research into a creative learning process for both researchers and informants – not to mention engendering genuine interaction between researcher and activists. Inspired by Gerald Raunig’s work (2007), research becomes an “instituent practice”: a critical practice that prevents the closure of models and ways of seeing into dogma.

2

Meshworks

Italy, mid seventies: the free radio movement breaks state monopoly over radio transmission and provides a tool for young people to articulate their views and tastes outside of mainstream culture.2 Some of these radios, like radio Sherwood in Padua and Radio Onda Rossa in Rome, become the megaphones for emerging extra-parliamentary leftist political movements and are still active as points of reference and sites of independent cultural production for activists groups all over the country (Orrico, 2006). ............................................ 2 A history of Italian independent communication deserves mention of the long tradition of pirate, independent and community media in North America and Central Europe, which developed after World War II and inspired similar experiments in the country. For a study of past and present autonomous media in North America and Europe, see: Downing et al. (2001) and Orrico (2006).

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Then come the nineties: activists inspired by the struggles of groups like the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas adopt new communication technologies to respond to and subvert the language and power of the systems they oppose.3 In Italy, a new kind of communicational guerrilla quickly evolves from the Bulletin Board System – the first connections between computers using a terminal system (SKA, 2001, Festa and Renzi, 2008). This guerrilla communication adopts and adapts the Internet to link different organizations, exchange information and coordinate actions (Festa, 2003). It creates autonomous spaces on the web – server networks like isole nella rete (http://isole.ecn.org/) – to host websites, fora and mailing lists for the Italian radical left. Aside from enabling more efficient coordination, these communication networks also respond to a necessity to transversally organize a large amount of groups with different approaches to social struggle along the principle of affinity and coalition, rather than consensus or hierarchical structures. At the same time, “tactical media” experiments are bringing together artists, theorists, computer geeks and hackers to humorously expose the hidden modulations of control on which capitalism and consumer culture thrive (Garcia and Lovink, 1997).4 Tactical media rely on performance and ‘do it yourself ’ (DIY) media, created from readily available, relatively cheap technology and means of communication (e.g. radio, video and internet). With simple tools and much creativity collectives like 0100101110101101 create stunts that expose and reflect on the grotesque sides of the cultural industry and consumer culture.5 Tactical media’s hit-and-run, critical interventions mushroomed once technology had become more affordable and activists and artists could experiment with new ways to convey their messages amidst the white noise of a hyper-saturated information environment. A decade later, the same practitioners who promoted it, dismiss tactical media as a successful standalone mode of political protest, precisely because of its ephemeral character (e.g.: Garcia, 2006, Holmes, 2006). Nevertheless, tactical media and other ............................................ 3 The Zapatista were among the first rebel movements to consistently use the Internet in their struggle (Cleaver, 1998) Some Italian groups and organizations took part in the first Intercontinental Gathering for Humanity and Against neo-liberalism at Aguacalientes in Chiapas in the summer of 1996, setting up long-lasting solidarity exchanges to provide technical and medical assistance to villages in the region (Festa, 2003: 22, SKA and Leoncavallo, 1995). 4

For more information on tactical media see: Lovink (2002) and Renzi (2008)

5

0100101110101101 are “con-artists who use non conventional communication tactics to obtain the largest visibility with the minimal effort. Past works include staging a hoax involving a completely made-up artist, ripping off the Holy See and spreading a computer virus as a work of art” (http://0100101110101101.org/index.html).

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similar forms of affective6 tactics endure when harnessed as practices for the articulation of dissent and for awareness-raising campaigns.7

2.1

Enter Telestreet

The media activist project Telestreet develops partly from these traditions of guerrilla communication and autonomous media, partly from an engagement with the role of televisual communication in society (Berardi et al., 2003). Yet, although Telestreet fits seamlessy in the universe of contemporary modes of cultural politics, it is also a singular actualisation of forms of sociability in which communication becomes a space for social experimentation and synthesis, rather than a tool for information diffusion. In a nutshell, Telestreet is the name of an Italian tactical media network of DIY, pirate microbroadcasters that comes to life in 2002 during the government of media tycoon and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Because of his political role, Berlusconi exercises power over all three public broadcasting service channels, thus controlling over 90% of the Italian mediascape. Telestreet is initiated in conjunction with Ngvision, an online, openpublishing video archive, partly in protest against media-consolidation, partly to make available to the general public all the independent video material on police repression that is not showcased by the mainstream media following the violent protests at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa. Telestreet and Ngvision are made possible by the work of hackers and free software programmers, by the support of the CSOAs8 in which they are often based and which are also the breeding grounds of other political movements. ............................................ 6 Affects are moments of intensity, which might resonate with linguistic expression but do not operate on the semantic or semiotic level. When decoding a message, affective responses primarily originate from a gap between content and effect. More precisely, if coupled with images, language amplifies the flow of images on another level. This creates a tension that may play itself out in any number of creative ways, causing a reconfiguration of the flow of meaning (Massumi, 2002: 20-25). Affective tactics are often used to attract the attention of the media or of passers-by during demonstrations. 7 The alter-globalisation movement strongly relies on tactical media and guerrilla communication strategies as tools for protest, turning the most successful actions into sustainable projects. The Independent Media Centres (http://www.indymedia.org)––a global network of participatory journalists using an open publishing process started in Seattle in 1999 during the demonstrations against the WTO (World Trade Organisation) to report on the event. Indymedia is now active in many countries in the world as a news hub. 8

The CSOAs - Centri Sociali Occupati Autogestiti are squatted community spaces for cultural and political activities, which developed in the tradition of a radical extra-parliamentary Left from the seventies onward. The CSOAs are very common in Italy, as well as in Spain, France and Germany, and can be found in many other European countries.

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Street televisions channels transmit into the households of a neighbourhood or street-wide zone, using shadow-cones of frequencies granted to commercial networks that are unusable because of territorial obstacles. They are run on a non-profit, volunteer basis by a wide spectrum of actors ranging from media-activists to members of the neighbourhood. Each TV channel constitutes a node in a web, offering technical assistance and sharing a webarchive of broadcasting material with other street TVs – thereby considerably reducing production and distribution costs. This tactic amplifies their coverage at a national level, it provides a relatively sustainable infrastructure despite the scarce economic and technical resources available, and it allows each node to maintain a relative degree of autonomy. Telestreet’s practices are also the latest incarnation of the tradition of autonomous communication and cultural production initiated by the free radio movement. As with its predecessor Radio Alice,9 Telestreet’s televisual experiments are prompted by a general dissatisfaction with the structure of mainstream communication“from a few to many” and attempt to bring this medium and its language closer to the needs and desires of local communities. Telestreet aims at bypassing the forces of capital that usually condition the choice and format of programmes available with a structure that goes from “many to many” (Berardi et al., 2003). In this sense, the Telestreet model was born in the gaps left by the mainstream media, rather than simply in opposition to it. Ultimatey, however, more than simply being the sum of different traditions and practices, the Telestreet model is marked by its own specificity. A specificity that does not lie in the act of providing alternative content but can be found in the practices of experimentation with different forms of social exchange and narratives. Telestreet programmes are having an enormous success among those who have access to them especially because they are the medium of exchange and participation for many community members who take part in the production processes as well as in the consumption of its programmes. Indeed, their production and post-production activities and the organising of events offer the chance to various individuals to come together and reflect on ............................................ 9 “Capital’s program: communication within itself, neutralization of communication that is exterior to it. Its tactic: to disconnect communicative relationships from their objects, desire, power, truth… Communication is subversive: Power knows this… Our program: Subversion. Its means: Communication. Its content: Information (Radio Alice, 1977 - http://affinityproject.org/practices/telestreet.html). Some of the people who started Radio Alice in 1977 also helped set up Telestreet. For a discussion of the ideas behind Telestreet’s experimentation see: Berardi, Jaquemet, and Vitali (2003). For a discussion of the ideas and history of Radio Alice see: A/traverso (2002).

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political and social issues.10 Telestreet’s role goes beyond that of information diffusion to enable the appropriation of a medium for new forms of content, expression, and above all sociability. The Telestreet phenomenon is a staring point to map and understand how practices migrate and mutate across social fields, as groups like the one in question draw on a variety of histories, traditions and resources for their practices, adapting and combining them in novel ways that shift the ground for politics from confrontation to autonomous production and organisation. Moreover, the project’s character and connective capacity emerge and mutate simultaneously with the forces of control and governmentality it faces: its nodes constantly connect, disconnect, incorporate, synthesise and assemble together every element available that can sustain their work. Looking at Telestreet’s practices provides important evidence of the ongoing recomposition of the social, while it also forces us to focus on the dynamism, contradictions and relations of contemporary practices of dissent to think through present and future forms of organising. A further elaboration of context to understand the emergence and crosspollination of contemporary political practices is the concept of control societies. Control societies refer to the diagram describing the fluid power relations of contemporary western capitalism with its “ultrarapid forms of apparently free-floating control that are taking over from the old disciplines at work within the time scales of closed systems” (Deleuze 1995: 178). Control societies offer a new degree of freedom while contributing to indirect yet equally powerful forms of control. They are characterised by the use of computers and other information technologies and by a shift from production (of goods) to meta-production, selling services and buying activities (Deleuze, 1995: 181). It is this shift of waged labour from factories to immaterial labour that blurs the boundaries between work and leisure (Deleuze, 1995: 179) and sets the ground for the new arrangements of power and control: capital can now sustain itself by “real subsumption of labour” (Hardt, 1998a), turning labour into a primarily social activity that pervades society like a gas. Both Deleuze and Hardt argue that grasping the diagram of control societies enables us to rethink the concept of resistance as a creative search for new ............................................ 10

For example, the format of the programme Domenica Aut, produced by InsuTV in Naples, enables different groups to unpack the topics chosen for each episode while producing documentaries and during the live discussions with invited guests in their television studios (http://www.insutv.it/domenicaut/).

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strategies and forms of struggle that recuperate previously developed practices while combining them with new ones. In this context, the seeds of resistance are to be found in new networks of solidarity and emergent forms of cooperation based on alternative collective values and practices functioning outside of the subsumed social fields (Hardt, 1998b: 31). Resistance in the societies of control constantly needs to cuts across time and space in order to be able to mutate and adapt as fast as do the dominant forces of capital, while it also redefines the body and the subject as crucial sites of struggle against modulated control. In this sense, rethinking – and understanding – the concept of political action not only requires a search for new forms of struggle extending beyond national borders and direct forms of confrontation, but also a retheorisation of subject formation and subject producing practices as targets of new forms of control (Foucault, 1978). While providing some context to understand contemporary political action, Hardt’s and Deleuze’s work on the societies of control also points towards some ways of rethinking political activism. Along these lines, Autonomist thinkers such as Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato (e.g. Lotringer and Marazzi, 2008, Virno and Hardt, 1996) conceptualised social and political organisation not only paying special attention to the heterogeneity of contemporary practices of resistance, but also foregrounding a need to constantly carve out spaces to experiment with alternative modes of organisation and subjectification. Influenced by Marx’s ideas in the Grundrisse and by Foucault’s work on biopower, thinkers from the Autonomia lay an emphasis on the social aspect of labour in order to device new forms of resistance. More precisely, they avoid a reification of the concept of subjectivity by shifting the focus of their work from the economic aspect of labour to the activities involved in defining and fixing social norms and subject positions through our daily work. Together with Foucault and Deleuze, they contend that the subject or subjectivity are only residual elements of ongoing processes of subjectification that unfold through practice – the practices of labour inscribed within capitalists systems and the ones developed to subvert said systems (Lotringer and Marazzi, 2008). In a society of control new autonomous practices develop where the ones that sustain control are unmasked, and new resistant subjectivities are engendered in their embodiment. Here, the subject is precisely “the agency that follows the creation of a void” (Deleuze, 1998 [1967]: 279) and her practices of subjectification are conditioned (yet not determined) by the social structure. 204

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Such processes or modes of subjectification are the enactment of an ethics (Foucault, 1978) that is based in action but begins by applying theory to life, that is, by linking the self-transformation of a subject to her knowledge of the forces that biopolically produce her. It is by bringing together theory and practice that it is possible to determine the sites of production of alternative modes of subjectification. Thus, looking at political action through the lenses of control societies, new political practices come to light that would not have been previously considered as such. The cultural production nested in squatted social centres, in online networks, the community projects, the transnational alliances and coalitions of activist groups, the “new commons” off-balancing the growing monopoly of intellectual property over knowledge are all forms of resistance within the diagram of power in societies of control. They are an integral and constitutive part of contemporary social struggles, as well as over processes of subjectivation, of which autonomous media and communication stunts are only one form of expression. In other words, control societies are increasingly composed of functional networks connecting different processes, resources and actors that need to be considered in their globality and then entangled, to be able to uncover the hidden relationships between such elements and how social change takes place. They need to be considered in their globality and then entangled to understand communication as a political practice of experimentation and subjectification beyond the mere transmission of information.11 Here, projects like Telestreet, its predecessors and allies, prompt us to interrogate traditional models and modes of knowing, and to search for options that attend not only to their singularity but also to their relation to broader social, historical and politico-economic contexts. They prompt us to produce alternative narratives on political action and social change, through the act of ............................................ 11 Though attentive to the modes of action of political movements, many scholars see change as still inextricably linked to specific events and oppositional strategies (Melucci, 1996, Touraine, 1981, McAdam et al., 2001, Melucci, 1989). For this reason, the study of political movements also seems to have mostly misunderstood the importance – or overlooked the presence – of many of the abovementioned practices. For researchers, a perception on the social that is based on ready-made categories of analysis diverts the attention from emergent forms and sites of struggle that do not match pre-formed parameters of how structures are altered. Moreover, viewing social movements protests as the sole medium of political action limits the possibilities of conceptualizing social change. For activists, a limited vision of how society changes restricts the space for envisioning action and reduces the possibilities to act in the world, whereas recognising the importance of continuously adapting their practices of dissent opens up the possibility of devising effective forms of resistance. At the same time, acknowledging the growing interconnectedness of fields and issues where specific forms of power are exercised enables human agents to further draw on the potentials of communication and collaboration.

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embodying more practices that open up our collective imaginary to the potential for change obscured by dominant perspectives. Research practices, political practices, practices of subjectivation are engendered in this process.

3

Thinking practice

Traditionally, knowledge production has been viewed as a representational interpretive process that privileges the forces of recognition guiding our thoughts. This presupposition is rooted in what Gilles Deleuze calls the“Image of Thought” (1994), an image underlying most western philosophical traditions and impacting their modes of thinking, as well as their practical, political and ethical implications. For Deleuze, thought has so far been subordinated to externally imposed directives, to commonsensical notions about the good nature of thought, to the priority of the model of recognition as the means of thought, to the sovereignty of representation over supposed elements in nature and thought, and to the subordination of culture to method, or learning to knowledge: The philosopher […] proposes as universally recognised what it is meant by thinking, being and self – in other words, not a particular this or that but the form of representation or recognition in general. […] It is because everybody naturally thinks that everybody is supposed to know implicitly what it means to think. The most general form of representation is thus found in the element of common sense understood as an upright nature and goodwill. […] An object is recognised […] when all faculties together relate themselves to a form of identity in the object, thereby making it representable. The model of recognition that involves all faculties implies that we can look at, touch, hear a specific object and can hence recognise it as such and that “the form of identity in objects relies upon a ground in the unity of a thinking subject of which all the other faculties must be modalities” (Deleuze 1994: 131–133). Common sense underlies the assumption that there is an original reality to discover, and that recognising and describing this reality objectively are the purpose of thought. Consequently, this taken-for-granted predisposition of the subject towards recognition and description becomes established as a natural mode of thinking and knowing via pre-established models and pre-formed 206

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categories. That is, models for recognition and representation come to constitute the unquestioned ontological basis for epistemological practices. This epistemological approach, in turn, legitimises regulatory practices within academia by constructing and classifying any object of inquiry as a static entity to evaluate according to general or universal categories. It is common for scholars to construct political movements as objects of study in a way that extracts and reifies them, leaving many of their connections and continuities outside of their filed of action unexplored.12 Moreover, this operation requires a freeze-framing of the movement in a way that unavoidably obscures the dynamic processes that underlie its presence to provide a consistent description of its functions. For example, the classification of social movements as old or new places exclusive emphasis on a separation between the social/political and the cultural fields (Frampton and al., 2006: 13) disregarding the tension between these fields as a generally productive force that is key to understanding some expressions of contemporary political practices that engender projects like Telestreet. Locating thought in the realm of representation also has the important consequence of creating a split between theory and practice, in favour of a speculative, explanatory approach to social analysis. Sociological studies of activism are often conceived of as tools to “understand” social phenomena – they imply a “neutral” stance for the researcher, whose role is to explain the world around us. This positioning of the researcher outside of social dynamics brackets practical necessity, using instruments of thought against practice to produce scientific knowledge (Bourdieu 1990). It poses knowledge production as detached from social change, denying any responsibility of the researcher in shaping official narratives about the relationship between resistance and change. Calls to question the dominant representational paradigms within research and to acknowledge a researcher’s agency in the social field have come from sociologists as well as from geographers and anthropologists. In these fields, many researchers recognise that knowledge production is never objective or neutral but always situated within the specific context and point of view of those involved (Haraway, 1988). In particular, researchers whose ethnographic studies directly pertain to local issues and actors feel particularly well placed to ............................................ 12

See Ronald Bogue (2004) for a detailed explanation of how common sense, also based on a principle of similarity-difference, can only grasp the world as static, thereby missing the singularity of individual phenomena. Particularly insightful is his discussion of how the image of thought has important repercussions on the field of education.

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make strategic use of their symbolic and social capital to think through research questions that could trigger direct shifts in the fields of intervention. This is why meanwhile, many ethnographers use collaborative methods of inquiry in the explorations of the social relations that structure our existence. At the same time, they attempt to relay theory and praxis to analyse where specific interventions can shift the present configurations (Frampton and al., 2006, Smith, 1987, Smith, 2002). Geographers too promote and practice a critical geography that merges theory and praxis with a critical emphasis on how spaces affect social relations (see: Ruddick, 2004, Wakefield, 2007, Kitchin and Hubbardt, 1999, Staeheli and Mitchell, 2007). In a similar vein, activist anthropology explicitly combines scholarship and social activism, while encouraging a critical reflection on both the conceptual and practical limitations of the anthropological tradition (see: Speed, 2006, Messer, 1993, LyonCallo and World, 2003). Despite the different approaches to their concerns, all these research practices share a questioning of the neutral position and role of the researcher and stress a need to work together with the actors “studied” to produce social shifts. Collaborating with the actors that are the focus of their research, they open up to chance encounters that can shock their thought processes out of the habitual modes of looking at the world. In particular, the openness to listen and make unexpected connections between phenomena brings to their attention new relations that would remain hidden when working in isolation and objectifying the group studied. Starting from Deleuze’s idea of thought as “experimentation in contact with the real” (1987: 12) and on the research practices of this minor tradition of activist scholarship, I take research as an encounter that forces us to think creatively: a practice of/as thought. As I will explain in the following sections, this shifts the focus of thinking from the production of knowledge to the practice of learning. It is by seeing research as a medium of social relations, which affects our perspective of reality that the political and ethical potential of creative academic work becomes full-fledged. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Brian Massumi attempts to look at the dynamism that drives change in the social. He assigns primacy to movement, and considers position (or the finite product or object) as its derivate:

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The idea is that there is an ontogenesis or becoming of culture and the social […] of which determinate forms of culture and sociability are the result. The challenge is to think that process of formation, and for that you need the notion of a taking-form, an inform on the way to being determinately this or that. The field of emergence is not pre-social. It is openendedly social. […] That interaction is precisely what takes form. That is what is socially determined – and renegotiated by each and every cultural act. Assume it and you beg the whole question. Not assuming it however, entails finding a concept for interaction-in-the-making. The term adopted here is relation (Massumi, 2002: 9). Relation is what happens between the coordinates that are usually the object of study in the social sciences; it is between these chosen points that change happens. It is through this change that the points in relation are affected and mutate themselves: these points, these objects, this “stuff ” are indeed the result, not the cause of processes of emergence (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: 293). For Deleuze (1988a), the act of studying an object in space as being quantifiable, divisible or clearly positionable requires a freeze-framing of reality and the elimination of its processual interaction with its surroundings through representational forms of thinking. For Massumi, such operations cannot grasp “the continuity of its [the object’s] movements, we are looking at only one dimension of reality [the quantitative dimension] […] the kinds of distinction suggested here pertain to continuities under qualitative transformation” (Massumi, 2002: 7–8). Rather than an epistemological question, laying an emphasis on movement between objects is an ontological and ethical issue (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: 297–98). As mentioned earlier, this ontology underlies a different way of perceiving agency in the social, as well as knowledge itself. More precisely, looking at the relation between points can do more than just help us understand their functions: thinking outside of representational models through concepts like processual mapping strives towards a practice of thought and action that uses these same objects as reference points, as “signs pointing beyond themselves” (Bogue, 2004: 334) to forge a series of new connections. Consequently, Practice as/of thought can lead to a “superproduction” (Lotringer 2001: 5) of concepts and connections that constantly generate new ideas thereby opposing the regimes of discourses that reinforce “common” sense and habitual thinking. The gap between thinking and acting, between

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theory and practice is filled insofar as theory is put to task to reflect on reality, to formulate and solve practical problems. In What is Philosophy (1991), Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as the act of creating concepts through the construction of a problem field – what they call the “plane of immanence” (1991). The problem field is rooted in an immanent relationship of philosophy with the world and provides a diagram of the features and elements of reality that can contribute to the formulation of a specific problem. It is a map of directions that are fractal in nature (Deleuze and Guattari, 1991: 40) and sets the ground to experiment with concepts and possible solutions: “the concept is the beginning of philosophy, but the plane is its instituting. The plane […] constitutes the absolute ground of philosophy […] it is pre-philosophical […] it implies a sort of groping experimentation” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1991: 41). Hence, concepts are not created to abstractly describe or understand phenomena, rather, they derive from reality and must enable us to think of new moves: “a solution has no meaning independently of a problem to be determined in its conditions and unknowns; but these conditions and unknowns have no meaning independently of solutions determinable” (1991: 81). The act of posing problems directly related to a specific context and devising solutions accordingly is creative rather than representational. To think the social in the in-between of two or more entities, i.e. their shifting relation is to see and be in the world differently; it means to sustain truly creative processes that are not rooted in analytical thinking and recognition because there is no reality to recognise but only to create; it means to learn from movement how to constantly undo what has been thought so far and make room for new thoughts and practices (Deleuze, 1994). To think the social in the in-between of two or more elements is a creative learning process whose pedagogical value is not limited to its by-product – knowledge – but lies in the very practice of thinking and acting upon a problem field. In this sense, learning by posing and solving problems consists of actualising the virtual connections between elements – i.e. thinking their relation – while at the same time performing a reflection on this very act, so that the operation remains evident and open-ended. Returning to the idea of instituent practices, adopting this position within academia engenders learning during the process of assembling knowledge, where learning requires the act of moving away from pre-coded meanings. It is this pedagogical aspect that

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becomes key in research practices oriented towards a self-conscious use of theory for practice by all actors involved.

4

Squatted Spaces

The problems that I pose are always concerned with local and particular issues […] because it seems to me that none of the major discourses that can be produced about society is so convincing that it may be trusted; and if one really wants to construct something new and different, or in any case if one wants the great systems to be open to certain real problems, it is necessary to look for the data and the questions in which they are hidden. And then I’m not convinced that intellectuals […] can point to the essential problems of the society in which they live. On the contrary, one of the main opportunities for collaboration with “non-intellectuals” is in listening to their problems, and in working with them to formulate these problems (Foucault, 1991: 151). Methodologically, the act of constructing a problem field consists of mapping the potential relations among various terms constituting social entities and the processes of acualisation through which they come together (1987: 12). Deleuze draws from the language of differential calculus to conceptualise the relation between these elements. In Difference and Repetition he illustrates how the derivative of a function dy/dx can help us think through relation without having to fix a value for its elements x and y: “In relation to x, dx is completely undetermined, as dy is to y, but they are perfectly determinable in relation to one another. […] Each term exists absolutely only in its relation to the other” (Deleuze, 1994: 172). A problem field maps how these undetermined elements are ideally connected and reciprocally determine each other (Deleuze, 1994: 173–174). At the same time it also maps the distribution of its singular points in a field of vectors (social forces) without having to determine their value or form – each differential equation remains a concrete manifestation of more potential differentiations (Bogue 2004: 334). Concretely, in my case, it is possible to see Telestreet as a problem field with reciprocally determined sets of practices that can be used for organising and socialising, as well as a particular set of singular points that are actualised within the network. For example, experimenting with the language of televi-

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sion, distributing autonomous information or producing cultural forms that are dissociated from market values are elements that synchronically and diachronically relate Telestreet to the discourses and practices on communication and cultural politics mentioned earlier. Simultaneously, the forces that confront Telestreet in its daily existence continuously steer its nodes towards further differentiation in interaction with the context in which they operate – this is a quasi-causal rather than a causal, determination and produces Telestreet’s singularities. It is important to mention that Telestreet’s field of vectors is not only composed of the dominant forces that attempt to curb the practices of resistance associated with political grassroots projects, constantly affecting their functioning and thinking. This field of vectors also includes those forces pushing from inside: inside the nodes but also from within the field of activism – itself characterised by tensions and conflict. Here the framework of control societies, with its emphasis on subject-formation can be helpful in formulating questions about Telestreet that enable us to map its development within a field of forces. Rather than looking at Telestreet as an “object” determined by preconceived oppositional practices, it becomes possible to ask how its practices of dissent come to be related to and mutually engendered by the contingent forces they come in contact with. For example, to consider Telestreet’s node InsuTV as the direct (and static) result of discourses on political antagonism because of its strict association with the squatting and alter-globalization movements would overlook a series of elements that point at InsuTv’s singular role as a space for autonomous cultural production and mediation between different discourses within Italian activism, and its broader social field. From the data collected so far, it already emerges how InsuTV’s “subject position” is engendered by its engagement with social problems and control – an ongoing involvement with its territory, rather than from simple ideological positioning against the system. Philosopher of science Gilbert Simondon, stresses the necessity to account for the ontogenesis – the process of development of the individual13 and the collective – a process that is ongoing and never completed (Simondon, 2001). ............................................ 13 “Individuation must therefore be thought of as a partial and relative resolution manifested in a system that contains latent potentials and harbours a certain incompatibility with itself, an incompatibility due at once to forces in tension as well as to the impossibility of interaction between terms of extremely disparate dimensions” (Simondon, 1992).

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It can be argued, following Simondon, and Deleuze’s take on his theories of individuation, that the collective subjectification of Telestreet in a society of control functions similarly to processes of subjectification of its actors, engendering subjectivity as a residual effect of social forces and practices. This means that as a collective subject – a metastable system of practices and resources – Telestreet is continuously evolving by folding the outside with the inside: its present modes of existing as a political subject with its encounter with other actors, resources and technology (Deleuze, 1988b, Deleuze, 2004). This is how social change works through connection and contagion, where the emergence of social and collective actors is not to be seen only in linear terms of evolution from one less differentiated thing to a more differentiated one. Rather, according to a process that they call involution (which has nothing to do with regression or Gregory Bateson’s theories of agriculture), it involves the creative formation of a block “that runs its line “between” the terms in play and beneath assignable relations” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 239). In other words, Telestreet’s singularity emerges as surplus of past and present tradition of politics, communication and cultural production. Moreover, this transversal form of emergence takes place through the connection of biological, social and technical components, rather than simply from the interaction of the different levels that lie between actors on one end and society on the other. Returning to the concept of differential relations as loci to investigate social change without cutting the specific elements involved from their trajectory of development, Deleuze and Guattari state: “It is a question of assigning assemblages, in other words, of determining the differential traits according to which an element formally belongs to one assemblage rather than to another” (1987: 402). The concept of assemblages is particularly useful in sociology to think through the emergence of complex, heterogeneous social systems that regulate our behaviour, desires, language, and ways of thinking, while simultaneously attending to issues of downward causality in the formation of these same systems. Assemblages are specific interlocking and overlapping territories made of biological, social, technological, fragments that connect, interrupt, relay their material and expressive components. More specifically, Manuel DeLanda characterises assemblages as wholes characterised by relations of exteriority (2006: 10), that is, they are characterised by “a synthesis of properties of a whole not reducible to its parts” (DeLanda 2006: 4) which nevertheless allows for the isolation and analysis of their composing parts. Such aggregates

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are composed of analysable elements (individuals, resources, etc), yet they also present properties that emerge from the interaction between their parts (practices, power, etc.). Within assemblages, technological elements are interwoven with elements of the social and with bodies, producing emergent unities (Deleuze and Guattari 1986). In other words, the concept of assemblage allows scholars to actualise and map the direct and indirect connections within components and among different assemblages, moving between levels of analysis and structure. It provides a useful framework to look at political movements as entities composed of heterogeneous individuals, groups and social networks, as well as non-organic elements (e.g. computer hardware, communication infrastructure, physical sites, and so on). At the same time, it makes visible the dynamics and contexts from which activist practices emerge.14 The notion of the assemblage also directly addresses the issue of subjectivity. ‘Subjects’ are engendered within the bio-social-technical assemblage of ‘modernity’ and its capitalist axiomatics in ways that can be analysed through assemblage theory. More specifically, it is possible to look at the ways in which human agents link up with other agents through specific practices, repatterning their subjectivity, individually and collectively. The terms constituting an assemblage can be isolated and analysed through ethnographic research and then re-connected in an open series, showing the ways in which they affect each other. It is only in the act of making such connections, without using pre-determined analytic categories, that it is possible to determine the coordinates of each specific element (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 15). Thus far, my on-going work on and with Telestreet has familiarised me with different sources and kinds of information available in the public domain. These range from all the video productions that are archived online and are broadcasted through the airwaves of the Italian mediascape, their publications and press releases, the national and international reception in the mainstream and autonomous media, as well as websites, online fora and the legal documentations on the status of the network. I have also taken part in events organised by Telestreet and some they had been invited to (e.g.: Transmediale Media Festival in Berlin, Germany). This has provided me with an idea of how ............................................ 14

The concept of transversal emergence, what Deleuze and Guattari call the assemblage, gestures towards the political potential for experimenting with the limitations of specific forms of social relations through the creation of different bio-social- technical assemblages (Protevi 2006: 34). It takes into consideration what Bruno Latour (2005) calls actants – human actors as well as non human ones – and their role in social change.

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the Telestreet assemblage project functions on a general level and how it is valued both in Italy and beyond. On the whole I now have a clearer sense of the official discourses articulated by Telestreet, the kind of material it produces, how its broadcasting is organised as well as what kind of strategies have been developed and employed to interact with other networks of autonomous cultural production, the government and the mainstream media. In terms of finding the series that belong to an assemblage or constructing the problem field, these elements collected during this first phase of my research are only the first step in my experiment with processual mapping.15

5

Methodology

The question now becomes how to develop a framework that pragmatically attends to the specific ways in which the particularities of the Telestreet assemblage come together from various contexts, engender each other and interact with the outside. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987) the creation of social assemblages takes place through connection, relation and disjunction. Similarly, ethnographic research as a creative practice requires bringing together already available elements of theory in novel ways to suit a specific problem. This implies recuperating and re-contextualising data collection and analysis methodologies already available, as well as developing new ways of interacting with the people involved in the research. As mentioned earlier, I situate myself within a tradition of cooperative, practice-based research that has its points of departure and reference in the reality in which it is conceived. This line of scholarship finds its legitimisation in the tangible transformations that are brought about during and after the research in and by the group taking part in the process, rather than in a more general recognition by other scholars (Hale, 2002, Greenwood and Levin, 1998). It requires establishing a relationship where activist and researcher create ............................................ 15 Although it is important to mention Telestreet’s positive national and international reception during the first years of its life, it seems to me that focussing on the macro effects and successes of the project would not help me pose any questions about Telestreet’s social role, its functioning and any potential improvements. In fact, most of the hype created around the phenomenon was conditioned by the novelty of the technology used and by a vague hope that Telestreet would be an antidote to Berlusconi’s monopoly over the Italian mediascape. Due to financial, legal and logistical problems, the Telestreet network did not expand as foreseen by its enthusiasts and very little attention is now paid to its presence. Dismissing Telestreet as a failure because of its little impact on the media would overlook its unique role at the level of macropolitics.

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knowledge as they support each other. It also requires moving beyond discourses on positionality and belonging that legitimise the fixed subjectivity of the researcher, emphasising instead the potentials for learning and collaboration. Participatory Action Research (PAR) stresses the need to carry out research while tapping into the knowledge of the group examined. In PAR, the research process proceeds from the analysis of a concrete reality to more abstract generalisations, to loop back to this concrete reality in search of possible transformative solutions through targeted collective action (Greenwood and Levin, 1998). In this context, the researcher merely functions as a catalyst (Molina, 2007), using knowledge already existing and that can be harnessed partly through a previous study of the context and then through conversation, interviews, workshops, observation and collection of documents. PAR is structured by cycles and feedback loops in which groups and researchers identify the issues and problems collectively, they devise research methods and undertake action, and eventually evaluate the results to incorporate them in a subsequent research/action cycle (Riel, 2007). These cycles are instrumental in assuring that the research process stays collective, and are also where my specific approach to problem-posing becomes particularly relevant as a learning process, as well as a tool for finding solutions. Another collaborative research method that can be recuperated as a politically engaged form of scholarship is co-research, an independent case study often used by activists to assess their work. Briefly, co-research uses traditional research methods like interviews, questionnaires and self-narratives, but has different implications because it is also carried out by the actors themselves, doing away with the separation between interviewer and interviewee. This means that the groups taking part in the analysis are not objects to be studied but actively participate in the construction of the tools for the study. The advantage of such an approach is that the group itself defines the relevant issues and constructs the questions. At the same time, because of their coinvolvement, for both activists and researcher the production of knowledge is immediately a mode of subjectivation and development of political organization (Conti and al., 2007: 80); it is a practice through subjects are constantly recreated as active participants in the work of Telestreet. From a political perspective, in co-research, the production of knowledge is itself the production process of the research (i.e. takes place simultaneously with, as opposed to after). Here the resulting knowledge involves both learning about and re216

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constituting the subjects involved, but also devising new organizational forms and practices that redesign the structure and allow for the constant reinvention of the project. For Conti et al. “collective research is itself organization” (Conti and al., 2007: 80) – problem posing and problem solving. A map is an assemblage; a map being drawn is an assemblage in the making. Telestreet is an assemblage; InsuTv is one of the assemblages that composes Telestreet and relates to it, but also to other assemblages previously described. InsuTv is based in Naples, Southern Italy, in the CSOA Officina 99, which, since Mayday 1991 provides the Neapolitan youth with a physical space to organise political and cultural activities. Officina hosts, among other things, a computer lab for the development and dissemination of free and open source software, recording studios for emerging bands, an independent radio station affiliated with the IMC Network Indymedia, as well as the TV studios of InsuTV. It is also a venue for concerts, performance, workshops, fundraisers and various activities for the support of immigrants and the neighbourhood in which it is located. Since 2004, InsuTV’s DIY, 18-meter-high antenna and 20-watt transmitter broadcast without any advertisement, twenty-four hours a day from the roof of Officina’s building. From there, the signal reaches the central and eastern areas of the city of Naples16 with a quality comparable to some of the regional commercial television channels. InsuTv’s transmission system SOMA is completely automated, i.e. it does not require ongoing presence of technicians in the studios because it can transmit content through a Linux-operated computer application.17 SOMA selects from various folders and broadcasts autoproduced programmes that vary from investigative journalism and cuisine shows to films, documentaries and foreign languages newscasts for and by immigrants.18 In addition to being a TV channel, InsuTV also organises ............................................ 16 Naples is the one of the largest cities in Italy, with a population of 1,000,449 and a greater metropolitan population of 3,085,447. Because it has the highest population density on the Italian peninsula (8,334.5/km2; 21,586.3/sq mi), InsuTV potentially reaches more viewers than other microbroadcasters of the Telestreet network. For more information about the city see: http://www.comune.napoli.it. For more information about InsuTV see: http://www.insutv.it. 17 This strategy enables the members of InsuTV to concentrate on other tasks, especially production and post-production. A core group of a dozen individuals (age 20-40) coordinates the activities of the channel. Its members range from IT-technicians, graphic designers, social workers, students, a doctor, an architect and some independent journalists and filmmakers and editors. More individuals usually take part in their activities by collaborating on specific projects, or by submitting and discussing their collaborations at the weekly programming meetings. 18 Content is not only produced locally but also acquired during independent festivals and collaborations. Other sources of material are autonomous media archives or individuals that send in their own productions.

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community and media-related events, fundraisers to finance its work, film screenings, festivals and conferences, as well as training courses for those interested in collaborating with the channel. I have chosen to focus on InsuTV, partly because of its characteristics and partly because of my familiarity with the context from which it emerged. On the one hand, InsuTV’s functionality and many links to political spaces and groups within and outside its head quarters gesture towards different types of assemblages and degrees of social relations. InsuTv thrives on collaborations with various groups ranging from the Hacklabs, social justice and migrant organisations to local autonomous media, anti-homophobia and feminist collectives. In all cases, the activities organised function as much as tools to forge alliances and spark up reflection on social issues, as to provide new content for television. On the other hand, growing up in Naples and taking part in Officina and other CSOAs activities places me in an ideal position to carry out work with InsuTV’s members, as someone who can understand and navigate the Neapolitan and activist contexts and as a trusted person who shares the experiences and stakes of the group in Italy, while collaborating on similar projects in Germany and Canada. This familiarity with media activism, with the city of Naples and with InsuTV adds a further layer to the potential of my research. In fact, as a trusted researcher/activist, it facilitates, rather than weigh down collaboration and knowledge exchange, thereby helping InsuTV identify the issues confronted – and, if necessary, reframe the project through different strategies. All in all, my work aims to make sense of InsuTV/Telestreet’s practices while supporting the channel by actively participating in its activities and contributing to its own self-examination. Thus, research takes place on two levels: as a way of making sense of Telestreet/InsuTV as a social phenomenon, and as a collaboration to contribute to the project, in the shape and degree decided with the members of the channel. At the moment, all of InsuTV participants are involved in the collaborative research process, and some groups collaborating with them have been contacted. By setting ourselves some common research goals we hope to contribute knowledge on (and for) political movements while understanding and strengthening the impact of InsuTV’s work. One of the questions we are currently asking during the collaborative research process is how to increase InsuTV impact at the local level as a space of mediation and coordination for the different Neapolitan grassroots groups. The investigation is taking place by 218

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discussing individually, with each member the current limitations of the project and possible ways of overcoming them, and then setting up focus groups and brainstorm sessions in which all the ideas and positions are summarised, analysed and brought together in a way that can help simplify, rather than complicate their work.

6

Conclusions

I started this text talking about lines, I proceeded by trying to draw – sketch – and weave them together on a map – or plane – that gives them consistency and that spans between the macropolitics of academic practices and narratives about social change, and the micropolitics of our fast-changing everyday life and work. I talked about relation, the in-between along which these lines run; a thick, woven line of practices that draws from different poles, is not subordinated to either one but affects all (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: 293–4). The act of weaving, the drawing of a map, the laying out of a problem field that foreground the relation between elements without pre-assigning them a specific value is a process called learning. This pedagogical practice – a practice that brings the ontological underpinnings of how we think reality closer to everyday life to disrupt preestablished and habitual connections – leads both activists and researchers to make sense of the world through newly formulated problems and to engender new solutions. It helps us create new narratives about social change that can embolden our political imaginary by freeing it from the constraints of common sense and representation. It teaches us how to work in the gap between political activism and knowledge production as always instituting new practices that are immanent to a specific context, never separate from what preceded us but always different in relation to it (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: 296, Raunig, 2007). This same practice forms us as “subjects” always folding the reality that contains us and the knowledge we create about it (Foucault, 1980). This is because subjectivation is itself a collective practice and any political movement like Telestreet can be conceived as a continual affirmation of multiple modes of subjectivation and connections among actors, their environments, and their potential to create new conditions or social relations.

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Following the initial step of posing the question of Telestreet in terms of learning and experimentation developed through co-research and immanent critique, we can continue to look for the conditions and potentials for organising networks of solidarity between academics and activists that modulate (rather than isolate or oppose) and embolden a radical politics for social justice already taking place. Building connections among activists, organizations and individuals is not simply a matter of naming a condition, nor is it a matter of creating a concept that might provide a point of theoretical connection: it is in the actual process of making, or embodying, these connections that new practices of sociability emerge.

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Encounters

KONSTANTINOS C HORIANOPOULOS

Connecting Remote Educational spAces with mediaTed PresencE (CREATE)

1

Introduction

In this research program, we examine how the shared experience of mass communication could be extended with collaborative interactivity and user generated content that connects everyday life across physically distributed (‘diasporic’) communities. The disciplinary scope of this research program concerns interaction design in computer mediated mass communication and includes some novel technological aspects. Besides technology integration, the research program puts particular emphasis on a longitudinal study that will investigate the social effects of locative media in an educational setting. Previous research on the impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education settings has focused on the learning process itself (e.g., if and how learning is improved through computers and networks). In the proposed research program, we regard a complementary to the learning process issue that has been motivated by the growth of distance education programs and by the strong interest of the European Commission in cultural exchange programs within educational settings.1 2 3 4 In brief, we aim to study whether ICT could be employed in public physical settings in a transparent way and whether ICT could have a positive effect on social awareness aspects of the above cultural exchange programs. ............................................ 1 European Schoolnet (EUN) provides major European education portals for teaching, learning and collaboration and leads the way in bringing about change in schooling through the use of new technology. http://www.europeanschoolnet.org/ww/en/pub/eun/about/euninfo.htm 2 myEUROPE is a Web-based project which involves a network of more than 8000 schools. It aims to help teachers raise their pupils' awareness of what it means to be a young citizen in Europe http://myeurope.eun.org 3 In Classroom4EU students across Europe share opinions on two questions: What would you want other young Europeans to know about your country? And What do you think all young people in the EU should know about Europe? http://classroom4.eu/ 4 ETwinning is a virtual meeting point for the exchange of information between schools http://www.etwinning.net

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In particular, there are no current research findings that inform the design of ICT to support distant cooperation and cultural exchange activities during off-line periods. For, example students perform an overhead of on-line learning activities through ICT (e.g., email, forums, content sharing), which might be sometimes unrelated to the actual purpose of cultural exchange (which is regarded to be an off-line activity in the face of e-learning ICT tools). Moreover, everyday school life has also an informal social component that takes place in public spaces (such as cafeteria). Finally, school settings could be distributed and very remote, especially in the case of primary and secondary education. Therefore, there is a potential use of ICT in the casual social aspects of distance cooperation and cultural exchange programs in educational settings. In order to provide support for remote and casual social awareness, we aim to augment the familiarity and accessibility of mass communication with subtle interactivity (e.g. social presence visualizations) and user-generated content. Despite the criticism concerning the value of television (Putnam 2001) and mass communication, there are studies that reveal several worthwhile aspects, such as social communication. Indeed, media content is a shared experience and it is employed as a placeholder for interpersonal and group communication (Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi 1990). Although television has been implicitly assumed as a domestic technology, there are also several uses of media content in public space (McCarthy 2001.). Previous research has proposed several techniques that employ sensor data and visualize remote social activity, but there are no research results on the longitudinal effects of these visualizations. For this purpose, we aim to employ user evaluation techniques to assess activity visualization techniques on distant community awareness during off-line periods. In terms of methodology, the proposed research program aims to make a contribution towards the understanding of the long-term effects of locative media (e.g., public shared displays and mobile personal terminals) on the casual social aspects of distance collaboration (e.g., current status of remote partner’s work in joint project and highlighting of hot topics). For this purpose, we will employ a longitudinal evaluation of the employed ICT. In terms of measurement constructs, we aim to evaluate whether ‘social presence’ is enhanced by the use of locative media. Communication media differ in their degree of ‘social presence’ and this is one factor that molds interaction. Short (1976) defined social presence as the sense of awareness of the presence of an interaction partner in a mediated environment. Notably, social presence has 228

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been associated with enhanced online social interaction (Tu and McIsaac 2002). Therefore, it is expected that the proposed system might have positive effects to the core activities of distance collaboration (e.g., learning), although this is not the primary objective of the project. In the context of casual support of social awareness in distant collaboration, ICT and Television hold the potential for a different model of sharing individual and collaborative experience; one that is subtle and transparent to other concurrent activities. In practical terms, we aim to investigate the interplay between large-scale shared displays and meshes of small-scale personal mobile terminals that could be collectively employed to produce, distribute and control media content. In general, we aim to explore how locative media enable new forms of social practice and contribute towards enhancing and perhaps expanding social encounters in everyday places, within an educational and distance collaboration context. For this purpose, we will explore the use of ambient video-links (e.g., a public display that is dynamically updated to reflect the status of distant partners), which support distant cultural exchange and learning activities. Indeed, the majority of the European educational organizations have been involved in human resources exchanges and joint projects that aim to promote mutual understanding and long-term cooperation between the wide diversity of European cultures (for example the Erasmus and the Commenius programs by the European Commission). Although ICT has been widely employed as collaboration ‘tool,’ for learning, the value of advanced ICT as ‘medium’ of continuous and subtle social presence and awareness has been neglected so far.

2

Definitions and scope of this work

Among the broad research directions in this interdisciplinary field, there have been some interesting findings that frame the motivations of the current research program. Adams (1992) studied the phenomenon that TV is described by people and considered by the media researchers as a physical place. On the other hand, Reeves and Naas (1996) have explored extensively human reaction to mediated experiences. Wildman (2001) traces the historical impact of communication technologies (radio, TV, telephone) to the design of the homes and reports that each of these technologies, slowly, yet boldly, transformed the design of domestic space. In addition, media researchers found

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that the design of the domestic space has an influence on the way people watch TV (Pardun and Krugman 1994). Although TV is implicitly assumed as a domestic technology, there are also several uses of TV in public space (McCarthy 2001). Furthermore, the closer integration of powerful communication mediums, such as TV, in the fabric of the social and build space is of central important to the future of human-computer interaction (Dourish 2002). In this context, Ambient ITV is defined as a rich audiovisual user experience that spans physical places (private, public) and devices (TV, mobile, public display). The concepts of ‘media’ and ‘architecture’ have been treated by so many different researchers and disciplines and it turns out that very common terminology such as media-architecture or media and the city have ambiguous meanings. Still, it is possible to distinguish between few main directions of academic research, which we describe next. For the sake of simplicity, we refer to all the above terms with ‘mediacity.’ Although some existing works might possess aspects of more than one of the following categories, we find that most of them sit comfortably within that taxanomy: 1. Mediacity as immersion in a virtual environment: Inspired by early science fiction literature and technological determinism it refers to virtual worlds, such as online multiple-player games (e.g. Second Life, World of Warcraft, etc). 2. Mediacity as analysis of architectural representations in media content: Based on the media studies methodologies for content analysis it refers to the exploration of the ways buildings and cities are represented on media, such as film, photography. Since architectural creations hold symbolic meaning then media studies provides a suitable methodology to analyze past and present forms. 3. Mediacity as a design and representation tool: Building upon the success of early Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools researchers have been exploring the use of novel media technologies (e.g. smart video projectors, augmented reality systems) in the design process. The main benefit is that new tools will bring shape to new forms. 4. Mediacity as mixed reality environment: Driven by wide adoption of place based multimedia computers (e.g. mobile phones, phone cameras, large-scale screens), and the pervasiveness of geographic information systems (e.g. car navigation) researchers have been studying the impact of those media technologies on the under230

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standing of physical space. Since new media technologies are employed during everyday life, then the responses and behavior of users changes according to those tools. In the context of this research we are mostly concerned with the latter definition of mediacity. Moreover, we attempt to move one step forward towards the consideration of mediacity as a communication medium instead of mere tool.

3

Related work

In this research program, we will explore if and how the connectivity of distant communities could be reinforced through locative mass media communication (O’Hara et al. 2004), which support shared experiences, such as content sharing and collaborative interaction. Locative media offer new ways of combining the emerging ubiquitous nature of digital technologies with the significant qualities of physical environments. Like dwellings or fireplaces, locative media could promote social interaction and become a placeholder for shared experiences. Although video has not been very successful in distant personal or group communication (Finn 1997), it has several worthwhile qualities. Indeed, according to Fish et al. (1990): „The history of video as a communications technology has been a mixed one, showing great successes as a method of broadcasting entertainment, a mixed record as a method of educational distribution, and a dismal record as a mechanism for interpersonal communication.“

3.1

Art and telepresence

In the past, there have been several artistic works that explored the connectedness of places. For example, Hole-in-space was a public communication sculpture. It connected an art exhibition center in New York City with a department store located in an open-air mall at the west coast. The visitors of the two places had a surprising encounter with each other. Passers-by could see, hear, and speak with each other as if encountering each other on the same sidewalk5. Very similar artistic work has been performed recently under the ............................................ 5

Galloway, K. and Rabinowitz, S. (1980). Hole-In-Space. http://www.ecafe.com/getty/HIS

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name Hole-in-earth6, based on internet and computer technology, instead of video links. Indeed, telepresence is a favorite theme between artists and there has been a major contemporary video link and installation connecting New York and London7. What is common between the above works is that participants had a surprising counter with each other. Suddenly head-to-toe, life-sized, television images of the people on the opposite coast appeared. They could now see, hear, and speak with each other as if encountering each other on the same sidewalk. No signs, sponsor logos, or credits were posted – no explanation at all was offered. No self-view video monitors to distract from the phenomena of this life-size encounter. Self-view video monitors would have degraded the situation into a self-conscience videoconference

3.2

Human-Computer Interaction and video mediated communication

Besides artistic exploration that did not provide any formal evaluation of the concept, previous works in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and video-conferencing have been installed in researchers’ offices, or student dormitories and have been used to link distant offices of the same organization (Jancke et al. 2001). Researchers have investigated technical feasibility and user acceptance about whether collocated face-to-face meetings could be replicated with video portals that connect remote places. Moreover, researchers have developed computer based tools that support meetings that take place over a distance or over different time-zones (Adams et al. 1999). They reported on several issues, such as the privacy concerns of users and the awkwardness of initiating conversations (Bly et al. 1993). Although video conferencing increases social presence, it also increases privacy concerns (Boyle and Greenberg 2005). Thus, there is increased reluctance to employ real-time video conferencing as a means of interpersonal communication. As a remedy, we propose the evaluation of a transparent and subtle ambient television system that ............................................ 6

Hole in the Earth: a digital installation in public space - by Maki Ueda http://www.ueda.nl/earth/index.html

7

The telectroscope was the first prototype television system. The term was also used in the 19th century to describe imaginary systems of distant seeing. Most recently, the term has been used for the name of a piece of installation art with a visual high speed broadband[1] link between London and New York City constructed by Paul St George in May 2008.

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creates video feeds based on local data, but broadcasts feeds based on abstract visualizations of those data. For example, the presence of many people as captured by a local camera, might be visualized as a particular color at a remote place, depending on remote activity and preferences as well. Notable examples of related research includes the work performed at Xerox PARC (early 90’s), which was followed up by MIT Media Lab (Karahalios and Donath 2004) and Georgia Institute of Technology. The majority of previous efforts have been focused in the office environment and they have not formally evaluated the effects on behavior and attitudes over a long period of time (e.g., for more than six months). With regard to the education context, the most relevant work has considered the collaboration between teachers who are geographically distributed (Groth et al. 2005). Although, there is a large body of research that treats ICT applications in distance education8, there is no work on the casual aspects of education and on the longitudinal evaluation of ICT that supports social awareness in an educational context. For example, most of the EC-funded cultural exchange and student collaboration programs employ standard ICT, such as email, chat rooms, forums, and file sharing to support projects’ activities. Indeed, ‘tool’ approaches to ICT have not been very successful in enhancing distant work (Olson and Olson 2000). Could the casual (off-line) aspects of distant collaboration hold some opportunity for enhancing the social aspects of ICT?

3.3

Some research issues in collaborative and situated communication design

There is a research opportunity in the analysis of ICT that supports casual aspects of learning and that is employed in a distance education context. By “casual aspects of learning” we refer to activities that do not support directly the learning process, but which might provide opportunities and motivation for the main learning activities (e.g. the knowledge that remote students are currently very active on a joint project might motivate local students to join them). Besides established interfaces from previous research, we aim to contribute to visualization techniques with one or more of the following concepts: ............................................ 8

For example, there are more than 200 citations for one of the early articles on ICT and distance education: Dede, C. Merging technologies and distributed learning. The American Journal of Distance Education. 10(2), 4-36. 1996.

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1) how media content schedule (e.g. who controls the flow) affects the sense of time in public space (Lynch 1972)? 2) what types of user interfaces (e.g. mobile phone) facilitate and promote group interaction in locative media (Paek et al. 2004)? 3) what type of visual language (e.g., TV, deskop metaphor) is suitable for the display of public information? For example, Acker (1999) outlined a key aspect of the interactive possibilities new technologies have unleashed. He identifies the „merging“ of space and time and the complicated consequences of our new existence in multiple places simultaneously. It would be interesting to evaluate the effects on education activities of a video-awareness system that is based on mass communication (Mazur 2000) instead of interpersonal communication. In general, the most interesting effects of distance communication systems on everyday life, such as community identity, community awareness, and civic participation have not been documented. In terms of methodology there are several research issues that have to be addressed. Traditionally, we have been designing and measuring the performance of new ICT in the face of usability. Today the context of the digital task has extended beyond the desktop to world of work, play, travel, and dwelling. Thus, the role of computing has changed. Information technology has become ambient social infrastructure. This allies it with architecture. The disciplines of architecture and interaction design both address how contexts shape actions. Architecture frames intentions. Interactivity, at its very roots, connects those mental states to available opportunities for participation. The need to connect architecture and interaction design comes from overlapping subject matters and escalating social consequences. The two disciplines converge on the design of operable inhabitable systems. The path toward connection involves a shift form foreground objects to background experiences. These processes are ambient. Their benefits are to be found in the quiet periphery, and not in the seductive objects of attention (McCollough 2004).

3.4

Significance of the research program

In terms of scientific disciplines, universal access in the information society, diffusion of broadband multimedia applications, and the assessment of the social impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on everyday life are primary objectives in the Community’s research framework. In 234

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addition, the employment of ICT in the context of learning and cultural exchange is a priority for European Commission. The ultimate research question behind this research program concerns cultural aspects of the viability of distant communities and whether technological support could make remote everyday life as engaging as life in the urban or centralized areas. For example, in Greece, the main motivation for distributing universities over remote places and islands was to support local development and avoid the shrinkage of the population (Oswalt and Rieniets 2006) on the islands. The latter is a very worthwhile objective in Greece, where half the population lives in the greater Athens (capital) area. Could situated communication technologies, when guided by a user centered interaction design approach (McCollough 2004) overcome the distance barrier between distant partnerships? For the above reasons, the proposed interactive video installation will be designed and evaluated with user-centered methods (e.g., cultural probes, ethnographic observation, usability tests in the lab, longitudinal survey) that ensure easy access to many people regardless of abilities and expertise. Moreover, the proposed system is based rather on television concepts and ambient user interfaces (e.g., mobile phone, presence, gesture, etc) rather than traditional personal computer interaction modalities, which require either high skills or high effort to use (e.g. mouse, keyboard, operating system). Moreover, the system will employ broadband multimedia technologies as the main means of communication between system-user and between users from remote sites. The use of broadband multimedia in a public system is expected to be a showcase of the usefulness of the respective technology to the students and the local community in general. We expect to establish awareness of the benefits of broadband multimedia, connectivity and increase the positive attitudes and adoption of information technology and in particular with regard to everyday aspects of social life. The proposed case study on student co-operation programs in secondary education schools could provide original findings, because there are no similar efforts. Besides the foreseen benefits for the local community, the outcomes of this research could have wide applicability in similar community establishments that take place over a distance (e.g. commercial or governmental organizations). Therefore, the findings of this case study could be consolidated with those from other similar regions of the EU (Groth et al. 2005). Finally, there are several benefits for the eTwinning program, which considers ICT

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mostly as a tool. The novel approach of the research program could promote the awareness of situated ICT as a complementary communication medium, as well.

4

Research methodology

Due to the multidisciplinary aspects (e.g., novel technology, social aspects of ICT, physical space considerations) of the research program, we employ a broad set of methodological elements. The overall approach is user-centered, where the user is regarded to have many roles, such as casual passer-by, author of content, or employee in an organization. There are many concepts, artistic works, ICT systems that concern the issue of distance communication and physical space. Nevertheless, previous related efforts have been temporarily installed, or they have been only informally evaluated. In contrast, in the proposed research program most of the effort will be focused on the design, data collection, analysis and publication of a longitudinal study on the social effects that situated technologies have on diasporic communities, with particular consideration to educational settings.

4.1

Understanding distant education

Before the longitudinal study, there will be a system design and integration phase. We are going to seek potential secondary education schools that wish to participate in this study9. In this period, we aim to create enthusiasm and gather user requirements, based on an ethnographic study of a remote collaboration session between two schools. The ethnographic study will be performed by the use of cultural probes, which are considered to be a ‘lightweight’ and nonintrusive user requirements collection method (Gaver et al. 1999). Cultural probes data will be analyzed and visualized with affinity diagrams (Beyer and Holtzblatt 1999). In addition, we aim to establish a set of benchmarks with regard to the measurement constructs. For this purpose, we will introduce the concept of ‘ICT in communication’ and evaluate the social awareness and ............................................ 9

Several local secondary education schools that are active in the eTwinning EC program have been already identified and will be invited to participate. It will be also interesting to consider the participation of additional schools that have not been as proactive as the former in the adoption of ICT tools provided by the EC eLearning programs.

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participation attitudes towards the current ‘on-line’ ICT tools, which the classroom employs for distant collaboration.

4.2

Learning by sharing experiences

We plan to deploy an ambient and social interactive TV platform (hardware, software, physical installation, content)10 that supports shared experiences in a positive way. The system will consist of shared screens (e.g., TVs in public space) and several physical and virtual sensors. By physical sensors we refer to Bluetooth receivers, video cameras and microphones that monitor the activity in a physical place. By virtual sensors, we refer to software interfaces that collect predetermined school-project data (e.g., forum discussions, exchange of media content), which they remotely visualize in an abstract way (e.g., active discussion threads could be highlighted and exchange of audiovisual files such as photos and videos run in the televised background of the shared screens).11 There are several low-cost ways to mix broadcast video and internet data in real-time, such as the ybox.12

4.3

Subjects and materials

We will develop and test the prefered types of media content and interfaces that are going to be displayed on the system screens and perform a pilot study. The pilot-study will involve two Greek schools, which reside in remote places (e.g. on an island and on the mountains in the mainland), in order to troubleshoot technical and methodological aspects of this study before actual deployment to a remote school in a different country. In this way, we “bulletproof ” the technological aspects (e.g., robustness, acceptance, usability) of the system and pilot the longitudinal data collection tools and data analysis proce............................................ 10

The technological platform will not be an end in itself, but a means to an end. The main objective is to evaluate technological support for human-connectedness in a diasporic community. For this reason, the deployed system will be based on integration and adaptation of existing components from related research efforts, which are described in the implementation section of this document.

11

Due to privacy concerns there is no real-time video transmission between the nodes of the system. Video cameras are employed as means of user interaction with the situated systems. The system transmits visually abstract compound video feeds (for detailed info please refer to the related projects links at the implementation section) of aggregate activity data.

12

The Ybox is an open hardware and software spec for an IP-enabled set-top box in a candy tin. http://ybox.tv

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dures. The same schools13 that participated in the pilot study will be considered for the longitudinal study in order to assess the differences between the proposed solution and traditional use of ICT. In the actual study, each one of the two local schools will be linked to one remote school14 that resides in a different EU country and they will be asked to perform their eTwinning project of preference.

4.4

Data collection instruments

Data collection will be based on the same cultural probes, data logs from the system’s sensors and will be guided by the ‘social presence’ approach and instruments. The social presence approach is the groundwork for many theories on new medium effects. The idea is that a medium’s social effects are principally caused by the degree of social presence, which it affords to its users. Social presence, or the ‘sense of being together’, is quite distinct from physical presence, or the sense of ‘being there’ in a mediated environment. One popular subjective method for measuring social presence is Ogood’s et al. (1957) semantic differential technique. There are also studies that articulate the construct of social presence and develop a social presence questionnaire for examining on-line collaborative learning (Tu and McIsaac 2002). Moreover, there are several other enhancement and additions to the original instrument, which are going to be considered before the pilot phase.

5

Implementation

5.1

Subjects

With regard to the case study (secondary education schools), the eTwinning project includes among other wide-ranging themes a thematic topic on ‘ICT in communication.’15 On that topic, students are motivated to think about the ............................................ 13

In the unfortunate case that a school drops out of the actual study, we will administer the benchmarking study again to a new school that is going to participate in the longitudinal study.

14

By having two pairs of schools during the lifetime of the study we expect to reduce the risk of dropouts and increase the likelihood of extra statistical analysis, such as between-groups

15

Etwinning suggested theme on “ICT in communication.” http://www.etwinning.net/ww/en/pub/etwinning/ideas_and_practice/project_kits/ict/ict_for_ communication.htm

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attributes of different communication mediums. We will collaborate with schools and teachers in order to introduce the topic of ‘ICT in communication’ as a prelude to the actual longitudinal study and as an opportunity to benchmark students’ attitudes towards the current set of ICT tools. Students will be involved in the consideration of the human aspect of telecommunication technologies and they will be asked to fill in the respective questionnaires, which will form the basis for the benchmarking of the rest of the proposed research program.

5.2

Hardware

In terms of technology, we are going to consider several sensor/input devices, such as cameras, microphones, WiFi, RFID, and Bluetooth. There are several manufacturers and distributors of controllers and sensors, such as Arduino16, Phidgets17, and MakingThings18. In addition, we aim to build the prototype system with low-cost commodity personal computers: a cluster of PCs, PC graphics accelerators, consumer video and sound equipment, and portable flat-screen TVs. This approach has the advantages of low cost, as high-volume commodity components typically have better price-performance ratios and improve at faster rates than special-purpose hardware (Li et al. 2000). Moreover, portable terminals (e.g. multimedia mobile phones) will be employed as a means to record, distribute and control content.

5.3

Interaction design

In terms of content and user interaction, we plan to employ and systematically evaluate in a realistic setting ideas from previous research during a long-term period. Donath et al. (1999) have designed graphical interfaces that reveal the social structure of the conversation by visualizing patterns such as bursts of ............................................ 16

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. http://www.arduino.cc

17

Phidgets are a set of "plug and play" building blocks for low cost USB sensing and control from your PC. All the USB complexity is taken care of by our robust API. Applications can be developed quickly in .NET, Visual Basic, VBA (Microsoft Access and Excel), LabView, Java, Delphi, C, C++ and Python. http://www.phidgets.com

18

MakingThings provides software and electronics tools for people creating projects that interact with the physical world. http://www.makingthings.com

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activity, the arrival of new members, or the evolution of conversational topics. Techniques for the visualization of Threaded discussions have been also presented by Turner et al. (2005) and Donath et al. (1999). Moreover, there is previous work of distant photo-sharing application (de Greef Ijsselsteijn 2001). Finally, Mazur (2000) argues that Distributed Video Environments are essentially filmic media, and as such users of these distributed visual environments can capitalize on insights from the rich theoretic base of film theory and cinematic technique to engage meaningful interaction and support responsive communication (Mazur 2000). Additional interaction ideas will be considered on the basis of the early exploratory research. Finally, the majority of the content on the platform will be contributed by its users (teachers and students) during their respective educational activities.

5.4

Scenarios of use

History and common cultural roots: Two student groups (GroupGR and GroupIT) from schools in Greece (Corfu) and Italy (Venice) have been assigned the task to study history and in particular commercial exchanges and art production of the two respective cities during the past thousand years. Both groups commence their joint assignment by searching and retrieving texts, videos and photos from the public internet, which they store on the eTwinning platform. In addition, GroupIT uses mobile phone cams to take photos and capture videos of some buildings that have not been found online. Both groups use the authoring environment to upload the content to the CREATE TV distribution. Some members of GroupGR notice that the televised content contains pictures and videos of buildings that look familiar but do not belong to Corfu. After some extra background search they discover that the same Venetian architect constructed both during the same period. Now students are ready to build upon their exciting findings by preparing a joint presentation. They use the eTwinning platform to collaborate (chat, messages, exchange files) and keep track of the project progress. At the same time, the CREATE system is monitoring several of those activities through common web feeds (e.g. podcasts, blogs, etc) and automatically inserts overlays into the CREATE TV channel. Although Easter vacations are different in the two countries the absence of the distant partners goes more or less unnoticed because the CREATE TV station automatically schedules previously created content, as well as discussion threads. Thus, GroupIT has just returned form 240

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Easter vacations and they discover that their distant partners had good progress. During the next couple of weeks they feel that their project partners are working together thanks to a long record of televised activities.

5.5

Software architecture

The driving conceptual model of the system operation builds upon the familiarity and the usability of television. Just like traditional broadcast TV the screens of the system remain always-on and broadcast the same audiovisual content, thus creating a shared experience. In contrast to the hierarchical and professional production model of traditional TV the CREATE system is based on distributed end-user production and enhancement of audiovisual content, just like YouTube. The scheduling of content on TV screens is decided by 1) the decisions of an editorial team, and 2) automatic analysis of existing content, such as popularity, comments. In addition to audiovisual content, the conceptual model of the CREATE system supports video overlays, which are created automatically by analyzing the data and the activities in existing eTwinning ICT tools. Finally, users provide real-time input to the system by portable devices, such as mobile phones. There are few basic components in the software architecture of the CREATE system: 1. The content authoring environment allows users to schedule particular content into the broadcast. It also allows the users to define the automatic schedule parameters (e.g. popular content, or highly rated content). 2. The content distribution system stores and displays content between the project partners. It also manages multiple TV channels and content feeds. 3. The content control system provides several input interfaces that allow users to upload, edit, and control the presentation of the content on the screens. 4. The content bridge system takes care of the content exchange interfaces between the CREATE system and other existing systems, such as the eTwinning platform, mobile phones, etc.

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6

Further research

The exact system components, the functionality, and the media interfaces that are going to be displayed on the system depend very much on the findings of the exploratory study at the beginning of the project. In particular, several interaction concept (Chorianopoulos 2007) will be explored before selecting the few that are going to be empirically tested in the field. Nevertheless, there will be a strong emphasis on the most natural input and output devices, such as mobile phones, touch-screens and big shared displays. The social aspects of the prototype will be evaluated with casual users along twelve months (the first three months will be a pilot-test of the technology and the data collection instruments) with a longitudinal toolset, as described in related studies of ICT adoption and use (Kraut et al. 2002). Additional data collection instruments include data logging in computers and interviews. The data collection and analysis will be performed continuously along the time span of twelve months, in order to record the temporal effects on the educational community. The analysis of the data will focus on the differences between the benchmarking results and those achieved during the different phases of the system operation. Moreover, the analysis will seek differences due to age, gender, culture, socioeconomic background, as well as differences of attitudes towards the alternative modalities of the interactive video installations (e.g., text versus abstract video representations). In terms of scientific contribution, universal access and in particular accessibility research has been focused on the design and evaluation of information technology that considers the needs of people with (mental or physical) disabilities. While this is a very worthwhile effort, most of the researchers have ignored the situations where “healthy” people are temporally “handicapped” (e.g. driving and using in-car entertainment, or informatics and telematics systems). On the side of architecture and place, there are many people that are living in the suburbs and they are either too young or too old to drive, or just unwilling to travel frequently. Living aside the very interesting theme of “car as place” and by making an analogy with the “handicapped in-situ” people, these people are “confined” in physical space. Thus, we are elaborating on the research question: how information and communication technology could by used to enhance the sense of community in-place for people who live remotely or are not willing to travel regularly?

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References ACKER , S. R. (1999). Space, collaboration, and the credible city: Academic work in the virtual university. The Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 1(1). ADAMS, P.C. (1992). Television as Gathering Place. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1), 117–135. ADAMS, L., TOOMEY, L. AND CHURCHILL, E. (1999). Distributed Research Teams: Meeting Asynchronously in Virtual Space, JCMC 4 (4). BEYER , H. AND HOLTZBLATT, K. (1999). Contextual design. Interactions 6(1):32–42. BLY, S. A., HARRISON, S. R., AND IRWIN, S. (1993). Media spaces: bringing people together in a video, audio, and computing environment. Commun. ACM, 36(1):28–46. B OYLE, M. AND GREENBERG, S. (2005). The language of privacy: Learning from video media space analysis and design. ACM Trans. Comput.–Hum. Interact. 12(2):328–370. CHORIANOPOULOS, K. (2007). Interactive TV design that blends seamlessly with everyday life. In proceedings of the 9th ERCIM International Workshop on User Interfaces for All 2006. Springer LNCS vol.4397. D ONATH, J., KARAHALIOS, K., AND VIEGAS, F. (1999). Visualizing conversation. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 4(4). D OURISH, P. (2002). Where the Action Is: Foundations of Embodied Interaction. MIT Press. FINN, K. E. (1997). Video-Mediated Communication. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. FISH, R. S., KRAUT, R. E., AND CHALFONTE, B. L. (1990). The VideoWindow system in informal communication. In: Proceedings of CSCW ‘90, ACM Press, pages 1–11. GAVER , B., DUNNE, T., AND PACENTI, E. (1999). Design: Cultural probes. Interactions 6(1):21–29. DE GREEF, P. AND IJSSELSTEIJN, WA. (2001). CyberPsychology & Behavior. 4(2): 307–315 GROTH, K., B OGDAN, C., LINDQUIST, S., RÄSÄNEN, M., SANDOR , O., AND LIDSKOG, T. (2005). Creating a space for increased community feeling among geographically distributed teachers. In: Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing: between Sense and Sensibility (CC ‘05). ACM, New York, NY, 145–148. JANCKE, G., VENOLIA, G. D., GRUDIN, J., CADIZ, J. J., AND GUPTA, A. (2001). Linking public spaces: technical and social issues. In: Proceedings of CHI ‘01. ACM, New York, NY, 530–537. KARAHALIOS, K., D ONATH, J. (2004). Telemurals: linking remote spaces with social catalysts, in: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.615–622. ACM press. KRAUT, R., KIESLER ,S., B ONEVA, B., CUMMINGS, J., HELGESON, V. & CRAWFORD, A. (2002). Internet Paradox Revisited. Journal of Social Issues, 58, 49–74. KUBEY, R. AND CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, M. (1990). Television and the Quality of Life: How Viewing Shapes Everyday Experiences. Lawrence Erlbaum. LI, K., ET AL., (2000). Building and using a scalable display wall system, Computer Graphics and Applications, IEEE, vol.20, no.4, pp.29–37.

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LYNCH, K. (1972). What time is this place? MIT Press. MAZUR , JM. (2000). Applying Insights from Film Theory and Cinematic Technique to Create a Sense of Community and Participation in a Distributed Video Environment, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 5(4). MCCARTHY, A. (2001). Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Duke University Press. MCCOLLOUGH, M. (2004). Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing. MIT Press. O’HARA, K., PERRY, M., AND CHURCHILL, E. (2004). Public and Situated Displays: Social and Interactional Aspects of Shared Display Technologies (Cooperative Work, 2). Kluwer Academic Publishers. OLSON, GM., OLSON, JS. (2000). Distance matters, Human-Computer Interaction, 15(2&3):139–178, Lawrence Earlbaum OSGOOD, C.E., SUCI, G.J. AND TANNENBAUM, P.H. (1957). The measurement of meaning. University of Illinois Press, Urbana OSWALT, P. AND T. RIENIETS (2006). Atlas of Shrinking Cities. Hatje Cantz. PAEK, T., AGRAWALA, M., BASU, S., DRUCKER , S., KRISTJANSSON, T., LOGAN, R., TOYAMA, K., AND WILSON , A. (2004). Toward universal mobile interaction for shared displays. In: Proceedings of CSCW’04, 266–269. PARDUN, C. AND KRUGMAN, D. (1994). How the architectural style of the home relates to family television viewing. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 38(2), 145. PUTNAM, R. (2001). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster. REEVES, B. AND NAAS, C. (1996). The media equation: How people treat computers, television and new media like real people and places. CLSI. SHORT, J., WILLIAMS, E., CHRISTIE, B. (1976). The social psychology of telecommunications, Wiley. TU, C., & MCISAAC, M. (2002). The relationship of social presence and interaction in online classes. The American Journal of Distance Education, 16(3):131–150. TURNER , T. C., SMITH, M. A., FISHER , D., AND WELSER , H. T. (2005). Picturing Usenet: Mapping computer-mediated collective action. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(4). WILDMAN, M. (2001). Plugged-in: homes in the information age. Unpublished MSc thesis. McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

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K ATERINA D IAMANTAKI /D IMITRIS C HARITOS

Locative Media in the City: Spatial Practices and Social Dynamics

1

Introduction

The convergence of new mobile telecommunication networks, geographical positioning systems, and interactive graphical interfaces on mobile devices, as they are already being utilized in a series of location-based activities1, may in the near future support new forms of interpersonal and mediated communication. These forms may significantly alter the relationship of the physical world with the technologically mediated environment experienced by individuals who use these systems and, consequently, alter the way individuals perceive, experience, and conceive of urban public space. Such emerging types of communication may also lead to revolutionary new ways of social interaction and inhabiting urban space. In the light of these developments, the manner in which urban environments are conceived of and designed should certainly be reconsidered, by taking into account the incorporation of such information and communication technological (ICT) systems, which are already inseparably woven into the fabric of everyday life within the urban context. The idea of associating mobile computing, wireless networks, and digital media, and binding them to real locations via location-detection technologies, has led to the concept of Locative Media (Tuters, 2004). These media are considered systems of technologically mediated interpersonal and group communication which afford the augmentation of traditional urban environments with spatially positioned information that can be accessed through mobile devices, thus supporting a series of location-based activities and communication experiences.

............................................ 1

like pervasive games, socializing services, commercial applications, and location-based artwork.

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2

Locative Media as spatial communication interfaces

Spatial metaphors have long been used for aiding navigation within information sets. The term spatial interfaces (Charitos, 2008) is used in this paper to describe human computer interfaces that utilize space as a context for supporting navigation within information. Since humans use spatial organizing principles in their daily lives, they are used to navigating space and communicating easily within space.

Fig. 1: The LOCUNET system2 spatial communication interface

Biocca and Delaney (1995) define a communication interface as the interaction of physical media, codes, and information with the user’s sensorimotor and perceptual systems. An important characteristic of the particular interfaces ............................................ 2 LOCUNET2 (LOCation-based Urban NETwork) is a research project that aims to investigate the social and communicational aspects of using mobile multi-user location-aware systems in an everyday urban context. This project is supported by the Greek General Secretariat of Research and Technology under the framework of the Operational Program PEP Attikis, Measure 1.2. The Program is cofinanced (70%) by the European Fund of Regional Development (EFRD), which aims to facilitate the reduction of the inequalities within the European Union regions.

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that this paper deals with is their environmental character: Users access locative media via multiuser interactive graphical interfaces that display some form of an environmental representation, within which all users of the system are concurrently represented in real time and that could comprise 2D and/or 3D visual content. This paper therefore considers the type of interface experienced by locative media users as a spatial communication interface. Designing such a communication interface implies the design of the way in which interaction occurs among physical media, codes, and information on the one hand and the user’s sensorimotor and perceptual systems on the other hand, as well as the appropriate environmental context and representation for this interaction. Locative Media as spatial communication interfaces initiate a series of interlacing spatial practices and activities that define their use as everyday media. The spatial character of locative media is twofold. In a more general sense, the use of any medium is essentially spatial, by virtue of being part of everyday life practices. Technological, discursive and symbolic artifacts re-present and contribute to the shaping of the socio-cultural realities of individuals and communities. These everyday realities are presupposed to be ontologically spatial (Soja, 1996: 46). In other words, the use of any medium is always situational and contextual and its meaning is contingent upon the specific spatiotemporal conditions in which it unfolds. More specifically, locative media afford a series of highly spatialized activities that set them apart from other types of media. By enabling the execution of location-based activities, locative media create new zones of techno-social action and appropriation, each reflecting different types of spatial awareness which could be seen as corresponding with different types of spatial conceptions. Below, we are proposing a taxonomy of these different, yet inextricably related and mutually defined, types of spatial conception, with reference to the use of locative media and the spatial practices that this use involves. We suggest that this taxonomy may be used as a theoretical model for different levels of research into the spatial aspect of locative media. In proposing this model, we subscribe to Graham’s (2004: 67–68) “recombinant approach” which supports a fully relational view of the links between technology, time, space and social life. He suggests that new technologies become interwoven into complex, contingent, and subtle blendings of human actors and technical artifacts to form actor networks that are sociotechnical hybrids. Through such sociotechnical hybrids, social and spatial life becomes subtly and continuously

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recombined in complex combinations of new sets of spaces and times that are always contingent and impossible to generalize.

3

Unraveling the different types of spatial awareness involved in Locative Media

3.1

Performative space

The first type of spatial conception relating to locative media is identified as “performative space” and can be approached through the narrative paradigm according to which the modern city is a “text” on which a variety of textual practices are performed. The environment or landscape always gives meaning to places, and urban landscapes reflect contemporaneous trends (Zeitgeist). The signs and symbols of the city are read as an urban biography. Today these signs may include locative media. New media become new signs and symbols of the city. Locative Media are part of a new urban symbolology. For the philosopher of everyday life De Certeau (1984), the modern city has become a “concept” (a “concept-city”), by producing its own space through rational organization. This is how the city is being created as a universal and anonymous subject. The “concept-city” functions as a space of metamorphoses and appropriations, as an object of various interventions and at the same time as a subject which is continuously reinforced with new elements. The city today is a structured complex, within which the subversive human practices are functioning in an overt or covert way. These are essentially spatial practices, which are in fact “ways of operating or acting” which take place and evolve in space. They don’t necessarily correspond to a geometrical or geographical space but to a different spatiality, which one could call anthropological, poetic or mythical experience of space. One of the main human practices to be observed in cities is the “walking of pedestrians” and this activity of walking in fact creates, constitutes, “manufactures” the spaces of the city. The movement of pedestrians is not fixed in space; it is rather the movement itself that creates the city’s spatiality. The pedestrian, by virtue of walking, can transform spatial elements. At every single moment then the pedestrian-walker makes some kind of decision (to go from here or from there, to take this or that road, to deviate or to walk straight, etc), by 248

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neutralizing or generating spaces. In relation to her location she constitutes a set of spatial perceptions in every single moment, a “near” and a “far”, a “here” and a “there”, according to which she distinguishes between spaces. Simultaneously with the act of walking, she confronts other elements which initiate, maintain or pause communication with other pedestrians, expressed verbally and phatically with addresses such as “hello”, “fine”, “what’s up?”e.g. which are a way of “guaranteeing” communication during walking. De Certeau (1984) in particular defines walking and the practice of wandering in the city as an activity similar to talking, a “speech act” as he calls it. Following De Certeau, the city can be seen as a text or rather as a hypertext and the use of urban-based locative media as flaneresque-type practices of a creative and interpretative nature which are executed on the text of the city. With locative media, space is represented as contingent and productive, as the physically disconnected become attached anew, and social spheres combine in processes of assemblage and territorialization. This representation can be described as “textual spatiality”. Technology plays a vital role in how the city is perceived as a text. In describing the city as an “immense texturology” De Certeau (1984) concludes that “the desire to see the city precedes the media for its satisfaction”. However, today, the technological means have organized a panoptical force which sees everything, a “totalizing eye”. In other words, De Certeau talks about the modern progress in technology, which has given individuals the opportunity to perceive space and their movement in space, in a universal, totalizing manner. Therefore, those who live in the city with and through their “practices”, the city-dwellers, are those who live “down there”. And, while dwelling in the city, they don’t have the total “visibility” over the city (as they would if they were high above). It is in this sense that walking is for De Certeau a basic form of experiencing the city “down there”. The city-dwellers walk the “urban text” “which they write without being able to read it”, and while “they use spaces that cannot be seen”3. ............................................ 3 This view of new media is compatible with the latest perspectives in the study of human computer interaction (HCI), such as the research trends known as Social Computing encompassing theories like the Theory of Embodied Interaction (Dourish). According to this view, technology is highly integrated in the social world, therefore what is most important about new technologies is the social meanings constructed around their use. In other words, the use of technology is a practice and a practice is not simply what we do but how we experience the surrounding world through a meaningful way. Users don’t just use. They construct facts which have meanings. They appropriate the worlds which surround them, the natural as well as the conceptual and its technological elements.

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3.2

Public/private space.

This level deals with the classical (and inherently spatial) public-private dichotomy and how it is being rearranged through the use of locative media in the city. Mobility is inscribed in locative media and thus any analysis should not restrict itself to fixed locations and practices. In fact, locative media can be conceptualized as mobile encounters, in which the streets themselves become mobile sites of consumption. Therefore, locative media use disrupts conventional notions of public and private behaviour and space, thereby raising questions concerning the adequacy of such dichotomous notions. The reordering of the meaning and significance of these concepts is understood through an analysis of how personal locative media users act to inscribe “public” space with “private”, personal or interpersonal, meaning. Modern communication technologies like the internet and especially the cell phone have actually empowered individuals to carry their private messages into public space. As a consequence, the public sphere tends to become a “common living room” as privacies infringe upon the surrounding public spaces (acoustically, cinetically, etc) (Kopomaa 2000). Through technologically-mediated interaction in the city, individuals re-appropriate the public space and public space is “colonized” by private communication. This amounts to a reverse mobile privatisation: public space is experienced through a private, individual space, while at the same time private space is brought into the public space. Both public and private spaces are defined broadly here in everyday practice: public space is defined as all spaces which are perceived as public or have public character, while private space is a space where others can be excluded in order to create a secure and confidential environment (including private uses as conducted in public spaces – increasingly, private space is a state of mind). Therefore, borders between the two are increasingly challenged as locative media mediate the construction of public private environment and subsequently the construction of hybridized identities. Locative media use is a front stage performance, but a front stage performance that obliges users to take part in two highly demanding and usually conflictive front stage activities at once: moving safely in the city and participating in a game or activity which takes place in mobile device screen. When locative media users are playing they are simultaneously in two spaces: the spaces they physically occupy, and the virtual space of the game or the activity.

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Also, contrary to a long term trend where public space increasingly became a vacuum zone only used for traffic purposes, locative media (like all mobile media) lead again to a more intensive use of public space („third places“) for informal social interaction. Streets, inroads, squares, stations, supermarkets, and many other “polyvalent” places not committed to specific purposes (nonplaces) become enriched with communicative behaviours. In other words, communication is more and more dislocated to „non-places“ which have no intrinsic relationship to the messages and messengers involved: so that their content is exclusively determined by the participating subjects, not by their setting in which the interaction takes place (Augé, 1992). This is exemplary of the “mobile forms of dwellingness” which characterize the postmodern world. Modern, mediatised and highly technologized societies are often characterized as societies of mobilities, while modern individuals are said to be transformed by the different versions that this mobility can take. In his critical sociology, John Urry sees the modern worlds as being made up of “horizontal mobilities” or “horizontal fluidities” (2000: 3), which produce new types of “dwellingness” previously unknown to individuals. By virtue of being hybrid, modern societies comprise networks of connections between individuals and material-technological elements (Urry, 2000:15). Locative media can be seen as exemplary of those complex and mobile “non-human hybrids” of humans and material objects (Urry, 2000:14), as well as of a “modern nomadic” lifestyle in societies which are in fact deterritorialized and constituted by fluid itineraries and changing nodes. Like Urrian “fluidities”, locative media change spatial and territorial topographies, in fact they change the metaphors of social topography. The concept of bounded regions is substituted by the concept of flow and network, while the concept of fixed location is substituted by movement, improvisation, mobility. Locative media are a metaphor for social life as a flow. They comprise networks and networks of networks, machines, programmes, texts and images where subjects and objects are mixed with new hybrid forms. Continuously changing connections are multiplied in unprogrammed and mixed combinations. In doing so, locative media produce a new form of city “dwellingness” as they become increasingly part of how people “dwell” (communicatively, symbolically, playfully) in city spaces.

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3.3

Physical space

The question about physical space lies at the heart of the discussion about locative media. With reference to the dimension of the user’s spatial experience, we will present the “respatialization” and “hybridity” arguments, according to which locative media not only differ from previous computer-mediated communication media such as the Internet, in that they reintroduce physical space, but also create an enhanced urban space through the incorporation of location-based media and activities. In contrast to the deterritorialized, immaterial and screen-only Internet, locative media bring physical places back into connection with each other through the interplay of technologies and physicalities. In the case of locative media, the mediated experience is imbricated with immediate experience, but physicality exists as the final threshold, contrary to the Internet where physicality is entirely done away with. Interactions with locative media, regain the lived sense of the world, since they involve the movement and intersection of real bodies (players) and real, material spaces (cities). Therefore, it can be argued that locative media seem to subvert the trend of the diminution of geographic space that seems to lead to confusion and uncertainty in finding agency in a rapidly globalizing virtual life. This clearly opens up the possibility of spaces turning into places. If media use is a meaningful practice, then the use of location-based media and activities within the city4 makes the surrounding urban environment or natural landscape a socially-significant locale. Moreover, a new kind of mediated and interpersonal relation may take place between participants who communicate not only through their mobile devices but also with their own mobile bodies. It is a well-established truism in Internet studies that the Internet is essentially bodiless. The ontology of the Internet’s virtual space is one without bodies. In the metaphysics of virtuality, “cyberspace supplants physical space’ (Heim, 1993: 99). Cyberspace is a “space without flesh”; on the Internet, the body remains one that is absent – represented as text – something which is at once enabling and constraining. Via the introduction of locative media, we are once again reminded of the trenchant presence of bodies and the real boundaries they impose. The post-human embodiment of cyber communication becomes a human-enhanced embodiment of location-based interaction. Locative media may afford the possibility ............................................ 4

and through the city and on the city.

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for face-to-face interaction, thus bringing back the “compulsion of proximity” (Boden & Molotch, 2004) into computer-mediated communication. Through the mediation of locative media, modern cities may become “technospaces”, new spatial formations where technology meets human practice. Importantly, the contingent nature of the daily may become mediated and reduced through the structural possibilities of locative media use. In this sense, urban experience becomes in a very real sense a technological experience. The dominant image is that of the unified city/technology spatial communication interface. This unified city/technology interface, the holistic hybrid face, is familiar to all those cyberpunk aficionados. On the one hand, we have the static structures of the built environment and on the other hand we have the electronic representation of the city/media interface, as integral parts of the same structure. This relationship reveals also that the link between architecture (built environment) and information (technology) is actually very old. In this sense, locative media re-emphasize what can be called “material continuity”. Because of this triple effect – re-spatialization, re-somatization, hybridization – we could argue that locative media also hold the potential of bringing forth not only the geographical-somatic but also the cultural aspect of spatiality or rather the notion of accountability to space – the notion that “spaces have a history” and a material continuity that is a vital counterpoint to the illusion of abstract and deterritorialized communication (and mental mastery) which has suffused much of the fictions of cyberfutures. Contrary to the illusion of abstract mental mastery which has suffused much of cyberdiscourse, space and materiality matter again and they regain their role as necessary conditions for communication competency. Based on what has been suggested so far in relation to this triple respatialization, re-somatization, and hybridization effect, it could be argued that locative media also rearrange the virtual-real continuum. Although there are strong arguments to support that a clear distinction between virtual and real cannot be defended, all and every single medium of communication transforms the equilibrium between reality and virtuality. Locative media lead us to think anew the real-virtual continuum. Let us follow this argument in more detail. In significant parts of post-industrialized societies, mediatization has so much invaded the world of everyday life, that the two have become indistinguishable. In other words, mediated experience has become imbricated with immediate experience. Progressively the media in certain way have replaced a

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lived sense of our world. Jean Baudrillard (1988) has described this phenomenon as reality gradually mutating into hyperreality with notions of simulation and virtual reality, once taken as abstract theoretical premises or science fantasies, now appearing as the logical expression of contemporary consciousness. When we engage with new media we are present inside a synthetic environment. We experience a sense of actualizing the space of digital information and the associated network of pathways into and through this technologically facilitated infrastructure. Even in more “conventional”, non-immersive technology, we now routinely participate in modifying the form and content of the digitally mediated environment, in real time. Though not ‘real’, the spatial and temporal experience of the immediacy and interaction offered through new media assumes the force of reality, in a Baudrillardian sense. The virtual becomes the real, and hyperreality becomes normalized as virtuality. One could argue however, that by bringing the space, the body and the real-time interaction to the forth again, locative media are actually making a step backwards and moving from the utterly virtual, Baudrillardian hyperreality back to a more ‘real’, albeit hybrid and enhanced, reality. With locative media the ‘real’ spaces of the body and the ‘real’ spaces of the city intersect with the conceptual spaces of virtual reality, but both spaces are equally significant and crucial in the locative media experience.

3.4

Interaction space

Finally, the spatial conception that we call “interaction space” encompasses the psychological, social and even political dimensions of locative media use in the city. By locating this spatiality zone, we evidently assume that locative media use is more than a task performance, it is a multidimensional and complex psychological phenomenon. It encompasses new psychodynamic, cognitive and interpersonal aspects which determine the way that these media are used in practice. Secondly, the “interaction space” emphasises the dynamic of group formation and new forms of public participation that are made possible with the use of locative media in the city. In fact, locative media and their use in a public urban context seem to reinstate a nostalgic sense of social interconnectedness. They enable new forms of connectivity in the dislocated social world of modernity, a world in which, as Giddens (1993) points out, we increasingly make ourselves available to others 254

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at a distance. They offer new places and practices of communicative connectivity, novel spaces of symbolic interaction among moving city dwellers. Ιn this sense, locative media seem to reinstate the “ritual model of communication”, which is mainly counterpoised to the transmission model (McQuail, 1997: 100–107). According to the transmission model, communication is simply seen as a process of transmitting a typical quantity of message information, as it is being determined by the source of that information. However, the process of communication is not merely the transmission of information between a sender and a receiver. It is a more open, contingent and rich process, a “ritual” process which has more to do with concepts like mutuality, feedback, participation, cooperation, sociality, togetherness, commonality, etc. A ritual view of communication does not concern itself primarily with the transference of meanings in space but with the maintenance of bonds and groups (society) in time. Similarly, interaction through locative media also seems to validate the socalled “co-orientation approach” (McQuail & Windahl, 2001: 58–61) which gives primary emphasis to the elements of interpersonality and intergroupality in communication. In mass media, the presence of the other facilitates and reinforces the search for subsidiary information in relation with conventional media of communication, where the other receivers don’t exist. According to the “co-orientation approach” there is a “space where media develop”, a space within which mass media, audience and power co-orient their action in reference to a particular issue. All these poles may potentially belong to different realms of media communication but this is how a broader network of media networks is being created. What is also noteworthy in this approach is the analysis of the relations between the different poles. Potentially in mass media there can be flow of communication from and towards all directions. Thus, traditional approaches according to which interpersonal and intergroup influence is more efficient than the effect of media (biphase flow of communication – McQuail & Windahl, 2001: 94–99) may also contribute to the analysis of media communication where we can observe multiple flow, not equally potent (in the sense of the pressure exercised by Media). This approach also helps us understand that media function (by virtue of them being models of multiphase communication flow) primarily by penetrating the web of social relations.

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3.5

Subjective space

If we subscribe to Mark Poster’s opinion (1995) that every new medium produces a new type of subjectivity, then it is legitimate to ask if a locative media is developed and what it amounts to. We argue that locative media and new communication and visual forms they afford generate a space, a ‘matrix’ within which we can virtually exercise our identity, analogically and paradoxically. In an evolutionary perspective, locative media strike a new balance between the creation and distribution of content, as we have known it in the age of mass media and the active participation of individuals and citizens. Like the Internet and its various applications, with locative media we have entered into the age of “our media" – where communication of ideas amongst groups and sharing of content are at the heart of the media experience. First of all, it is suggested that the use of locative media generates a new type of user or subject type. The user of locative media is both a source and a receiver of messages; the circulation of messages, ideas, representations, movements means that they must be directly produced, while users can circulate meaning while they are producing it in real time (and space). This sets locative media in stark contrast to their more conventional mass media predecessors, such as radio and, in particular, television and film. Locative media platforms entail fundamentally different modes of use to those made possible by, let’s say, television. They have the potential to be interactive and participative in a way that television simply cannot be. Locative media are an open message and their users are user-doers, user-participants, active agents in the communication process. They may position the tools of media creation and manipulation in the hands of the people, formerly known as the audience, and allow flourishing social networks and homemade content to take root. While traditional media technologies primarily concentrate on the distribution of ideas, new media technologies are concerned with handing active control and the ability to communicate to citizens. But locative media are also different from other interactive media like the Internet, since they allow for the placement of ideas in new contexts, via mobile devices. More fundamentally, they have already created whole new forms of entertainment and participation, taking place in the very geographical spaces that Internet supposedly did away with. As explained above, this technology’s intrinsic mobility raises a challenge to the dichotomous conception of space as either public or private. This has 256

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inevitable implications for the transitorial construction of users’ subjectivities, mostly in that it transforms anew the subject/object relations. In the hybrid spatial interfaces described so far, individuals are enhanced through the mobile devices, doing away with the classical subject/object distinction or at least reaffirming it in new ways. The self is resignified: through a coorientation of technology and users and of users among themselves a new, location-based hybrid subjectivity is generated. The temporal identity of the players enters into a symbiotic space of identification with the game. Mobility which is one of the main intrinsic characteristics of locative media also affects subjectivity, in that it changes the users’ environmental knowledge, thereby enabling the effective subjective management of a wide range of everyday communication behaviour. Locative media applications are in fact participatory events between the users and the interface and the city, which emphasizes the present. The space around this ephemeral event, this hybrid generated time-frame, is momentarily constructed around the interactor’s point of view. The space entered is conditioned by the individual’s user experience of an interactive space, which functions within a network of networks. The immediacy of this new virtual participatory space, although fractured, weaves its ‘web’ into a variable, relational spatial realm, a space which appears to be unified through change and constant mobility. Locative media users manage and organize the flow of experience through the use of their personal device, and in doing so their sense of place and space is brought under their control. They operationalize a variety of strategies of behaviour that enable them to successfully prioritize their own experience, personally, interpersonally and geographically through the mediated use of the digital device. As users have to produce their own content every single moment, either as individual users or as individual members of user groups, they are involved in a high degree of strategic adoption. In this sense the self is enhanced through the mobile device. Moving actors not only manage their flow of thoughts and emotions but also engage in interpersonal strategies in which they control the nature and duration of interaction. For example, locative media use enables the construction of forms of ‘look’ whereby lookers either escape the look of others or engage in strategies of looking without being looked at. They make urban environment what it is for users. The urban spaces of daily habitation thereby become subjectively managed and controlled in a variety of ways through use thus giving users a sense of empowerment.

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4

Empowerment? A critical approach

One may think that all these practices described so far offer support for the rhetoric of empowerment, that is the rhetoric according to which new digital media increase public participation, rejuvenate public space, enhance identity and deepen social interaction. In this paper, we argue that a simple “yes” or “no” answer is not the apposite way to frame this question. Instead, we should recognize the ambiguous nature of “postmodern digitality” in general, and look at the “dilemmas” between connectivity and alienation, empowerment and consumerism, affordances and risks, that they pose. It is definitely a gain for modern societies that the use of new media increase social connectivity and provide less support for central control and autonomous connectivity of different small groups. Multiplying connections reinforce social connectivity and social dynamics in general and through a process of “social viscosity” create new social structures. Collective knowledge between people is also being created through the contingent, creative and improvised connections between them. The mechanisms of displacement are subverted and the concomitant creation of “other hybrid zones” relocates human connection rather than exterminating it. These new visual techniques reinforce the spaces of belonging/non-belonging in urban life. However, together with the creation of new social dynamics, new forms of social control and power may also be created. Emerging technologies in general are “empowering” in the sense that they increase the range of alternative actions available to individuals or social groups. But in all cases, such gains in freedom and autonomy go along with countervailing increases in inequalities, alienation and social control. The interaction of these spatial logics that exist between the ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ should be addressed specifically in order to raise political questions about the power implicated by their reproduction. We are no longer “innocent” in that we know how material power relations are reproduced uncritically, unconsciously, latently, often unintentionally in media use. The urban environments within which subjects interact are structured by the symbolic and technological realities of the media they use (Holmes, 1997:11), characterized by various power relations and structures and hegemonic ideologies. Individuals who live in post- or late- or hyper- modern societies increasingly inscribe themselves within digital domains (Hayles, 1998). In fact, modern individuals are both inscribed digitally and materially 258

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embodied, appearing and disappearing within social spaces characterized by various unequal power relations. Technologies, especially everyday technologies which are used more or less routinely by “common” people produce realities which frame a society’ s symbolic and material culture. These realities of the used media in turn are produced by negotiation with hegemonic ideologies and structures of power. Media subjects communicate and interact within epistemological and ontological structures embedded in material reality. Mediated interactions and the subjects produced in interaction with the new mediating technologies, cannot be discussed in isolation from the cultural, social, political and economic contexts within which emerging technologies and new forms of communication operate. The illusion – cultivated by a large part of cyberdiscourse for example – that technological experience is separate from real reality is a result of mainstream celebratory discourse about new technologies which deeply ignores the wider context in which the use of the Internet takes place (see Benedikt, 1991 and Markley 1996). Contrary to the empowerment rhetoric, one could say that despite their sociability potential, locative media in fact attribute to the massification of digital media, which is arguably leading to the logic of visualization and consumption embedded within capitalism, within paradigms of power which offer the human being limited spaces of negotiation in which to find a self. Locative media are technologies imbued in commercialization and consumption. They are commodities in themselves as well as channels to stimulate other forms of consumption. This is why we should keep asking questions on the material and cultural contexts that underlie the use of such media technologies. If we don’t ask these questions we see only half of the picture. For example, while it is easy to talk about reinforcement of public participation we should not refrain from asking about the rules and protocols of real participation and whether they really become participatory and dialogic. We should explore the biases that are implicit in the way locative media are organized and analyze to what extent their social uses are active. We should also pose questions relating to the ‘right’ to communicate and access, which are the excluded and who should be included. Therefore we should be on the alert and question “why urban space in these media is visualized by a technology that is more visual than actual (like the Panopticon)?” This refers to the particular vision of the city as fortress and as “scanscape”, in which the spatial logics are those of control and surveillance.

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This vision is contrasted with the vision of the city as “polis” in which the spatial logics are those of democratic access and free movement. This means that in order to understand locative media we must apply a stance that combines a media-cultural with a socio-material approach: the first one focusing on content and message reception and the second one taking into account the material, economic and social conditions which surround media use. This brings forth the political dimension of space. As Lefebvre and Soja have demonstrated, space is always and essentially political5. Space cannot be defined in geographical only terms but should also refer to social/cultural spaces in which, as Soja puts it, “social relations are simultaneously and conflictually space-forming and space contingent” (1989: 126). To put it in another way, a space that is both rendered by and that activates the social relations occurring in this given space. Such a space is a politicized one in the sense that the social relations constitute and are constituted by, the dynamic operations of race, class, sexuality, and gender. As Massey has argued: “It (the spatial) is a way of thinking in terms of the ever-shifting geometry of social/power relations and it forces into view the real multiplicities of spacetime … The spatial is both open to and a necessary element in politics in the broadest sense of the world” (1994:4).

References AUGE, M. (1992). Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London: Verso. BAUDRILLARD, J. (1988). “Simulacra and Simulations”, in JEAN BAUDRILLARD, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster, Stanford; Stanford University Press, pp.166–184. BENEDIKT, M. (ed). (1991). Cyberspace: First Steps, The MIT Press. BIOCCA, F., & DELANEY, B. (1995). Immersive virtual reality technology. In F. BIOCCA & M. R. LEVY (Eds.), Communication in the age of virtual reality. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp. 57–124. B ODEN D., & MOLOTCH, H. (2004). Cyberspace meets the compulsion of proximity. In S. GRAHAM, (Ed.), The cybercities reader [Urban Reader Series]. London: Routledge. pp. 101–105. ............................................ 5 Through the 1990s ‘space’ became a central theme and key term in a variety of critical discourses, including postmodernism, cultural geography, and architecture.

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CERTEAU, M. DE (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. CHARITOS, D. (2008). “Precedents for the design of Locative Media as hybrid spatial communication interfaces for social interaction within the urban context”, in ISOMÄKI, Η. (Ed.) Future Interaction Design II, Springer Verlag. D OURISH, P. (2001). Where the Action is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, MIT Press. GIDDENS, A. (2004). New rules of sociological method: A positive critique of interpretative sociologies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. GRAHAM, S. (Ed.). The cybercities reader [Urban Reader Series]. London: Routledge. HAYLES, K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. HEIM, M. (1997). The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford UP. HOLMES, D. (Ed). Virtual Politics: Identity and community in cyberspace. London: Sage. KOPOMAA, T. (2000). The city in your pocket: Birth of the mobile information society. Helsinki, Finland: Gaudeamus Kirja. ΜCQUAIL, D. (1997). Introduction to the Theory of Mass Communication. Athens: Kastaniotis (greek translation & edition) MCQUAIL D. & WINDAHL, S. (2001). Communication Models: For the Study of Mass Communications, Αθήνα: Καστανιώτης. MARKLEY R. (ed.) (1996). Virtual Realities and Their Discontents, Baltimore & London: The John Hopkins University Press D. MASSEY (1994). Space, Place and Gender, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press POSTER M., (1995). The Second Media Age, Oxford: Blackwell SOJA, E. (1989). Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London/New York: Verso. SOJA, E. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. TUTERS, M. (2004). The locative commons: Situating location-based media in urban public space. Paper presented at the 2004 Futuresonic conference, Manchester, UK. Retrieved May 10, 2005, from http://www.futuresonic.com/futuresonic/pdf/Locative_Commons.pdf URRY, J. (2000). Sociology beyond Societies. Mobilities for the 21st century, London: Routledge.

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JAN HATT-O LSEN

Urban Artscape – Furesø Connecting two towns and two squares in the northern part of the Greater Copenhagen area | Kulturtorvet in Værløse – Kulturpladsen in Farum

(New media art – public art project by poet/artist Jan Hatt-Olsen realized in cooperation with Furesø Municipality1. Mayor Jesper Bach, Director Michael Schrøder. Support and permission passed by the committee of culture, Steen Horstmann (chairman), Lone Christensen, Svend Erik Jørgensen, Jørn Johan Nielsen, Sidika Yalin, 8 March 2007 the project is realized November, December 2007 and January 2008)

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Introduction

Art in urban spaces have often been en extend version of art in art galleries, art for the art community or it has been connected to the idea of gestaltung of a given urban space, which is already created by urban planners and architects. Can art be a part of both research and praxis in the whole creation of urban space and urban life? If this is the case can you still call it art? I think it can, but it’s important to stress which kind of research and praxis it is. Research traditionally being theoretical, experimental or empirical, which clearly a work of art can’t be viewed as, still it can to a high degree explore into a subject matter. The exploration in an art project being more creative and aesthetic and less systematic. Like there can be a prolific synergy between technique and art as praxis. There can in my opinion be prolific synergy between theoretical, experimental or empirical research and research through art and artistic practices.

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With pervasive technologies (always and everywhere present) building pervasive systems into the urban space can new media be used to connect, augment and re-enchant urban spaces, thereby making it into connected urban places? If it can, which kind of urban space will it create? In the following sections I will present and analyze different aspects of the new media – public art work Urban Artscape – Furesø with regard to the exploration of connected, augmented and re-enchanted urban spaces. I will focus on the following. Possibilities and limitations in making sustainable augmented and connected urban places, by the use of new media in the present day situation where there are pervasive systems in much of the urban space, systems for wireless internet, for mobile phones etc. The character of augmented and connected urban spaces with regard to perception, ontology and social interaction, especially with regard to the question of making borders in urban space soft, fuzzy and porous and to the question of humanizing urban space. Making urban spaces where the human imagination and body have an important role in the constant creation of an urban space and architecture in flux.

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Concept and Sketch | Urban Artsscape – Furesø

The idea in the new media public – art work Urban Artscape – Furesø is to create and explore connected, augmented urban places in Furesø Municipality, a municipality with 40.000 inhabitants in northern part of the Copenhagen metropolis. In Urban Artscape – Furesø there will be established two community websites connected to central squares in the two main towns. Kulturtorvet in Værløse and Kulturpladsen in Farum. The websites will be projected directly into the squares, using the urban spaces as screens. The two squares will also be filmed with webcams (IP cams) and streamed into each others by another set of projections. It will be possible to interact with the website projections, with laptops, pda’s, mobile pones, pc stations in the nearby libraries. The computers governing the video projectors are reloading the projected web pages every minute. Standing on the square or from anywhere in the world poems, text, pictures and animations, created by imagination, knowledge and experience (only limited by what can be created on a personal computer or mobile phone and transmitted through wireless 264

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internet) can be projected within a minute into urban space. This can be as expressions or as parts of dialogues. People can also interact with the projections by playing, dancing or touching them, with their bodies or shadows. The projection of live streaming of pictures from the squares into each other will be made blurred. The live streaming projection will not be information about the other square, but in a given square create a presence of the other square, as an echo or reflection of the other square. Information in text or pictures from the other square or other places in the world can be send through the web-site projections. The aim is both to connect the two squares and create a humanized urban space, to recreate in-between zones in the fully developed urban spaces. Bringing back the undefined, only partly controlled, openness of the inbetween. The not predetermined encounters between people. Making borders soft, fuzzy and porous, borders between the private and the public, between urban spaces, between imagination and outer physical reality, between the individual and the collective, between the virtual and the physical urban space. Do this in a sustainable way, which would open up for the creation of permanent and expanded urban spaces both for the daily life and for the extraordinary. Re-enchanted connected urban spaces with a sense of belonging and ownership for the different, cultures, groups and individuals which are being in, working with or relating to the urban places. At the same time maintaining both individuality and being a part of a common community in the urban squares, with their shared encounters. Making urban space into urban place. A core idea in Urban Artscape – Furesø is to be part of an open up for a crossover between art, architecture, urban planning, urbanism, media science, computer science and engineering as equal partners (both a praxis and research) utilizing new media and digital production techniques in creation of the mediacity.

2.1

Communities in Urban Artscape – Furesø | the urban wiki

To facilitate the possibilities for everyone an any group to make their traces in urban space and contribute with their individual creativity, with possibility for open encounters and still with respect for the community as a whole. I looked for places where it functioned and fund that online virtual world have these possibilities because of the flexibility of digital works on the net, compared

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with physical paintings, installations, buildings etc. The last have in common that they with different degrees are costly to make or remove. This applies from counter culture as graffiti to established culture as a commissioned mural or authorized physical structures in urban space. They are a vital and important part of public space, without them there would be no public urban space, but they can’t be bases for an open negotiated creativity in the community. For the mentioned elements of public urban space it is necessary with a strict hierarchy to make it function in peace or to accept a kind of more or less open war in public urban space. The digital works on the net can be governed in the same way, you can make it possible to create a replica of the traditional conditions for creativity and encounters in the physical urban space, but you can also maintain the characteristics of the in-between zone. The use of the infrastructure of projectors, public accessible computer and hotspots in public space (high quality wireless connections) in Urban Artscape – Furesø makes it easy for people from the public computers or their own laptops or mobile phones etc to participate in an online world in the community web-sites and through the projectors change the urban space for everyone to participate in, with his or her personal creativity. At the same time with a respect for the community as a whole if the rules of projections are negotiated in the community. The materials of the encounters are paintings and writings in urban space made with light. The physical infrastructure of Urban Artscape – Furesø, have through it’s use of projected and played community web-sites in urban space a wide range of possibilities from the very stable to a total anarchistic flux. The material is not costly, when the infrastructure has been constructed, to use, to completely remove or to change in physical urban space. The community web-sites in Urban Artscape – Furesø will be a wiki www.urbanwiki.net powered by the open source software MediaWiki, the same software, which is used in the online open source lexicon Wikipedia. I chose this software because the structure of Wikipedia has some features in it, which functions very well in the Urban Artscape concept. There is no pre-censorship, only consequences if rules or acceptable cultural behavior is broken too much, with a community of people, and different layers of authorities reacting. It is the same dynamic as you have in every day life public urban space.

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One of the core ideas of Urban Artscape – Furesø was that it created this kind of an augmented urban space, with the basic social and cultural dynamic you already experience in public urban space, but with an augmented reality which added new possibilities for encounters, expressions and impressions. This creates a total new situation and with time it will create a new social and cultural dynamic. It’s difficult to foresee how it will play out, so it’s important with a highly adaptable organization of the community web-site. This is very well achieved in a Wiki based upon the MediaWiki software. The communities could have very strict rules like Wikipedia, but they also could have quit anarchistic principles for editing and thereby for the reality of the interactive physical urban space. There are lot of possibilities for the degree of control or openness, for acceptance of only one culture in the community or several co-existing cultures and individuals. The idea is not to impose rules on the communities, but let them develop through a negotiating process, where I as the artist behind the project will have two functions. One is being a moderator in discussions to ensure they are open and equal, the other in being a link between the communities and the municipality I am in close contact with the head of culture and the head of planning and the politicians in the committees for culture and for planning. This position was formalized as an experiment in Furesø Municipality from 1 February 2007 – 30 June.2007, where I had the job in the municipality as an artistic planning consultant, with the purpose of creating a cross-over between art and urban planning, with the two as equal partners, thereby being different from cultural management, where art and culture is used instrumentally in urban planning. The link is not only between the local level and the municipality level it is also between the formalized art world in the municipality, the galleries and the art museum and the communities. In the position as artistic planning consultant was also the aspect that there should be established links both in planning and in art/culture on regional and international level. The position as artistic planning consultant is a new concept, which I presented in the international seminar for artists, urban planners and urbanists ‘The City as Stage and the Stage as City’ June 8th in Copenhagen.2 (Hatt-Olsen, 2007 a) The role as the described link between the municipality and the local communities in Urban Artscape – Furesø I am now performing as the artist

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behind a public art project could easily be formalized as part of organizational structures in urban area, in the position artistic planning consultant. This position as moderator and the linking position between the local level and the municipality is a necessary part of the organization in the interactive cityscape and the crossing of borders in Urban Artscape – Furesø. I will refer to the wiki in Urban Artscape – Furesø (with its interactive projections in urban space, and possibilities for people to interact with them using both stationary computers, laptops, pda’s, mobile phones and the their own bodies) as an urban wiki. It is at the same time a locative media for shared encounters in an augmented urban space and a media on the net. In that way it is very different from the traditional wiki, which is a pure net media an interactive website, everyone can edit in their web browser.

2.2

Engaging society in the urban space augmented by new media

The use of new media as tool for conscious communication and expression has to be learned like any media for conscious communication or expression. In that way the interactivity in Urban Artscape – Furesø differs from an interactive digital installation, where sound, light or other material in urban space react upon an action, in a way designed be the artist (which can be random), but where people only can observe they have influence on the reaction, but not what influence they have. Besides spreading knowledge of how to use the new media in Urban Artscape – Furesø, engaging society in Urban Artscape, demands spreading knowledge of the existence of an augmented urban space and the possibilities in it. For people who don’t have this knowledge the interaction can only be by looking at the projections of text and pictures in urban space or playing with their body movements and shadows with the projections. This will not be an augmented reality, but can of course create a more, fascinating, beautiful, informative or irritating urban space, depending upon who is looking and playing and what is looked at or played with. To create an actual augmented urban space it’s necessary to collaborate with educational institutions, schools, libraries, culture houses etc in the society and already established media, press, radio, tv, established parts of the internet and other already established new media and preferably with workshops directly in the augmented urban space. Establishing of this is an essential part of Urban Artscape – Furesø. 268

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Reactions to Urban Artscape – Furesø

Fig. 1: Kulturtorvet in Værløse.

There was a general support for the aspect of bringing the two towns online in physical urban space through the wiki and also have them as echoes or reflections in each other through the live streaming of pictures from the two squares into each other. There was split opinions in the administration of the softening of borders in public urban space between the private and the public, the imagination and the outer physical reality. The director of the municipality, the planning department and the majority of the politicians supported the concept, with the underlying agenda, that they wanted more direct participations from the citizens of the municipality in forming the public urban space, that they wanted a more living urban space and that they saw the making borders soft and fuzzy in Urban Artscape – Furesø as something that worked in the desired direction. A part of the cultural department and the vice director of the municipality was against the softening of borders, with the underlying agenda,

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that art should be in art spaces and public urban space should be a consensus space, where there was no risk of anyone being challenged or offended. During the Urban Artscape – Furesø there were no problems with offensive material being projected into urban space. The second last day 45 people were interviewed. In the age group 18–30 years 75% expressed that Urban Artscape – Furesø had been a significant experience for them as citizens in Furesø Municipality, in the age group 31–50 years 39% expressed this view and in group 51+ year 25%. Not viewed by age groups but by male and female the results were 50 % of the men and 27 % of the women thought Urban Artscape – Furesø had been a significant experience for them. During the whole project period several people would discuss Urban Artscape – Furesø with me. Some expressed it was fascinating how you could use IT in urban space, some said they didn’t new anything about IT, but it was fascinating and impressing what you could do in urban space. Some said it was provocative that public funding was used to Urban Artscape – Furesø, when asked if they had personal experience with IT they would answer no. It’s here important to stress that knowledge of IT and use of new media was not necessary for participating. If you wanted to change something in urban space, you always had the possibility to go into one of the nearby libraries and get a librarian to help you in changing the urban space.

4

The re-enchanted urban space.

The augmented and connected urban spaces, which emerged in the new media – public art work Urban Arscape – Furesø, is both a familiar and a new kind of urban space. The squares being places for shared encounters .The use of the squares being negotiated like in public urban squares today, by locals, visitors, by passers, people working with the space and authorities. At the same time there are enhanced possibilities for creating, changing, negotiating, sharing and community building, in a reality with a phenomenology and ontology different from what is present in urban space today. I will in the following go deeper into the character of these augmented, re-enchanted urban places.

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Fig. 2: Kulturtorvet in Værløse

4.1

Making the borders between the Imagination and the outer physical reality soft and fuzzy

To perceive in the re-enchanted urban space is not only to perceive with a combination of the senses, the memory and the pre-structured cultural and biological categories for perception. To perceive in the connected and augmented urban spaces in Urban Artscape – Furesø is very much to perceive with the imagination, inspired from what you actually can sense in the outer physical reality. You can enter into a dialogue with the space, which both is in a world of imaginations and in the outer physical reality. If you imagine pictures or text you want to place in the urban space you can just do it and share your imagination with anyone being or passing through the urban space, important element of what you are seeing in the urban space will in the same way be text and pictures formed by others or your own imagination. It’s a dialogue of imaginations, you can just enjoy or ignore what is being said or you can let your own imagination form the next text or pictures. The only limitations being, what it’s possible to make with regards to pictures or text on a computer to day.

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4.2

The magic realistic dimension

The force of the imagination to form and change the urban space in daily life on the two squares creates a magic realistic dimension. The magic dimension, in societies which believe in magic and the use of magic, is the force of the imagination in humans or the supernatural over the matter. From a point of view where you don’t believe in the actual existence of the magic, being social and psychological phenomena. For the Urban Artscape – Furesø project the important is the structural resemblance there is with the position of the magician in an enchanted space and the position of the daily life ordinary user of the two squares in the Copenhagen metropolis. A person can in Urban Artscape – Furesø like the magician, like the wizard command a part of urban space to follow his or her imagination. Of cause not arbitrarily, and in cultures which believe in magic, this is never arbitrarily. There are techniques imbedded in rituals, which has to be followed. The same is the situation for the person in the augmented reality in Urban Artscape – Furesø. The structural resemblance between this person and the magician is that what is governing the immediate perception and action in the outer physical reality is a combination of what can be imagined and of experiences of the outer physical reality. This is a combination of the magical and realistic, which is well known from literature, but not from the outer physical reality in daily life urban space.

4.3

The collapse of spaces into each other. The echoes or reflections of spaces in each other.

One of the essences of space in a Newtonian world view, which is still governing most people’s perception of the outer physical reality, is that space is distance and it’s governed by the principle of non contradiction. Two spaces which are placed at a distance can’t be in each other. In the world of fiction, the world of imagination and the virtual world, it is not like this. You can be in one space and in your thoughts be in another space, but still be conscious about where you are walking, mentally blending the two spaces. You can over the net, but also over phone and television bee at two places, very far from each other in a Newtonian worldview, at the same time. But for most people this is not possible in public urban space or in any other kind of what is perceived as the outer physical reality.

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Fig. 3: Kulturpladsen in Farum

That’s probably why so many people are fascinated by passing by a radio, TV shop and seeing themselves in a TV in the window, but here it is still not perceived as two places in the outer physical reality. TV is being very strongly positioned as a virtual place, when placed in a shop window in a TV/radio shop. In Urban Artscape – Furesø the two squares in physical urban spaces could be collapsed into each other, by using a screen placed on the wall in the square in one town, where you could look into streamed pictures from the square in the other town. It is not what I chose to do in Urban Artscape – Furesø. The concept here very much being the re-enchantment of urban space the strength of the imagination through new media applied directly in urban space. Instead I chose two make the projected live streaming blurred and project it directly into urban space. Thereby in a given square creating a presence of the other square as a reflection or an echo.

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4.4

The shared experience of the re-enchanted urban space. The shared experience of imaginations in outer physical reality

What have been described, has always been possible to imagine, but would have been confined to individuals or groups who shared a belief system. In Urban Artscape – Furesø it is a shared experience crossing the world views and beliefs of individuals and groups and crossing the borders between subjective or inter-subjective perception. The reason is that it is a shared experience also from the perspective of the five senses, of course perceived somewhat differently by different groups and individuals, which is always the case of any perception, but with the common ground being a shared experience in the five senses in the outer physical reality. A hard core Newtonian sense the expressions of imaginations in urban space as well as the mystic. This is a very new situation and places the imagination in a role in the perception and creation of the outer physical reality in daily urban life, which it never has been in before. This changes radically urban space with regard to it as space for shared encounters, as a social space, as individual space, as space for perception and action.

4.5

The crossing of borders between virtual and physical urban space

The wiki FuresøWiki (Hatt-Olsen, 2007, 2008) projected into urban space creates a fuse of the virtual and physical urban space with its buildings, cars, bikes and people. The encounters in virtual world around the interactive wiki, becomes a part of the encounters in physical urban space and the physical urban space becomes a part of the interface of the wiki. The borderlines between the virtual world and physical urban space in Urban Artscape – Furesø are soft, fuzzy and porous. It has as a result a blend of possibilities of the two realities and of rules of behavior in regard to expressions, impressions and shared encounters. When the virtual world fuses with the physical urban space, it becomes public and real in a very different manner for what you normally associate with the virtual. Likewise the reality of the physical urban space also changes. What’s develops is an augmented reality with characteristics from both the virtual world and the present days physical urban space.

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Fig. 4: Kulturtorvet in Værløse

You can se it as a virtual world projected on urban space as a screen. This is a screen not neutral towards the expressions projected on it. A screen which is not neutral toward the expressions from the virtual world, but are blending them with what is going on its own reality the physical urban space. The idea of a neutral screen, which is a pure media for the virtual world, will always be an illusion. Like the illusion of the physical aspect of a book, just being a media for the text. It can be a working illusion with standardized computer screens and books, but when you use the urban space as a screen or a book the illusion brakes totally down, and the reality which develops is a fuse between the physical urban space and virtual world or immaterial textual world in the case of the book. The shared experience in the present day physical urban space still being explainable in a Newtonian model of space, where there is only one common outer physical urban space, which forces shared encounters in quite a different way than the virtual world, where you can choose between an almost infinite number of spaces (limited by the accessible places on the net) in the same physical location. In the same physical location many parallel worlds therefore co-exist in the virtual world. Worlds which attracts different people and can be mutual

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unacceptable, and only accepted because of the possibility to choose the world you like and ignore the existence of the parallel worlds. This possibility will be lost when the screen is turned into a locative media, for example by placing a large screen on a square or as in Urban Artscape – Furesø using urban space in it self as a screen. Thereby creating an augmented reality, which is as flexible as the virtual world and is a shared encounter as the physical urban space.

4.6

The encounter between private and public

Making borders soft, fuzzy and porous between the virtual world and physical urban space and between the imagination and the shared outer physical reality creates close encounters between the private and the public. There has often in democratic societies been a much larger degree of tolerance towards expressions in the virtual world and in people’s imagination, than towards behavior in physical urban space. The last in fully developed urban spaces, governed by the authorities through broadly accepted measures, manly the control over physical structures, decoration, traffic and parking in urban space. The possibilities for extraordinary events, structures or decorations exist, but with a demand of permissions in forehand. Fully developed physical urban spaces in general have been governed very top down, with acceptance from the majority and confirmed in a democratic political process. These have been in sharp contrast to the private sphere and the virtual world, where there has been a strong right to individual solutions and a much softer top down approach. Mainly using different ways of influencing the opinions of groups and individuals. In the private sphere and virtual world there has also been an important bottom up approach. One reasons for this is, as I have mentioned earlier, the possibilities of coexisting parallel worlds in the virtual world and the private sphere, where very different world views can be manifested, while it is so costly and difficult to change, remove or create physical structures or decorations in physical urban space, that people generally accept the lack of openness and possibility for spontaneous creativity in public urban space. At the same time this makes many consider public urban space as quite dull and suppressed, and creates an attraction towards the in-between zones with their openness for expressions. A minority even creates a kind guerilla style like counter culture in fully developed urban spaces, like graffiti cultures in the suburbs of Copenhagen. 276

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In an augmented urban space like the two squares Kulturtorvet in Værløse and Kulturpladsen in Farum during Urban Artscape – Furesø, the traditional argument for at strict top down governing of urban space loose its validity. It’s as easy to make change and expressions in urban space as on the web. Therefore the discussions of the private and the public have to shift to a new discourse. The discourse being about civility in shared encounters, like the civility in a public meeting. How much can you impose on each other, which rules of civility shall there be in public urban space, which every kind of ages and every groups of citizens use. There need to be developed cultures for how these spaces shall be used. In the case of Urban Artscape – Furesø there have as I mentioned been two very different opinions in regard to the private – public. One is that the multitude of different worldviews opinions, aesthetics, and ideas in people expressed in small groups or in their private surroundings will make the public urban space more interesting and living and can be tolerated, when you use light and shadows for painting and writing. The other position is afraid of a break down in the civility in public urban space. It very much come down to what you think people are hiding inside them and how do you think, there can be established a functioning culture for the use of the augmented urban space.

4.7

Urban Space as an Artwork The superuse of urban space.

“I’ am a protagonist of transformation. In my opinion it’s not very interesting to restore the former state of things. At best they will look like they did before. The most interesting buildings are those that are in motion that evolve in time. Superuse serves to stimulate that change” (van Hinte, Peeren, Jongert, 2007) In Urban Artscape – Furesø I chose to project directly into what was in urban space. To use the urban space in itself as a screen, with a word borrowed from the architects Ed van Hinte, Césare Peeren and Jan Jongert to superuse, their purpose being not to recycle objects but to use them in new architecture. What happens when you superuse is that characteristics and meaning from the object before it’s superused will fuse together with the way you are using it, and

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augment both the object and the new way it’s used. It’s like creating metaphors with their in-between zone quality of the not fully settled and defined. Another reason for projecting directly into urban space is that the only intervention you make is with light and shadows. The shadows of people will be a part of their presence in and interaction with the augmented urban space. The light in the projections, being an expression through new media of peoples imaginations. By only intervening with projected light, the urban space can at anytime with total ease be recreated and light is already one of the primary materials in urban space. The idea is that the projection will function as catalyst in a process, where not only areas of projections, but the whole urban space, will be perceived as an in-between zone full of aesthetic force and possibilities, an urban space which change appearance with the shifting light, with your movements around the squares, with how you meet the light reflected from the other urban spaces, which is connected to the urban space you are in. The idea is that this process being catalyst by the use of new media will make the whole urban space be perceived as a space in which every place with the right technique and ritual can be re-enchanted. That the urban spaces is a work of art, where anyone are themselves among the artists, using their imagination to create in a magic realistic place.

4.8

Shared encounters in Urban Artscape – Furesø

Urban Artscape – Furesø creates a new kind of public urban space, a new kind of square, where people can meet, where they can interact and have shared encounters and experiences. The structure of meetings in the urban wiki is the same as when people normally meet and interact on a square in a town. You can go into a dialogue with the other, use their expressions, change theme, ignore them or go over and talk to, interact with someone else. People can meet each other in groups or just relate to the common life on the square as individuals. The difference from the normal square in urban space is that the possibilities for shared encounters are much enhanced and augmented. You can share your imagination, your private experiences through the text, pictures or animations. You can walk, dance and play together with others in poems, landscapes, paintings, photos created by you or together with others. You can share scenery with others for a period or go into an interactive play between the pictures and texts 278

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painted with light on the ground or walls at the square. You can break the Newtonian ideas of space and be in one square having and echo or reflection of the other square present. Not in your personal mind but in the outer physical reality being a part of common ground for shared experiences in public urban squares. The augmented squares are stretching between to towns and stretching between the virtual and the outer physical urban space. A large area in the squares is a soft and fuzzy border zone an in-between Zone with an augmented reality. Said in a slightly different manner, you can share encounters in web 2,0 walk, play or dance in an urban screen. In the urban wiki.

4.9

Content sharing in Urban Artscape – Furesø

Urban Artscape – Furesø is a fuse of the virtual and the physical urban space, with the same easiness in content sharing as on the web. Every picture or media file uploaded in the urban wiki and projected into the squares will be stored in the wiki’s gallery, the old versions of the pages projected into urban space will be stored too. There will develop a richer gallery and archive of shared content, it will exist in the virtual world, but because of the soft, fuzzy and porous borderlines in Urban Artscape – Furesø between the virtual and the physical urban space, the gallery and archive (the museum) will also exist in physical urban space. Every one standing on one of the squares can access the gallery and museum, consisting of previous content projected into urban space and project it again into the present urban space. The urban space will of course have changed since the last time the material was seen there, but that’s precisely the same situations which exist for any gallery or museum. The cultures of expressions, the shared content of expressions, the possibility for individual and cooperative interaction with the others or with the public urban space in itself, will get richer and richer when Urban Artscape – Furesø develops. It will create an augmented space in urban daily life, where art, culture, relaxation, experiences and business coexist with easy ways to create and interact, an urban space with a broad variety of ways to use it and exist in it. An urban space you can enter in dialogue with, when you are on the squares but also when you are in another part of the world or at home. The augmented urban space in Urban Artscape – Furesø is a place with room for a broad variety of people, encounters and interactions, but also for memories and

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development of the culture of the two squares. The squares being living urban places.

5

Conclusions

In this paper was through the new media – public art work Urban Artscape – Furesø, explored augmented and re-enchanted urban spaces. It’s important to stress that it is research through art and artistic practices, with the concept of the whole urban space as a work of art. Urban Artscape – Furesø is close connected with visual poetry, poetry as text and other forms of creative writing in urban space, looking at the urban space as a narrative and performative space, as a book, a collection of poetry, where everyone in it or relating to it are both readers and writers. Urban Artscape – Furesø shows that with the existence of pervasive systems in urban space, new media can be used in a fuse between the internet and locative media, using urban space as a screen. A promising way to do this is by the creation of an urban wiki, a wiki based on the open source software MediaWiki (also used in the online lexicon Wikipedia), both existing on the net and projected into urban space. The augmented reality which will evolve can be realized in a sustainable way in physical urban space. This will create urban spaces where the human imagination as in creative writing are an important factor in a permanent negotiation and a creation of connected, augmented urban places in flux. Urban places in physical urban space, where people can have shared encounters with their bodies and minds. The shared encounters will be in a common urban space, shared by both people who know each other and are strangers to each other. The shared encounters will be both chosen or imposed, in an urban space negotiated between by passers, local cultures, people who in different ways work professional with the urban space and different authorities. In a way similar to what is happening in the common physical urban space today, but within an augmented reality. To which degree are the squares in Urban Artscape – Furesø perceived and used as a fundamentally new type of urban space and urban condition? Can it be a typical type of a public square in physical urban space, being a part of creating a city as a whole with humanized urban spaces? Urban spaces with the 280

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quality of being fully functional and developed, but still always be in the making by people, by human minds, imaginations and bodies. The last quality often found in in-between zones but lost, when an area is fully developed. It seems like the way of augmenting, connecting and re-enchanting urban spaces, by new media, thereby making urban spaces into urban places, which was created in Urban Artscape – Furesø have an interesting potential for being this kind of fundamentally new urban places, is seems like there is a split in many levels in the society related to the new media urban spaces created in Urban Artscape – Furesø, with regard to how this spaces are perceived. Considerable more research is required. My work with exploration through art and artistic practices of augmented, re-enchanted urban spaces has a departure in literature, working with the concept of a collection of poetry being as an urban space. From 2004 moving into works of art in physical urban space with ‘The City as a Collection of Poetry: Værløse Bymidte den 3. Sept – 12 Sept. 2004 | Lyrik – installation/Bog/Digtsamling’3. These works and my on going work with exploration of the urban wiki support the findings in Urban Artscape – Furesø in indicating that new media and digital production techniques can alter the experience and reality of urban space itself. That the creation of sustainable, augmented, re-enchanted city is possible today. That in this process a cross-over approach between different disciplines working with urban space, new media and digital production techniques is essential. The works also indicates that possibilities and limitations today seems to be more narrowed down by cultural and sociological boundaries than technical boundaries. This can of cause change in the future in the complex interaction between cultural, sociological and technical boundaries. ........................................................................................ 1

Organizational and legal structure in the Urban Artscape – Furesø project. Urban Artscape – Furesø is a new media – public art work, which in it has other works of art. The artist Jan Hatt-Olsen has the immaterial rights to Urban Artscape – Furesø, and decides any artistic aspect of it. The different people who make contributions in digital form to the community web-sites in Urban Artscape – Furesø or through there actions on the two squares, have the immaterial rights to there contributions. Every contribution is submitted under a creative commons license. The people who contributed with digital works and there contributions can be seen in FuresøWiki www.urbanwiki.net (Hatt-Olsen 2007, 2008) in the gallery, in the user list and in the history of projection pages. From Furesø Municipality is established a committee to follow Urban Artscape – Furesø, with Jan Hatt-Olsen, head of culture Bente Høegh and head of planning Susanne Birkeland as members, administrative support cultural advisor Annemette Andersen-Hoppe. There is contact with the juridical advisor in Furesø Municipality and dialogue between Jan Hatt-Olsen, the libraries and culture houses in Farum and Værløse.

2

Beside this talk there were talks about the urban planning in London, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Berlin and the municipality of Copenhagen. More information about the seminar Thinking Metropolis I |

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The City as a Stage and the Stage as a City can be found on www.cph-metropolis.dk 3

(Hatt-Olsen, 2004 a), (Hatt-Olsen 2004 b) (Hatt-Olsen, Jørgensen, Arngrimson, Contenscu, Kanzir, Cizmic 2005) (Jensen, Drachmann, Hatt-Olsen, Thomsen, 2006) (Hatt-Olsen 2007 a), (Hatt-Olsen 2007 b) (Hatt-Olsen, Magnúsdóttir, 2008) The City as a Collection of Poetry: Værløse Bymidte den 3. Sept. – 12. Sept. 2004 | Lyrikinstallation/Bog/Digtsamling , was in 2005 selected as one out of 30 examples of street creativity in Europe to be exhibited in City Living – Living City | the 6’th European Biennial of Towns and Town Planners’ in which I together with a group of architects, planners and urbanists made The Cinescape Street Creativity Charter, which was presented and discussed in plenum with the city architect from Copenhagen and Malmö, at the biennials street creativity charter presentation. My work with urban space, through art and cross-over’s with architects, planners and urbanists, has as main starting points this charter and The City as a Collection of Poetry.

Illustrations in the text Hatt-Olsen Jan 2007, 2008. Photos from the documentation of the new media – public art work. Urban Artscape – Furesø, by Jan Hatt-Olsen at Kulturtorvet in Værløse and Kulturpladsen in Farum. Documentation of digital material used in the projections, people’s participation in the urban wiki and names can be found on the internet in FuresøWiki (Hatt-Olsen 2007, 2008).

References HATT-OLSEN, JAN (2004). Værløse Bymidte den. 3 Sept. – 12 Sept. 2004 | Lyrikinstallation/Bog/Digtsamling, Copenhagen 2004. HATT-OLSEN, JAN (2004-2008).Værløse Bymidte den. 3 Sept. – 12 Sept. 2004 | Lyrikinstallation/Bog/Digtsamling, [Internet] Available from [Accessed: July 14th 2008]. HATT-OLSEN, JAN/JØRGENSEN, STINA/ARNGRIMSON, GUDMUNDUR/CONTENSCU, ION/KANZIR , IVANA/CISMIC, MILICIA (2005). The Cinescape Street Creativity Charter. [Internet] Available from [Accessed: July 14th 2008]. JENSEN, LENE BANG/DRACHMANN, LOUISE/HATT-OLSEN, JAN/THOMSEN, KARIN (2006). Rhizome, in Atlas | En kortlægning af Ny Herning Kommune. Herning. NYP (Network of Younger Planners), Herning Kommune 2006, pp. 15–27. HATT-OLSEN, JAN (2007). The Municipality as a Work of Art [Internet] Available from [Accessed: July 14th 2008]. HATT-OLSEN, JAN (2007). The City as an Expression of Poetry. In WAYNE MCCREADY (ed.) Western Humanities Review, Fall 2007, Western Humanities Alliance Special Issue: Whats is a City, University of Utah 2007. pp. 88–99.

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VAN HINTE , ED/PEEREN, C ÉSARE /JONGERT, JAN

(2007). Superuse | Constructing new architecture be shortcutting material flows, Rotterdam oio Publishers. HATT-OLSEN, JAN (2007, 2008). FuresøWiki [Internet] Available from [Accessed July 14 2008]. HATT-OLSEN, JAN/MAGNÚSDOTTIR , ÁSTA OLGA URBAN ALCHEMIST IN THE NIGHT (2008). In Changing Metropolis. Copenhagen: Viadesign 2008 pp. 110–111.

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AVA FATAH GEN . S CHIECK /C AROLINA B RIONES / C HIRON M OTTRAM

Exploring the Role of Place within the Urban Space: The Urban Screen as a Socialising Platform

1

Introduction

The public arena provides temporal and spatial mechanisms for generating and promoting various social interactions, offering a “stage” for events and activities on which people negotiate boundaries of a social and cultural nature. With the introduction of mobile and pervasive media technologies within the urban space, and in order to identify the impact of the deployment of pervasive technologies on people’s relationship to each other and to their surroundings in particular, we need to achieve a better understanding of the notion of place and the role of context as an emergent situation – physical, social and mental – of surrounding aspects that give meaning to our activities. When situating a digital platform in a city context, which includes both humans and the digital platform as components, it becomes part of a larger and a more complex system, spatially (i.e. physically), digitally and socially. Whereas the social aspect is often taken into account in designing interactions enabled through digital technolgy, relatively little attention has been given to date, however, to the spatial properties and the individual aspects of the place, and so to address their impact on forming shared encounters, in particular within the urban context. In this respect it seems that we face the challenge of developing strategies for articulating the new public arena that connects the urban space and the potential space created by the new media technologies. In this paper we report on our investigations within an ongoing research project that aims at developing a better understanding of the urban space augmented with the digital space in the heritage city of Bath. A long term goal of our research is to inform the design of pervasive systems that are deployed in the urban environments. In (O’Neil et al, 2006) we described our approach in developing novel methods for systematically observing the city, physically, digitally and socially in order to understand mobile and pervasive computing

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features as integral part of that environment. How do people negotiate relationships with technologies in a pervasive era? Does the space act as a place for urban performance when introducing a new digital element into the urban space? Do social interactions change or remain the same when introducing the digital elements? In order to address these questions and to engage the general public in our research, we are applying a series of different methods based on intervention using digital installation and encouraging playful use of technology. In this paper we demonstrate applying a digital installation within the urban space. In this experiment it is hoped that interventions can serve as a methodology for better understanding of social and digital interactions and underlying affordances (Fatah gen. Schieck et al, 2006). In order to investigate the impact of the spatial and temporal properties on the type of shared interactions within the city context, we have deployed a socialising platform, in the form of a digital screen, in three selected locations in the city. The aim is to generate a rich urban experience among friends, observers or strangers. Here we explore the relation between the type of shared encounter and the spatial and syntactical properties of the space in the specific location. The selected locations vary in the pedestrian flow rate and in the visibility and accessibility of the location. We analyse these locations and demonstrate that the physical setting of the built environment had a direct influence on the movement flow of passers-by and the activities taking place near the locations, which in turn had an impact on the characteristics of the social encounter and the shared experience. Our observations suggest that public interactive installations, like the one presented here, provide a platform for rich social interactions and awareness among the various people involved. However, situating it in different locations and within different social and temporal situations, and depending on the context, diverse and unpredicted social behaviours may emerge. In the next section we review projects in the fields of ubiquitous computing. In particular, we focus on projects that have embedded technological artefacts into urban situations. In section 3 we provide a brief introduction to Space Syntax, describing some of its main features and methods, and highlight the spatial analysis of Bath using these methods. In section 4, we outline our methodology, describing the digital prototype and its deployment in selected part in the city. In section 5 we review the evaluation methods we applied. We then discuss preliminary findings from the early implementation of a digital 286

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prototype in the city of Bath. Specifically, we highlight the role of place within the urban space. Finally we draw conclusions on certain aspects and outline our ongoing work as part of a systemic approach for analysing and understanding ubiquitous computing systems as integral facets of the urban environment.

2

Background

Recent research has tackled issues related to implementing pervasive systems inside the built environment. Many projects have been developed within a workspace environment in order to create opportunities for informal interactions and communication, such as “Hello Wall” (Streitz et al., 2003), or “Wallmap” (McCarthy, 2002). Other cases of large interactive systems have been introduced into social settings with the aim of extending existing activities and practices or helping people to talk to people standing beside them, for instance “Boundary Functions” (Snibbe, 2005), “The Opinionizer system” (Brignull, H., & Rodgers, Y., 2003) and “Dynamo” (Izadi et al., 2003). In relation to projects that have tended to investigate interventions or experiences in specific urban situations, the Mobile Bristol group (Reid et al., 2005) developed a range of outdoor situated experiences, such as the interactive play “Riot! 1831”. The Equator Citywide project (Benford et al, 2003) has developed games played in urban settings. The goal of those activities was to overlay an experience on city spaces, by giving mobile devices with GPS receivers to users, rather than by placing technology into the settings themselves. These projects are city probes made with the aim of understanding more about how to design experiences in the city. Other projects have attempted to understand existing city behaviours, mainly as a resource for designing new applications. Paulos and Goodman (2004) studied the phenomenon of familiar strangers – people we become familiar to seeing in urban settings but do not communicate with – by asking subjects in Berkeley to record the people they recognised. This became the basis for tools designed, for example, to augment the user’s sense of social relationship to different parts of a city. In his informal study Höflich (2005) have looked primarily at physical behaviours in the city, which themselves are often rooted in social behaviours. The study focused on the movements and body language of people in the Piazza Matteotti in Udine as they made mobile telephone calls, relating them to the architectural features of that square and the different types of engagement people have with their

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interlocutors versus their surroundings. Höflich identified signature patterns and paths of movement reflecting an interest in how technologies affect paths through space. A few urban projects have been designed to use body movements and gestures to activate the digital media without using portable devices. For instance the work of the Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael LozanoHemmer, such as “Urban Scan” and “Body Images” use body-input interaction (in this case users’ shadows) creating a direct relation between the human body, the technology interface and the urban space (Lozano-Hemmer, 2005). The Citywall project uses a series of intuitive gestures to manipulate media in a city context. The project developed environments for on-site configuration and light-weight mixed reality interfaces with the ambition to weave them into the fabric of everyday life. Users can navigate and arrange media as if they were manipulating physical pictures of city events in an engaging installation where passers by playfully manipulate media and learn about anniversaries, events and festivals. Unlike our approach, projects developed in the urban contexts have not tackled the spatial setting of the city as a potentail facilitator for social encounters. In our research we aim at developing the basis for a systematic approach, by looking at the urban environment as an integrated system mediating both the built environment and pervasive systems. This is achieved by applying different methods in different phases (Fatah gen. Schieck et al, 2008); in this paper we report on our investigations of the deployment of an urban installation taking into account the bodily experience as essential factors of human experience.

3

Exploring Encounters in the city

The urban environment, in the way it structures space, plays a critical role in the construction of social behaviours. The city can be considered as a pattern of connected spaces that take on a social meaning by constructing patterns of co-presence between people (Hillier and Hanson, 1984). In this respect space does not only reflect social patterns, but can also play an important role in generating these patterns, providing a platform for rich and diverse social encounters. For instance, public spaces such as the bus stop or the cafe can act as an ‘encounter stage’ on which people negotiate boundaries of a social and cultural nature. Building pervasive systems into our urban environment 288

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requires a new way of thinking about the design and use of the digital layer and how it interweaves with the built environment. With the advent of pervasive technologies (always and everywhere present) we need to achieve a better understanding of how to compose the necessary framework for allowing a better integration of the built environment and the digital layer and it seems that designing new technologies within our built environment is often accompanied by speculations about their potential for influencing social behaviour or promoting shared encounters within the built environment and it is here that designers, working with radically new and disruptive technologies, tend to work on the boundary of existing knowledge. The design of pervasive systems may change the environment for interaction and so stimulate the emergence of new social behaviours. Inevitably then, designing new technologies tends to modify existing social practices, and on occasion stimulate new ones. Feenberg has argued that new technologies tend to undermine existing social practices, requiring new ones in their place (Feenberg, 1999). We believe it is important to understand, when studying any type of technology, how these technologies reflect the social relations and how they might change the social relations. In our approach an attempt was made to map and understand existing social practices in relation to the space and in respect to the heritage value in Bath. We believe that identifying these practices and their location within the city would help gain a better understanding of the underlying affordances. These can then be addressed and taken advantage of in designing the new technologies and interventions. In the following sections we explain our approach and illustrate the methods we applied in conducting our empirical study. We discuss limitations encountered during their application.

3.1

Understanding the urban space in Bath

The structure of the built environment in Bath is by no means a unified, planned whole. The expansion that took place in a relatively short time span in the 18th and 19th centuries created a collage of separate, largely unconnected, and often incomplete pieces of speculative development, each shaped apparently by accident (Forsyth, 2004). In order to understand the urban space in Bath we use Space Syntax methods. Space syntax, first developed by Hillier and Hanson (1984), analyses cities as systems of space created by the physical

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artefacts of architecture and urban design. It takes the position that the key to urban function, at the level of movement of people, is the way in which each space is accessible from every other space in the city, not merely in terms of metric distance, but rather in terms of topological distance, or the number of changes of direction needed to move from one space to another. In that respect the space is understood as a fundamental aspect of everything human beings do. The experience of the space is related to the movement, the interaction and the visual fields. Each of these concepts describes different aspects of how we use or experience the space and they are all related in a geometric language that reflects human behaviour. We apply Space Syntax methods as an aid to understanding the configuration of the urban space in Bath. The reason is to a great degree based on the correlations found between the measures generated by Space Syntax spatial analysis, and flows of people counted in real urban space. The ability to interrogate the spatial structure of a city plan and to investigate what factors lead to the presence or absence of people on the street is one of the central contributions of space syntax methodology. This is supported by many studies, mainly of pedestrian movement, indicating that under normal conditions the spatial configuration of the urban grid is in itself a consistent factor in determining movement flows. Some key studies in Space Syntax are reported in (Hillier et al, 1987, Hillier et al, 1993). Using a range of qualitative observation methods one can gather data on people’s obvious behaviours and revealed preferences. Using the quantitative analysis of spatial morphology one can then investigate the degree to which behaviours appear to be related to spatial design, and the degree to which other explanatory factors must be invoked. By applying Space Syntax spatial analysis coupled with using qualitative observations we were able to identify potential spaces for investigating the impact of introducing a digital platform on the nature of shared experience.

3.2

Understanding Bath with Space Syntax

A fundamental concept of Space Syntax is that a city can be represented as a graph of nodes and links. The graph is constructed from a map of the city by first making an “axial map” of the streets. In an axial map, the longest lines passing down streets are considered as nodes and their intersections as links in the graph. This graph can then be analysed in terms of its properties such as 290

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the depth between the nodes. This is characterised in Space Syntax as the level of integration of a node, i.e. the deepness or shallowness of a node in relation to the other nodes in the graph. Shallow streets are essentially fewer changes of direction from the other streets of a city, while deep streets are relatively isolated from other streets. Space syntax has found a consistent correlation between the shallowness of streets (in terms of integration) and pedestrian flows in the city. Observations are then made at different times of day of movement flows along each street segment by counting people passing points on a street, ‘imaginary gates1‘, and indexing them in flows per hour through that gate. The various spatial values for the lines are then compared to the movement flows by simple and multiple regression. The only other variable required to model movement is knowledge of the special attractors, for instance average building height, development densities and land uses in an area. In the first phase in our approach to understanding the urban space in Bath, we have applied a syntactic analysis of Bath city centre. The city was analysed as an independent system. This was followed by an observation study, which was carried out over 2 days. Data about pedestrian movement was gathered using an observationbased pedestrian survey conducted in the study area. We established 96 gates throughout the city, and counted the number of people crossing them. Our observers took 5-minute samples from each gate in 5 cycles throughout the day, from 8:30am to 4:00pm. Observed flows of people ranged from high flows of 2750–4000 people per hour to low flows of 250 people per hour or less. The local integration was correlated with pedestrian movement data. The correlation between the predicted and actual flows of people is low in comparison to that found in other cities. This indicates that patterns of movement are likely to be heavily influenced by a range of other factors. For instance location of tourist ‘attractors’ (Fatah gen. Schieck et al., 2006).

3.3

Areas definition

Using a range of qualitative observation methods drawn from ethnography we gathered data on people’s behaviours and by applying quantitative spatial analysis of the urban morphology we could investigate the degree to which behaviors appear to be related to spatial design, and the degree to which other ............................................ 1

“A brief lesson in Observations” Space Syntax Lab, 1997.

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explanatory factors arise. These methods allowed us to identify various social interactions within various social groups. Early findings indicated clear differences in the social behaviour and the movement flow in different parts of the city. For instance, some of the streets were mainly used by locals. Other static locations, which are characterizedare characterized by low movement flow, were dominated by tourists. This appears to be determined, to some extent, by the spatial configuration of the city. As a result of the analysis, we were able to identify potential areas for carrying out the empirical studies. The aim is to investigate the impact of deploying a digital platform on the social and shared encounters in these areas. We have identified 3 areas for conducting the empirical studies. These areas differ in the spatial characteristics, their connection with the adjacent areas, the surrounding attractors and activities, the visual fields, the movement flow and static activities. The main characteristic of the selected areas are described below: [1] AREA ONE: THE RIVERSIDE This area is located along the riverside. It is situated on a different level, which is separated from the main level of the city centre. Adjacent land uses include a restaurant and a children’s playground. On the local scale there is a bench and tree close to the area. Some people walk along the riverfront, however, the area is relatively isolated from the city centre, and therefore, characterised with a low movement rate. In order to reach the area people need to use a stair, which would lead them to the lower level of the city. Having said that it is important to outline that visually the area is highly connected to the city centre (it could be seen immediately from the main movement route). [2] AREA T WO: NEW BOND STREET This area represents a highly used space that connects 4 different pedestrian routes in the city centre. It is surrounded by shops and cafés. The movement rate is higher than in Area One (the Riverside). On a local scale there is a bench in the middle of the square. In terms of static activities, people tend to sit on the bench and have lunch, use their mobile phone or observe the surrounding. Many tourists appear with digital cameras. Generally, people tend to meet in this area. Many people tend to walk with their children or with a pram. In the afternoon most of the people tend to walk 292

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north, moving away from the city centre. The installation was tested in this area during the afternoon and the evening.

Fig. 1: left part: Area One: The River Side (above). Area Two: New Bond Street (middle). Area Three: Stall Street (below). right part: Top view of the three areas showing movement flow and static activities during midday (the arrow shows the location and direction of the camera).

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[3] AREA THREE: STALL STREET This pedestrian area is situated on the main shopping spine in Bath along the North-South axis. The wide route is highly integrated with a very high movement flow. People tend to move fast to their destination this varies depending on the time during the day. The area is mainly surrounded by shops and it is very well connected to the main shopping spine in Bath. On a local scale there is a big tree, which is used by street performers as a base for their performance and equipments. A few benches are situated close to this area. In terms of static activities, people tend to sit and have lunch or observe. The spot in front of the tree, which was selected to test the installation, is highly connected, visually, to the main entries to that location. We have carried out experiments in the above mentioned locations and implemented a digital prototype in the form of a digital screen, encouraging playful use of technology that triggers shared encounters among friends, viewers or strangers. In these experiments it is hoped that these interventions can serve as a methodology for better understanding of social and digital interactions and underlying affordances. We believe that in order to introduce a digital platform into the urban environment we need to think of the design and use of the digital layer and how it interweaves with the built environment. Key to this integration is the concept of space, by which we mean not only physical location but also the social protocols, conventions and values attached to the particular physical space (Harrison and Dourish, 1996; Tuan, 1977). In the next sections we review our methodology and describe preliminary findings from the early implementation of the digital prototype in the three selected locations in the city. We then discuss related issues before we conclude by summarising our ongoing work.

4

Implementing the Prototype

The urban prototype was implemented as a portable digital screen that can be embedded as an interactive installation in different locations in the city (Briones et al, 2007). It is made of two layers. The first layer is a grid of LEDs (light-emitting diodes) embedded in a surface (1.8mX2.8m) that contains 21 units of rubber door mats. The second layer is a grid of pressure pad sensors, which is located under the LEDs layer. Both the LED and the pressure pad 294

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layers form a unit that sends the user’s input to the computational program and performs the outputs as well, in the form of blinking LEDs. The pressure pads detect people walking on top of the surface. In response, it illuminates the series of LEDs. The lights turn on or off depending on a computer program, which defines the behavior of each light at every instant. When pedestrians walk over the surface a pattern of blinking lights is generated dynamically following the pedestrians’ movement over the surface. The aim is to generate a rich urban experience that can be introduced in various locations in the city. Using the body as an interaface, the digital screen acts as a non-traditional interface and as a facilitator between people and people, and people and their surrounding environment. We are interested in investigating aspects that influence the interactions between people and people, and people and their surroundings when technology is introduced in the urban space. In particular, we focus on the importance of the spatial setting and the role of place in providing temporal and spatial mechanisms that facilitates different types of social interactions and shared encounters. The interactive installation was tested in three different locations in the city of Bath, with low, medium and high pedestrian flows. The selection of the locations makes use of space visibility and connectivity in the urban space and in relation to attractions and services that work as movement attractor. Four test sessions were carried out over three days. Three of these sessions were performed during daytime (one for each location). An additional test session was conducted during the evening (in Area Two: New Bond Street).

5

Evaluation methods

Our approach in the real setting, and unlike in a ‘lab’ setting, requires applying a range of methods from interpretative-ethnographic to experimental approaches. In this section we explain the methods we implemented together with the limitations and constraints that were encountered during its application. During the study we have applied the following methods:

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1) Before running the experiment: Information about the physical conditions of the space was mapped by two researchers (authors of this paper); this includes defining the boundaries, exits, entries, street furniture for instance mapping the position of benches, trees. In addition active and passive facades2 were mapped in order to understand the relation between interactions triggered by installing the digital platform and the immediate surrounding. Before the actual test sessions we have implemented a range of empirical observation methods in the selected areas. We have conducted a ‘static snapshot’ recording the static use of public space by people. Moreover, pedestrian flow levels and people’s movements in and out of the space were observed, and the type of activity taking place in the immediate surroundings was captured. 2) During the experiment: Each test session lasted for two hours. Both researchers were observing the interactions in each location; one of the researchers was engaging with the public at the test location and the other was standing with a camera at a distance. During the sessions people’s movements in and out of the interaction space were recorded. The form of interactions with the prototype, and with the other people in the area was observed. Shared encounters were captured using the digital camera. Various interactions were video taped by the researchers using Digital Video Camera. Finally, people’s movement on the digital surface was tracked using a computer program, which maps the sequence of people’s position on the digital surface. The aim is to identify the interaction pattern and the movement paths taken by people. 3) After running the experiment: Following each test session a randomly selected number of participants were asked to participate in a semi structured interview and to fill in questionnaires. Twenty questionnaires were collected from all locations.

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Active facades are building frontages that attract people movement such as commerce or cultural venues. Passive facades are building frontages without interaction with the public space for eg empty shops or blank walls.

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6

Evaluation and early results

Our observations of the test sessions indicated that public interactive installations may provide a stage for emergent social interactions among various people. However, situating the digital platform in various locations, and depending on the context, might generate diverse and unpredicted social behaviours designers are unaware of. During the sessions, we observed the following emergent patterns of behaviour: • Awareness: from peripheral awareness to focal awareness to direct interaction. Different levels of awareness were observed among people walking around the area, from those simply glancing at the interactive prototype, to people stopping around the prototype and asking about it, trying to understand how it works. • Shared experience: People behaved differently in different situations and the experiences varied depending on whether the interaction took place among friends or strangers (Briones et al., 2007). During the test sessions, most people shared the experiences with friends; however, a few of the participants shared the experience with a stranger. The most common pattern observed when strangers were interacting was that they were waiting for their turn, providing a mechanism for an unintentional shared encounter.

Fig. 2: Awareness varied from peripheral awareness to direct interaction (left). Different levels of interactions were observed among people walking around the area; some were simply glancing at the interactive prototype, which indicated a certain level of curiosity (middle). The most common pattern observed when strangers were interacting was that they were waiting for their turn (right).

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• Physical properties of the installation The physical properties of the digital platform can have quite profound effects on the way it is used in a public setting. One of the central issues in introducing a new form of technology in the public space is people’s uncertainty regarding how to interact with it. One factor, which needs to be taken into consideration, is the physical affordance of the interactive display. In our case, installing the large interactive platform as a horizontal surface in a public space encouraged people to walk over and congregate around it in a socially conducive way. People move around it or over it, in a non-hierarchical manner, where each user has the same possibilities for controlling the interaction performance. Moreover, the rubber mat was very attractive as a material especially for children who were jumping and dancing over it for a longer period of time. • Social proximity The social proximity or person-to-person distance has played a profound role in influencing the shape of interactions with other people on the digital platform. The distance was different between strangers compared to that between friends and it seems that this aspect has influenced peoples’ perception of their personal space. The interactive media artist Scott Snibbe (Snibbe, 2005) has explored this aspect in more detail in his installation Boundary Functions: ‘Our personal space changes dynamically in relation to those around us’. According to Snibbe the personal space exists only in relation to others.

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Fig. 3: interactions on the digital surface: among friends (left) and strangers (right).

• Playful use of technology We have implemented a digital prototype in the form of a digital screen, encouraging playful use of technology that triggers shared encounters among people. In some cases this was built up amid anticipation as people used relevant prior experience and expectations of a new experience e.g. often people recognized the prototype as a “dance floor” before they interacted with it. We also observed differences between singles and groups behaviour. In a group we see a dynamic flow of interactions. People tend to play with the installation while interacting with of the group members.

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Fig. 4: The digital platform as a dance floor left and middle). Group interactions among friends (right).

• Temporal One of the interesting aspects we observed that during the evening session the nature and duration of the interactions were different than those during day time in the same location. Although a fewer number of people stopped to engage with the installation, during the evening session people tended to be “themselves” and express different visions about the digital installations. Some of them continued dancing for a long period of time. • Spatial setting and movement rhythm Our evaluation demonstrated that the physical setting of the built environment had a direct influence on the movement flow of passers-by and the activities taking place near the locations, which in turn had a direct impact on the level and the properties of the social encounter and the shared experience. Early findings indicated clear differences in the intensity of interactions with the digital surface and with other people in the different locations in the city. This seems to be determined, to some extent, by the spatial configuration of the city. Moreover, city rhythms – the way that variations in pace and density are structured over time – played an important role in shaping the type and intensity of interaction with the prototype in different locations. Being able to understand the movement flow and movement rhythm is of value. Good local knowledge of these rhythms with respect to the spaces is key in determining appropriate approach for triggering different types of interactions. Different types of behaviour were observed in relation to the space properties. For instance, in Area Three (Stall Street), a wide and highly integrated street which was characterised with fast walking pace, people had a tendency to simply glance at the interactive prototype and continue walking in the same pace towards their destination. In contrast, in Area Two (New Bond Street), a highly integrated area with slower walking pace, characterized as being an

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intersection of more than one pedestrian route, people tended to stop around the prototype and share the experience with other people around the area. This has varied during different times of the day. This seems to be supported by the temporal and the spatial properties of the physical space. In the same way Whyte (1988) found in his study of cities that people will tend to chat the longest in the busiest areas, those areas where there is most visibility, light and people.

Fig. 5: in a highly integrated area people tended to stop around the prototype and share the experience with other people (left). In a highly integrated street with fast walking pace, most people had a tendency to simply glance at the interactive (middle and right).

• The prototype as an urban performance During the setting up of the installation by the two ‘observers’, people started gathering around waiting for the ‘event’ to start. This created the feel of an urban performance that unfolds in real time. We noticed that many people were looking first at the poster that was displayed on the wall next to the digital installation. Although the poster was not related to our study it seems that people tended first to look for information about the ‘event’ before deciding to engage with it either indirectly by engaging with the ‘observer’ or directly by engaging with the display itself. We suspect that in order for the public display to be engaging, the viewer needs to be able to construct a meaningful social relationship of which the display forms a part. The engagement with the ‘observer’ offers one example of this. In this case the user puts together the presence and activity of the human observer who is setting up the ‘event’ with the presence and behaviour of the display.

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Fig. 6: Installing the digital stage created the feel of an urban performance people were gathered around waiting for the ‘event’ to start.

6.1

Limitations of the methodology

During the test sessions many people commented that it was not easy to understand what the system was doing. This has raised a few issues in relation to three aspects: software, hardware and the presentation of the prototype in the social environment. • The software does not allow many people to interact with it at the same time, the blinking/lights only respond to one input at each time. Also because of the way the sensors are distributed it wasn’t always possible to detect the accurate position of the user. • The hardware posed some limitation caused by the low brightness of the LEDs. As a result, the LEDs were not always visible during a sunny day. • Prototype: The size of the prototype was rather small for the urban scale. Therefore in some locations such as Area One (The Riverside) it wasn’t immediately possible to trigger a real impact on the social surrounding. In this regard, the size of the LEDs surface was a weak point. For instance in Area One many passers-by did not realized that the prototype was there and in Area Two it was not big enough to host interactions between large numbers of people at the same time. Because of these issues the evaluation sessions were sometimes accompanied by technical glitches and inconsistencies, and it was clear that these hindered users from interacting and engaging with the system and the other people around. Having said that, many users found the system both enjoyable and to

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offer a potential for engaging with other people that happened to be at the same spot and it seems that if technical and human factors barriers can be overcome, the introduction of digital interactive media in this form in the urban space may lead to a diverse type of social interactions supported by a playful use of technology that triggers shared encounters among friends, viewers or strangers and it seems that the ability of an urban interactive platform to encourage and enhance social interactions depends on dynamic interconnections of elements including the social setting and the temporal dimension, where it is located, the type of audience and cultural background, the affordance of the prototype, and the affordance of the environment in which it is located.

7

Conclusions

In this paper we described initial findings from the deployment of a digital installation in various locations in the city. The aim is to create a novel urban experience that triggers social interactions among different people present at these locations. The installation is implemented in the form of a digital urban screen, embedded in the physical surrounding, and acting as a non-traditional interface and a facilitator between people and people, and people and their surroundings. In our study an attempt was made to map and understand shared social encounter mediated by the digital platform and to establish the relation to the spatial properties of the surroundings. Our investigations suggest that the success of implementing a large interactive display in the urban environment depends on the properties of the digital platform and on the external factors relating to the social, temporal, and physical settings of the surroundings in particular. We have presented a digital prototype that was implemented in three locations in the city. These locations differ in the way they relate to the built environment and the way they construct users’ relationships to the surroundings. While demonstrating differences in how users’ intention to interact and their awareness of the various interactions have influenced the type of shared interactions, our prototype illustrates an approach to facilitating and encouraging shared encounters in the city.

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Our initial evaluation suggests that by altering the relation between consciousness of communication and the intention of interaction, technology can be appropriated to support emergent social interactions. Introducing a change in an area within the urban space, by setting up the digital platform, made people aware of the existence of other people in the same area and altered the type of encounters with others from being unconscious into conscious encounters. This can possibly influence their behaviour or provide a motivation to change the way they communicate and engage with others, generating diverse and rich shared encounters. In this paper we have demonstrated a prototype that explores the role of technology in supporting social encounters within the surrounding environment. The example we described here investigates the relation between the type of shared encounter and the spatial and syntactical properties in a city context. The prototype supported the spatial configuration in which it was embedded, and was similarly affected by it. What about the city as a whole? Could digital technologies re-create a sense of collective place and a kind of belonging? Considerably more research is required in order to inform the understanding the relation between new pervasive technologies and the urban realm. As part of our ongoing work we are trying to address a number of issues that came up through our study. Specifically, we are exploring how digital encounters can improve the experience of public space, and whether a system can improve the quality of social encounters. In this respect a particularly important insight comes from the effects we observed of the impact of the presence of the human observer on the perception of the experience. It seemed that this was interpreted by the viewers as giving the installation a personality. It encouraged the viewer to engage with the ‘event’. We suspect that in order for public display of these technologies to be engaging the viewer needs to be able to construct a meaningful social relationship of which the display forms a part. The presence of the ‘observer’ offers one example of this. This required that viewer to put together the presence and behaviour of the display with the presence and activity of the human observer generating rich shared encounters.

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Acknowledgement The authors would like to thank Alasdair Turner and Chris Leung for their support. We thank Alan Penn for his contribution. This project was conducted as part of the MSc. Adaptive Architecture and Computation at UCL, London. It is partially funded by Cityware (EPSRC: EP/C547691/1).

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References BENFORD, S., ANASTASI, R., FLINTHAM, M., DROZD, A., CRABTREE, A., GREENHALGH, C., TANDA-VANITJ, N., ADAMS, M. AND ROW-FARR , J. (2003). Coping with uncertainty in a location-based game. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 2(3): 34–41. BRIGNULL, H., AND ROGERS, Y. (2003). Enticing People to Interact with Large Public Displays in Public Spaces, In: Proc. Interac’03. Zurich, September 2003, 17–23. BRIONES, C., FATAH GEN. SCHIECK, A., MOTTRAM, C. (2007). A socializing Interactive Installation for the Urban Environments. In: proceedings IADIS Applied Computing 2007, Salamanca, Spain. FATAH GEN. SCHIECK, A., KOSTAKOS, V. (2007). Workshop on shared encounters (CHI 2007), San Jose, USA . FATAH GEN. SCHIECK, A., PENN, A, KOSTAKOS, V., O’NEILL, E, KINDBERG, T., STANTON FRASER , D., AND JONES, T. (2006). Design Tools for Pervasive Computing in Urban Environment. In: proceedings 8th International Conference on Design & Decision Support Systems in Architecture and Urban Planning, Eindhoven, Springer, NL. AVA FATAH GEN. SCHIECK, ALAN PENN, EAMONN O’NEILL (2008). Mapping, sensing and visualising the digital co-presence in the public arena. In: proceedings 9th International Conference on Design & Decision Support Systems in Architecture and Urban Planning, Leende, NL. pp. 38–58. FEENBERG, A. (1999). Questioning Technology, Routledge. FORSYTH, M. (2004). Bath, Yale University Press. GLANCY, M., K.O’HARA, B. CROWTHER , J. MOORE1, S. ROBERTSHAW, A. PRESSLAND, M. CARTWRIGHT, A. COLLINS, N. SMYTH, J. THOMSON, M. SPARKS, S. KURNIAWAN, E. GEELHOED (2007). “Understanding audience behaviours around the Big Screens in public spaces”, Big Screen Report, UK. HARRISON, S. AND D OURISH, P. (1996). Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems. In: proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. HILLIER , B., BURDETT, R., PEPONIS, J., AND PENN, A. (1987). Creating life: or, does architecture determine anything? Architecture and Behaviour, 3 (3). HILLIER , B., A. PENN, J. HANSON, T. GRAJEWSKI AND J. XU (1993). Natural movement; or, configuration and attraction in urban space use. Environment and Planning B. HILLIER , B. AND HANSON, J. (1984). The social logic of the space, Cambridge University Press, London. HÖFLICH, J. R. (2005). A certain sense of place. In: K. NYÍRI (ed.), A sense of place – the global and the local in mobile communication. Passagen Verlag, pp. 159–168. IZADI, S., BRIGNULL, H., RODDEN, T., ROGERS, Y., UNDERWOOD, M. (2003). Dynamo: A public interactive surface supporting the cooperative sharing and exchange of media. In: Proc. User Interfaces and Software Technologies (USIT’03). Vancouver. LOZANO-HEMMER , R. (2002). Alien Relationships with Public Space. In: TransUrbanism, NAI Publishers, Holland.

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MCCARTHY, J. F. (2002). Using Public Displays to Create Conversation Opportunities, INTEL RESEARCH, I. (Ed.) In Workshop on Public, Community and Situated Displays at CSCW 2000. New Orleans. O’NEILL, E., KOSTAKOS, V., KINDBERG, T., FATAH GEN. SCHIECK, A., PENN, A., STANTON F RASER , D., AND JONES , T. (2006). Instrumenting the city: developing methods for observing and understanding the digital cityscape. In: proceedings UbiComp2006, Springer Berlin. PAULOS, E., AND GOODMAN, E. (2004). The familiar stranger: anxiety, comfort, and play in public places. In: proceedings CHI 2004, ACM, pp. 24–29. REID, J., HULL, R., CATER , K., AND FLEURIOT, C. (2005). Magic moments in situated mediascapes. In: proceedings ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE 2005), Spain, ACM. RODDEN, T. & BENFORD, S. (2003). The evolution of buildings and implications for the design of ubiquitous domestic environments. In: proceedings, CHI 2003, USA. CHI Letters 5 (1). STREITZ, N. A., ROCKER , C., PRANTE, TH., STENZEL, R., & VAN ALPHEN, D. (2003). Situated Interaction with Ambient Information: Facilitating Awareness and Communication in Ubiquitous Work Environments. In: Proc. HCI International 2003, Crete, Greece. SNIBBE, S. (2005). Selected Interactive Works 1995–2005, DVD, ASIN: B000B5SLUU. TUAN, Y.-F. (1977). Space and Place. The Perspective of Experience, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. WHYTE, W. (1988). City: Rediscovering the Center, Doubleday, New York.

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Exploring MEDIACITY

R ALF H ENNIG

The House as a Medium: A History

“The way we think about architecture is organized by the way we think about the relationships between inside and outside, private and public. With modernity there is a shift in these relationships, a displacement of the traditional sense of an inside, an enclosed space, established in clear opposition to an outside. All boundaries are now shifting. This shifting becomes manifest everywhere: in the city, of course, but also in all the technologies that define the space of the city: the railroad, newspapers, photography, electricity, advertisements, reinforced concrete, glass, the telephone, film, radio, … war. Each can be understood as a mechanism that disrupts the older boundaries between inside and outside, public and private, night and day, depth and surface, here and there, street and interior, and so on.” (Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity. Modern Architecture as Mass Media, 1996: 12) Rem Koolhaas’s MAISON À BORDEAUX (Floirac, 1998) is acknowledged as a building where the layout and functional requirements were influenced by the particular circumstances which developed during the design process. Following an accident which left him wheelchair bound, the client’s requirements subsequently changed considerably. The simplicity he had wished for gave way to a complexity that would apparently conflict with his physical handicap. Koolhaas found the solution in a space that was specially planned for this purpose. One central open space, extending to the building’s full height, allows a stepless and continuous movement which is made possible through the introduction of a hydraulic platform between the three floors. Thus, the occupant can move unhindered between the levels. The floor levels consist of three “houses”, layered one upon the other, marking different grades of privacy. In this manner, the more private zones are also constructionally defined. The kitchen, dining room and TV room are located in a row of cavern-like rooms that have been literally chiselled out of the hill for the most private family life. The individual rooms for the parents and children, i.e. the bedrooms and bath-

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rooms, are located on the upper level, enclosed by massive fair-faced concrete walls and accessed through only a few small openings. In comparison to these more introverted structures, the level between them has a completely different quality. Koolhaas explores the meaning of this level by saying: “The most important house was almost invisible, sandwiched in between: a room of glass – half inside, half outside – for living.” (Koolhaas quoted from Riley 1999: 92) In his analysis of the building, Terence Riley even goes as far as to describe this level as a public zone. (cf. Riley 1999: 21) The technique used to erase even the most recent conceptions of an interior space seems to support Riley’s hypothesis: full glazed walls border on a terrace, above which the concrete cube of the upper level floats. The glass elements on this floor can be moved by means of electric motors and thus restructure the space. What could be deemed as a part of the interior space can now ultimately be considered exterior space. The mobile platform does not only allow the occupant to move between these three programmatically different levels of the building in an unhindered manner. It also allows an unusually smooth transition between public and the private levels of the building, an interlacing of the interior and the exterior, the public and the private. By interlacing such polarities, by relating them to each other, the house can – according to Fritz Heider – be understood as an “in between”, a medium that arbitrates between the different elements. This transcending of borders achieved by a building is similar to what Marialuisa Palumbo describes in her essay Inhabiting Media as network architecture. Here she defines the underlying structures of the new kind of networks that she observes in the presence and distribution of the internet and information distribution technologies. She establishes three basic characteristics: firstly, that they are characterised by mixed architecture. They are distinguished by a real infrastructure, out of which a virtual extension develops. Secondly, it is architecture as interface, which is – as an active organisational instrument - affected by input and output. Thirdly, it is about “an architecture of interconnections, i.e. a spatial system, whose main objective is not statically storing contents but acting as a system of interchange, or connection, between here and elsewhere, individual and collective, in a networked total surround system that overturns the distance, frontal perspective and unidirectional quality of the prospective grid.” (Palumbo 2001: 88). At the same time, and taking into account the sphere of influence of new media, she proposes a virtual extension of architecture, the possibility of walls as interfaces and a new dynamic and interactive aspect that could be extended to include the surroun312

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dings and the static dimensions of the building, or which could ultimately replace them. Palumbo’s essay uses Koolhaas’ Villa near Bordeaux as an example. She interprets the building as a metaphorical implementation of the intention to find a form that connects a built space with the informational space and that introduces architecture as a kind of innovative infrastructure. Again, it is the mobile platform, which is the basis for a new perception of architecture. This platform passes through all three levels of the building and connects them with each other. Thus, it allows access to diverse (material) information that is stored in a transparent shelf that runs over all three levels. “Books, art objects and bottles of wine represent the virtual space that this platform/search engine can bring.” (l.c.: 89) The house can be seen as “a technological device that allows us access to the virtual but also, and above all, to give access to the virtual from inside the real.” (ibid.) A new dynamic and interactive aspect of architecture is contrasted with the static dimensions of the building.

Fig. 1: „Architecture as a new infrastructure, a technological device that allows us access to the virtual but also, and above all, to give access to the virtual from inside the real.” Rem Koolhaas: MAISON À BORDEAUX (Floirac, 1998).

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The MAISON À BORDEAUX reveals itself to us in two ways. On the one hand, it acts as medium itself. On the other hand – on both a conceptual and a metaphorical level – it indicates the development of new spatial concepts using new technologies that appear to contradict traditional existing concepts. Thus, the house marks an important social transition, representing numerous shifts of importance “from reality to the virtual, from the industrial to the information society, from the analogue to the digital culture, from the classical to the techno aesthetic etc.” (Weber 1996: 132) The discourse arising from this explicitly thematizes the alliances that architecture establishes with digital media, such as the representation of architecture in the media as well as the numerous correlations between architecture and media. (cf. Zimmermann 2003: 10–11) It is just this discussion that creates debate around the medial character of architecture itself. In this sense, classical modern architecture can be seen as an early ancestor of current developments. Since the beginning of the 1920s, buildings and projects have been created that do not only reflect the function and effects of the new media of that time, such as photography and film. Instead, they place the mediating characteristics of architecture into the center of the discourse. In the following text, the characteristics of architecture as media will be discussed in order to determine the relationship between interior and exterior and public and private. The demarcation between the interior and exterior that seems to be self evident in architecture, as well as in living itself, is questioned not only in contemporary architectural discourse. Already, modern architecture is confronted by an increasing demarcation within these dualisms. The resulting confrontation with the medial characteristics of architecture sensitises the current debates on the correlation between media, architecture and urban research.

1

Inside the compass case

Regardless of these issues, the strategy of examining architecture as medium between interior and exterior, constant and variable, public and private – in addition with the context of dwelling – is a challenging undertaking. It is the dividing function of the house wall, that – not only as load-bearing, but also as a limitative and protective element – gives meaning to the term privacy, as opposed to public space. Thus, the basic characteristics of the wall as construc314

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tive demarcation have remained constant over centuries, despite ever changing construction methods. “Construction materials, as well as the conventions, self-evidently connected the safety of a place and shelter granted from the elements with the design of an enclosed interior, whose relationship to the outside world was only forged through fixed, spaced openings in the wall, such as the door and the window.” (Vetter 2000: 17) This is clarified by Walter Benjamin, who discusses the various states of the term of privacy and its spatial-architectural equivalent in the container-like character of flats of the 19th century and points at the prototype dwelling: the “image of habitation of the human being in the mother’s womb.” (Benjamin 1991: 291). “The prototype of all dwelling is the existence not in the house but in the shell. This shell bears the imprint of its resident. In the most extreme case, dwelling becomes a shell. The 19th century was addicted to dwelling like no other. It saw dwelling as a sheath for the human being and it embedded him with all his belongings as deep as one could think of inside a compass case, where the instrument with all its accessories is embedded in deep, mostly violet, velvet hollows.” (l.c.: 291–292) This becomes pictorially clear in the findings of art historian Michelle Facos in his work on Lilla Hyttnäs, the family seat of the Swedish artist Carl Larsson, at the end of the 19th century. In a series of water colours he captured the interiors of his living room which were published in 1899 in A Home. The concept of a dwelling at the time becomes especially clear in the picture Cosy Corner. A further illustration of this concept is found in Larsson’s own words: “Here I experienced that unspeakably sweet feeling of seclusion from the noise of the world.” (cit. after Facos 1996: 81–91) All this culminates at the beginning of the 20th century in an overabundance of privacy. In his preamble for the catalogue to the exhibition The UnPrivate House, Terence Riley refers to the corresponding spatial characteristics in Frank Lloyd Wright’s project A HOME IN A PRAIRIE TOWN (1900) which serves as an example of the nature and value of privacy at that time. Wright’s concept sought to guarantee absolute privacy in relation to the public space. Different architectural elements act together to create a spatial effect. The house itself stands back from the property line. Walls and flowerbeds serve as barriers between street and entrance. The entrance is set back and is further shielded by low eaves. The windows towards the street are small and high, just below the eaves. Thus, direct contact between the interior and exterior is prevented. (cf. Riley 1999: 14)

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This insistence upon outdated dwelling concepts becomes clearer if one remembers that already half a century before Wright’s project the introduction of new building materials such as iron and steel enabled completely new qualities of architectural space. Paxton’s Crystal Palace, as well as many factories from this time bear testimony to this fact. However, the original closed nature of the dwelling remained a significant characteristic of the residential house – apart from a few exceptions. “Nowhere did constructed openings exceed the number of windows in small, French, Rococo palaces.” (Vetter 2000: 17) Thus, it is no surprise that it was not the new material technologies but rather the transformed social background which was responsible for the development of a “different dwelling” as a solution to the common dwelling situation, confined by building mass and social conventions. Consequently, modern architecture at the beginning of the 20th century developed as a built and spatial reflection of a time that was characterised by a dissociation from antiquated power structures and greater enforcement of technical and economical principles. The “mental state of the human being” was the unprecedented focus of discussion. The old, retrospective value order was broken and gave way to a dynamic orientation towards the future. Its general modernity and a vision of the new social context demanded the development of new structures and coding. “The vacuum in which the human being blundered by the political overthrow in Europe or the increasing importance of functional logic granted a unique freedom for designing new modes of life and called for visionary concepts. Furthermore, new materials, new functions and new media demanded a respective new aesthetic.” (l.c.: 11) It was primarily the architects who understood themselves more as engineers than as master builders – according to the new possibilities and demands – who were able to distance themselves from antiquated dwelling customs and ways of living and to generate visionary concepts. (cf. l.c.: 17)

2

Distancelessness and Penetration

This becomes more understandable when one considers that architects owe their inspiration to the technicians and engineers of the new developments. It is no revelation that technical inventions have spatial and architectural effects. Marshall McLuhan demonstrates this by drawing a comparison between

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different modes of transport.1 Horse-drawn buses and trams resulted in residential areas in American cities that were outside the catchment area of a business or a factory. Railways played a further important role in the development of outer suburbs. Houses were built in such a way that the railway station could be easily reached on foot. The corresponding form and density of a suburb were determined by the location of businesses and hotels near the railway station. (cf. l.c.: 197) Even on another level, the influence of this (for its time) new technology became apparent. Here, the common characteristic of all modes of transport becomes clear: Beatriz Colomina points out the usual misconception that railway stations, which emerged with the development of the railways, would assume the role of the old city gates and would therefore replace them. But what they actually do is to displace the idea of a border. They not only ignore the city limits, they also negate the concept of the city, the city as a place, as a spatial construction. The railway, only knowing arrival and departure times, which means punctual timetables, also changes cities into points (instead of their spatial expansion). In turn, those points are connected with a diagrammatical railway network, almost mapping the territory. According to Colomina, this conception of space has nothing in common with the conception of an enclosed space, defined by borders. Within this space, only points and directions count, not the emptiness of the room and what is around. Hence, the focus here is a space not affected by borders but by relations. (cf. Colomina 1996: 47–50) This kind of relationship, including the negation of the place as well as a new understanding of closeness, is recognised in the words of Heinrich Heine: “Which changes have to occur now in our perceptions and conceptions! Even the elementary terms of time and space became unsteady. Space is killed by the railways and only time is left… One can travel to Orléan now, within four and a half hours, it takes the same time to travel to Rouen. What if railway lines to Belgium and Germany are built, and with further connections to the lines there! I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries were coming closer to Paris. I even smell the fragrance of German lime trees. The North Sea breaks before my door.” (cit. after Schivelbusch 1995: 38–39) In these words one can read both horror and fascination regarding the new conditions estab............................................ 1 McLuhan calls media an extension of the human’s sense organs. Beside telephone, radio and TV, he discusses

other facilities too that serve the overcoming of distances, e.g. streets and lines of communication, wheel, bicycle, car and airplane. (cf. McLuhan 1968)

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lished by the railways. Here one can see how disconcerting it is when the traditional awareness of space and time is destabilised. However, an optimistic and euphoric tone seems to affect Heine’s reflections, since he is able to imagine the mountains and forests of all countries in Paris and even with pleasure inhales German lime tree fragrance and therefore this suggests he has an affinity with the railway. Heidegger takes a view of this subject from another position, since he expresses concern about new media, which, in his opinion, create distance between events and things. In his work Sense and Time, he outlines his ideas of the overcoming of distance with regard to radio: “All kinds of speed increases that we are more or less forced to take part in nowadays aim to overcome distance. Today, ‘broadcasting’, for example, confirms an alienation in the ‘world’, a world on the way to expansion and destruction of the normal, everyday environment, an alienation which it is not yet possible to overlook.” (Heidegger 1983: 105) His approach to the distance between events and things becomes more defined in his introduction to his Bremen lectures of 1949: “What is this uniform thing, where everything is neither far away nor close and, thus, without any distance? Everything is swept together into the uniform distancelessness. But how? Isn’t this getting closer much more weird than a bursting apart of everything?” (Heidegger 1994: 4) But isn’t it just this “bursting apart of everything” that often reveals the relations between things? It is the mission of media to bridge the occured distance and to mediate between the elements and, thus, to “point my attention to other things”. (Heider 2005: 26) Consequently, the mediating character of media that doesn’t withdraw from the private sphere, as Heidegger clearly explains, now finds its constructional implementation. New building materials, which were introduced decades earlier, as well as building techniques, are now used to respond to the new circumstances. The increasing infiltration of the public into the private “opens” the house and documents its integration into a new greater correspondence. Siegfried Giedion makes this clear as he wrote in his script Freed Dwelling from 1929: “It is just a self-evident consequence that this ‚opened’ house is also a reflection of today’s mental status: There are no more isolated affairs. All things interpenetrate.” (Giedion 1985: 8)

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3

“An element of the outside and an aspect of innerness”

The use of the term ‘media’ for the private sphere is not as novel as suggested by Heidegger. The implementation of radio in the nineteen-twenties instead seems to strengthen a process that has always described privacy as a “natural fascination for the outside world“. “The presence of books, maps, and works of art tempered the inward-looking nature of the private house. In the nineteenth century, a study or library – a room devoted to books, newspapers, magazines, and jounals – was not uncommon in an upper-middle-class home.” (Riley 1999: 11) However, the use of these media was exclusively limited to specific rooms, such as a library or the study room. Furthermore, all these media, whether maps or works of art, books or magazines, were solitary objects, uncoupled from the architecture (that means, objects that are irrelevant to the design of the architectural space), by means of which an imagined view outside became possible. But it is one solitary object – the mirror – that gives the first subtle indication of the current change between inside and outside as well as the relativity of these dualisms. But the mirror is not alone, it acts in correlation with one architectural element, the architectural element of mediation between private sphere and public space: the window2. A mirror hangs in Vienna in the year 1938, on Berggasse No 19 at the window of Sigmund Freud’s study. In Freud’s theory, the mirror symbolises the psyche. So, the mirror image is a self portrait at the same time, which – originating in the positioning of the mirror at the same level as the window – is projected onto the outside world. Freud places his mirror on the border between the inside and outside and in so doing undermines its status as a dividing mark. Colomina writes about this: “The frontier is no longer a limit that separates, excludes, dissociates, a Cartesian limit; rather it is a figure, a convention, its aim is to permit a relation that has to be defined continuously. It is what Franco Rella would call a ‘shadow line’.” (l.c.: 80) That any kind of dualism exists in a mutual dependency, that they cause each other, that one addicts on the other and arises from the other – this is what Freud also pointed out in his remarks on consciousness and subcon............................................ 2 Etymologically, the word window has its roots in the connection of the words wind and eye. Georges Teyssot accurately remarks that the word, therewith, combines “an element of the outside and an aspect of innerness”. The window as connecting element between inside and outside, as interface, couldn’t be described more accurately. (See Colomina 1996: 378)

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sciousness: Thus, he assumes “that every mental process (…) at first exists in a subconscious status or phase and then passes into the conscious phase. Just like a photograph is a negative at first and then becomes a photograph by the positive process.” (Freud 1999: 305) It is clear here, that photography, just like the subconscious, requires a new spatial model, where inside and outside no longer exist as strictly divided units. The figure of the observer inside, whom Jonathan Crary describes as a “privatized subject confined in a quasi domestic space, cut off from a public exterior world” (Crary cit. after Colomina 1996: 82), dissolves. It is replaced by a model where the differences between inside and outside, subject and object, blur irrevocably.

Fig. 2: Sigmund Freud’s study, Berggasse 19, Vienna. Mirror at the window, close to the desk.

Using the following examples, I would like to show how relations between town, house and landscape can be interpreted by an interlacing of inside and outside. Architecture is seen here mainly as a visual medium. Three buildings, as well as drafts by Le Corbusier, show a development of the view, which is strictly controlled by architectural elements, from a framing of the view to the immersion of the architectural space in the landscape – a conscious interlacing of house and landscape. Subsequently, using a study of three projects by Mies van der Rohe, the limits of such dis-spatialisation of architecture will be analysed.

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4

The controlled view

The directed control of the view is symptomatic for the APARTMENT FOR CHARLES DE BEISTEGUI (Paris, 1929–31). Here, Le Corbusier experimentally tests the situation of the building within the urban context as well as the relation between house and town. Such an interlacing of different spatial situations already indicates the transition to modern architecture. For example Adolf Loos integrates framed views and also mirrors as elements of spatial interruption into the design of his interiors. However, the accentuation of the relation between different spatial situations is still limited to the interior and remains inside the building’s frontiers. (cf. l.c., esp. chapter Interior: 233–282) In contrast, the design concept of the APARTMENT FOR CHARLES DE BEISTEGUI deliberately turns to the town. It is the presence of media, that gives the house a meaning and that changes the relation to the town fundamentally. Significantly, according to the status of the view established by Le Corbusier, it is not a “housebreaking of the public” into the private, but instead it is techniques as new characteristics of the building process that allow a new quality of mediation towards the outside. The view out of the window gains unexpected new readings and leads far beyond the truly visible: “The (…) view leads far away. (…) The skyscrapers concentrate everything in themselves: machines for abolishing time and space, telephones, cables, radios.” (Le Corbusier cit. after Colomina 1996: 306) Heider always defines media as something in the middle, as something that is between other things. In this sense, he regards them as often disrupting elements with their ability to limit the perception of objects, such as window glass, by which the “assignment of light rays to things is disturbed“. (Heider 2005: 70) These concise characteristics of media, of being-between-things, is successfully expressed by Le Corbusier in the Beistegui apartment on the basis of the relationship of the view between house and town. Thus, in many cases, he first “obstructs“ the view, and then uses the mediating characteristic of media in order to restore the view again and to let a relation between house and town emerge in different forms. For example, from the apartment a total panorama view over the whole city is possible, but Le Corbusier does not allow this view from any point of the apartment. Only by means of a periscope – again a mediating element – is the panorama view visible (the image of the city is projected onto a glass table). The medium, the technology, becomes a controlling mechanism that directs, guides and limits the view. Manfredo

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Tafuri writes about this: “The distance interposed between the penthouse and the Parisian panorama is secured by a technological device, the periscope. An ‚innocent’ reunification between the fragment and the whole is no longer possible; the intervention of artifice is a necessity.” (cit. from Colomina 1996: 303–306) Consequently, he strictly controls all further views that the apartment allows. In this context, the unconventional interpretation of the inspiring characteristics of electricity are especially noticeable. At the client’s request, there was no electric light installed inside the apartment. Beistegui explains this as follows: “The candle has recovered all its rights because it is the only one which gives a living light.” (cit. after l.c.: 297) But despite this sentimentality, the apartment is anything but an ancient fortress, which rejects all kinds of technical innovation. In fact, four kilometres of cable were necessary for the installation of all the technical facilities in the apartment. The technical infrastructure itself remains hidden. Instead of the conventional lighting of the apartment, it is there to operate doors, to allow film projections and to move walls and hedges. These emerging new technologies use traditional constructional elements in order to relate inside and outside to each other in many different ways. According to this concept, doors, walls and hedges are used as traditional architectural objects for framing. The deeper sense of the motion of these elements becomes clear in the hedges on the different levels of the roof terrace. Instead of offering the same limited outlook and the same image of the city, here, at exactly defined points, “movable views” are staged towards four landmarks of Paris: the Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, Sacré-Coeur and Notre-Dame. So, the first level of terraces organised on four levels is surrounded by hedges. From here, one can gaze at Notre-Dame, isolated from the rest of the city. When one operates an electric switch, the green fence moves aside and reveals the whole of Paris. This manner of managing the view is repeated on the other terrace levels, where the view of Paris is framed in different positions. The interior rooms of the apartment are related to the city less dynamically but also with the intention of constructing detailed views. The salon has two panorama windows: one towards the South, showing the Eiffel Tower, the other one to the East, allowing the view of Notre-Dame. One half of the window to the South can be opened electrically and, thus, allows a view to the big terrace, where one can glance at the Arc de Triomphe behind pruned trees. 322

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It is always the staging and directed control of view that Le Corbusier thematizes here by means of many different “reframing devices”. (l.c.: 303) This fascination created by hiding, the lack of curtains and the testing of medial characteristics of architecture culminates in the chambre à ciel ouvert on the top terrace level. Its high wall only allows a view towards fragments of the city: the peaks of the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower and Sacré-Coeur. For the observer, this is the most disruptive, since he is in an exterior space, similar to the other terrace levels, and expects to have an unhindered view of the city silhouette.

5

Framing the view

In the case of the Apartment for Beistegui, Le Corbusier understands the medium as something in between. He makes this characteristic visible by constantly manipulating and controlling views by means of hedges, walls and doors, or, as in the case of the periscope, he actually allows views. In his draft of PETITE MAISON (project, 1954), he instead reduces this materiality of the medium. Here, he doesn’t primarily test the effectiveness of the medium, but the message itself. In this case: The view of Lake Geneva. This view is not only a necessary addition that belongs to the architecture. It determines the whole draft, it even exists before the draft, before the first line. Moreover, the view is the starting point of the draft. “The house is drawn with a picture already in mind. The house is drawn as a frame for that picture.” (l.c.: 315) Here, the meaning of architecture as a medium only consists in the framing of the view. A framing actually gives the view a meaning or, as Colomina expressed it, lets a difference emerge between seeing and just glancing. (cf. ibid.) The meaning of the view becomes very clear in one of Le Corbusier’s drafts for the project: Of course, one must not forget it is the human being for whom the house is built. He stands as a small figure at the edge of the picture. But the organ that defines the draft is the eye, which looks at the lake, independent from the figure and oversized. It is not by chance that the drawing of the house is located between eye and lake. The house represents what is between eye and the view: the house as a “perception machine“. (Zimmermann 2003: 11) The figure itself, in its relation to the view, plays an inferior role. It becomes a pure accessory.

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The second drawing doesn’t show the floor plan of the house in the common sense, i.e. the location of the building in its context, as one could expect. Even the coastline, still visible on the other drawing, doesn’t appear anymore. Instead the drawing shows the ground plan of the house and, in relation to it, the view of the lake and the mountains behind. It shows the ground plan and the corresponding view. Thus, the plan is not determined by the horizontal plane in the usual way, but is generated as a vertical plane of the view. In this case, the view of the lake: “The ‘site’ is a vertical plane, that of vision. The site is first and foremost a sight.” (Colomina 1996: 318)

6

Immersion

However, from the ground plan of PETITE MAISON it can be inferred that Le Corbusier purposely stages details of the “overwhelming natural landscape” and, thus, tames the landscape. The role of the frame and the taming of the landscape, by selectively displaying details, significantly influence the draft, which is characterised by only partial openings. “The view must be blocked by walls that are only pierced at certain strategic points and thereby permit an unhindered view.” (cit. after l.c.: 315) A complete contrast to this is MAISON DES HOMMES (project, 1942). However, it is primarily an almost identical scenario, the architectural framing of landscape, in this case: the panorama of Rio de Janeiro. But here, Le Corbusier goes one step further by saying: “Your room is installed before the site. The whole sea-landscape enters your room.” (cit. after Colomina 1996: 319) On the one hand, the room is erected in opposition to the landscape – similar to PETITE MAISON. But even the second sentence seems to negate the implied distance between architectural space and the surrounding landscape, since: “The whole sea-landscape enters your room.” While in PETITE MAISON each facade is structured by walls that only allow a detailed staging of an image, in MAISON DES HOMMES the wall opposite the landscape dissolves completely and gives way to a complete glazing, that can only be recognised as a part of the architectural space by its cross bars. This use of the maximum opening of the space to its surroundings corresponds to a conscious visual interlacing of house and landscape that creates an interactive immersive effect. On the one hand, landscape “enters the room”, on the other hand, the room can be experienced as a part of the landscape.

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Fig. 3: : Framing the view and immersion. Le Corbusier: UNE PETITE MAISON (1954), LA MAISON DES HOMMES (1942).

7

Limits of embeddedness?

A further increase of this interlacing of inside and outside only seems possible by eliminating the last dividing element; the glass facade. At first glance, this approach apparently redeems another icon of the modern architecture. Ludwig Mies van der Rohes’s TUGENDHAT HOUSE (Brno, 1939) not only has a completely glazed facade to the living space, it is actually constructed from two giant panes of glass in the living area which open out looking towards the front garden, which are retractable. Thus, they seem to interlace inside and outside in a new way, as the optical connection is completed by a physical one. However, the attempt to make “architecture at one with nature” (Riezler cit. after Huse 1986: 18) and the resulting elimination of the completeness of the architectural shell, as described by Walter Riezler in his review of the TUGENDHAT HOUSE, doesn’t withstand an extensive inspection. Here, it is not about a space continuum which seamlessly mediates between interior and surroundings. Wolf Tegethoff analyses the characteristics of the building in detail and

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comes to the conclusion that Mies consciously avoided this space continuum, as proposed by Riezler. In fact, a conscious physical separation of inside and outside was an essential part of the draft design. Tegethoff already detects the principle of separation in the facade of the building. Here one can see a largely hermetically sealed construction. In addition to the milk glass wall of the entrance hall, which avoids any internal views, there are only a few high positioned windows that serve to underline the closed nature of the construction. Even the entrance to the building is not visible at first glance. It is instead hidden behind the curvature of the staircase. Between the entrance and garage the construction is interrupted. Thus, an alley emerges that leads to the terrace area and on towards the garden. With the view of the Spielberg and the city castle, it gives an impression of the completely different character of the front garden. However, the alley is not a real alley that connects the street side with the garden side. A balustrade crosses the passage and reduces it to a purely visual connection. The framing of the view acts “as an additional distancing element, producing the impresson of a stage prospect, which is clearly distinguished from the space of the observer.” (Tegethoff 1998: 73) Here he makes clear that the whole concept of the house follows the pictorial aestheticisation of the view. The design of the roof terrace and the alignment of the rooms on the upper and ground floor make this clear. Indeed, this complete area opens towards the south. This opening seems to be supported by two completely retractable panorama windows, which make the spaces in front of the dining corner and the suite in front of the onyx wall become a loggia, at least when there is good weather. But even here, the principle of framing of the view works, as in the entrance area, only much more subtly. In part, this is achieved by the way in which the window frames the view. In the area of the loggias, the front columns that stand freely in the room represent a further lateral limitation of the visual field. Furthermore, the erection of the living floor on a pedestal causes a spatially perceivable distance between the direct surroundings and the interior space. In addition, the increased separation and the garden that tapers to the south cause the eyes of the dweller to focus on the middle ground and their attention is caught again only by the city silhouette far away. Thus, the surroundings are kept at a certain distance. It becomes clear here that Mies’ intention was not the overall interlacing of the building with its environment. Although an optical involvement of the exterior space into the interior space clearly exists, a spatial exclusion was consciously 326

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intended. “The observer doesn’t stand in but in front of the landscape, or in other words, in front of an alienated landscape window that confronts him. The strict separation of the spheres corresponds to techniques used in the theatre. And indeed, in their spatial staging, Mies uses a number of arrangements from stage architecture.” (l.c.: 74) Tegethoff shows this using the example of the roof terrace, which also focuses on the frontal prospect effect. The main field of vision is predetermined by a semicircular bench. The lateral limitation is caused by the east wall of the parents’ wing as well as by a great pergola at the south eastern corner of the terrace. Thus, the view is directed and perceives only one detail of the panorama that completely unfolds immediately in front of the balustrade. This intended effect (of separation, of distance) was, as Tegethoff supposes, a basic reason for Mies to renounce a direct connection to the garden in his original draft. Only the intervention of the Tugendhat family caused him to reestablish the connection between garden and house. However, it remains clear that the paths can still be understood as distancing elements between interior and exterior space, even if the access to the garden is reintroduced. Considering the functional requirements, the paths seem to be unusually numerous and quite long. (cf. l.c.: 74–75 and Huse 1986: 17) Thus, it becomes clear on many levels how keen Mies was on realising the building’s integrity and independent character. So it seems that despite, or rather because of, the vast transparency of the building, gradual passages have been chosen again and again. Grete Tugendhat confirms this assumption by saying: “… as important the connection between inside and outside might be, as closed and centred the room is. In this sense, the glass wall ideally acts as a limitation. If it wasn’t like that, I believe one would have a feeling of unrest and insecurity. But the room has, especially through its rhythm, a very special silence, which is impossible to have in a closed room.” (Tugendhat 1998: 35) In the course of the planning process, Mies had to acknowledge that the Tugendhat family had an undeniably conservative attitude towards the private bedrooms, despite their acceptance of the transparency of the living floor. Consequently, the rooms on the upper floor were sealed off much more than originally planned. Thus, the different functional spatial alignments changed. The planned glazing of the complete facade gave way to a clear definition of door and window openings, which let the character of common room units emerge. However, the preliminary drafts, such as the model house shown at the Berlin construction trade fair in 1931, clearly show his original intentions.

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The model house has a completely glazed bedroom area, which is only structured by the bathroom block that stands freely in the room and which, in his materiality, limits intimacy in the sphere of personal hygiene. (l.c. Tegethoff 1998: 70–72)

8

X-ray photographs

That the transparency of a residential building has its limits in the acceptance of its residents becomes clear in the well known response by Edith Farnsworth to her house designed by Mies: “The house is transparent, like an X-ray…” (cit. after Riley 1999: 15) Herewith, she unmistakably confirms the literal uninhabitability of the building and reminds us of Walter Benjamin’s claim of glass as the “enemy of the secret”. (cit. after Schnell 2001: 57) Indeed, Mies realised his ideas of a transparent architecture without compromise by completely glazing all four facades of the building. Thus, all areas within the one-room house gain the same value in relation to the exterior space. Living, dining and bedroom areas all open towards the surrounding landscape. The intervention of the Tugendhat family against the planned total transparency of their house’s bedrooms (just like similar concerns of the houses LANGE and ESTERS in Krefeld that led to comparable changings in the planning as in Brno, cf. Tegethoff 1998: 70) show, that even an open minded client appreciates the intimacy of the bedroom’s character.3 The FARNSWORTH HOUSE can only incompletely respond to the different demands. A response to the need for a changing “intimacy of space” is not possible, a fact which is reflected in the comments by Edith Farnsworth.4 As the comparison with the TUGENDHAT HOUSE shows, further aspects test the discomfort of the FARNSWORTH HOUSE’S resident: The columns and window frames also “act as a frame or display window, forming a thin line between inside and outside” (Schnell 2001: 56). But the open ground plan, which “extends through the glass towards the outside and, thus, makes the plants outside and furniture inside be perceived as conscious and equal elements ............................................ 3 cf. also the differentiation in the relation of wall openings of private and public areas at Koolhaas’ MAISON À

BORDEAUX, here: 1–2. 4 Regarding the not accidental comparison with an X-ray photograph, see the article Skinless Architecture by Beatriz Colomina (Colomina 2003: 122–124), where she explores the simultaneous development of X-ray technology and modern architecture.

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within one continuous landscape” (ibid.), gives a first indication of the separation between the inside and the surrounding landscape. The separation seems to be as important as with the TUGENDHAT HOUSE, in order to allow a feeling of security emerge. The house only slightly floats above the estate’s level. A clear vertical separation, as employed in the TUGENDHAT HOUSE, is missing here. Even the effect of separation, as realised in Brno by omitting the middle ground and the resulting graphic quality of the view of the Spielberg, does not reveal itself in the view of the FARNSWORTH HOUSE. In the context of the flat setting, the surrounding nature is already present within a short distance of the house.

9

Genuine Media

To all appearances, Mies’s position has significantly changed between these two projects. While at TUGENDHAT HOUSE he intended to define a subtle demarcation between the house and its surroundings. criteria which were critical for the house in Brno. These concepts were negated in the designs for the FARNSWORTH HOUSE. Instead the presence of the natural setting is acknowledged immediately beyond the building, which in turn completely opens without compromise with its glass facade. One project that seems to anticipate this development is the draft for the RESOR HOUSE from the years 1937–1939. Here, the mediating of Mies’ intentions on the visual medium of collage is of special importance. A key basis for the collages were photographs, which were provided to him by the Resor family. They showed views of the area, and described how they would be visible from the living room of the future building. From these, Mies developed interior room perspectives showing views from the central open living and dining area towards the north and south. With their panoramic effect, the photographs are the dominating elements of these collages. In contrast, the architecture itself practically disappears within the image. Window frame and columns are merely adumbrated with tenuous lines. Mies renounces further details such as furniture or perspective building lines that would let a room appear in the usual format. In fact, spatiality is only revealed by the columns, which are perspectively aligned to the window frame. The observer can only comprehend this spatiality by constructing the floor and the ceiling in the mind’s eye.

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Fig. 4: “The modern structure of the building has been dematerialised, almost up to the point of self-denial.” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: RESOR HOUSE (project, 1937–39).

The importance of this reduction of architecture towards the landscape becomes clearer through a comparison with an earlier project, the DRAFT FOR THE ALEXANDERPLATZ (1928). In this project one can find a similar contrast of light and dark in the planned new and existing buildings. But here, in contrast to the draft for the RESOR HOUSE, the new is accentuated against the old: “The modern buildings are provided with an aura that clearly sets them apart from the surroundings, which are shown as being cheerless.” (Levine 1999: 65) However, at RESOR HOUSE there is an opposite effect: “The modern structure of the building has been dematerialised, almost up to the point of self-denial, while the surroundings become the positive visual present.” (ibid.) Rolf Sachse makes this inversion of relations much clearer by saying: “The outside is the sanctuary; nature replaces culture”, when the observer finds himself “centered outdoors, unprotected”. (Sachse 2002: 61) This extensive dematerialising of architecture, in favour of an accentuation of the surrounding natural setting, which dominates Mies’ images, makes one think of Fritz Heider’s definition of media. As media are able to exist among other things and to reduce their perception, Heider often sees them as a disturbance. In this sense, architecture can also be interpreted as a disturbance. For Heider, however, the air filled space is “a genuine medium (…) that one can look through unhindered.” (Heider 2005: 35) In its almost complete dissolution, the architecture in Mies’ collages comes close to Heider’s definition of a genuine medium, which is no longer perceived in its presence. Overemphasising the surrounding landscape, the difference between outside and inside is almost abolished. A border as it was defined in the TUGENDHAT HOUSE is difficult to find here.

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10

The “pseudo room“

The window is not the only architectural element which transcends the border between public and private. In addition to the subject of a mutual visual reference, functional spatial interlacing gains a special importance within modern architecture. This becomes clear, for example, when taking a second look at the chambre à ciel ouver of the APARTMENT FOR CHARLES DE BEISTEGUI. It is not only the fragmenting glance that Le Corbusier thematises here. In fact, rather strange interior qualities are given to the exterior space. The walls around the chambre à ciel ouvert are much higher than demanded by the common chest height. In the middle of the wall opposite the entrance is a feature fireplace which adds a degree of absurdity to the situation. However, this room is nothing but an obviously self ironic motif which Le Corbusier used in the design of many outdoor areas and to which he, thus, gave a specific architectural characteristic and the status of an “open room“. „This living room ‘for outdoor living’ in its most simple suggestion is provided with concrete windows, a table, chairs and flower pots“, (Vetter 2000: 32) as it can be seen in the outdoor furnishing of VILLA SAVOYE. Vetter calls this specially designed outdoor room, which characterised numerous draft designs of modern architecture, the “pseudo room“. The main characteristic of this room is an “oscillation between an interior room outlined like a floor plan or a contour and the almost completely opened design towards the outside.” (l.c.: 26) Virtual borders are suggested by fragments and contrast to a use which is clearly assigned to the outdoor space. Vetter points at the special mediating position of this room between architectural structure and its surroundings saying: “Regarding the subtle handling of the basic and unavoidable dualism of architectural and surrounding spheres, which is characteristic for many of the progressive drafts, the ‘pseudo room’ assumed the mediating position. Exempt from the dictums of conventional architectural statements, the invention of the ‘pseudo room’ under the terms of an ‘open system’ allowed structures valid for constructions to become effective in the exterior room. This is according to the factual impact of real living activities towards the outside and the reciprocal reaction process of indoor activities towards the conditions outside.” (ibid.) The consequences of the expansion of the living space and the resulting effect on the architecture seem to be significant, so that one can refer to an everyday life that is exempt from the confining architectural structures. Furthermore, in this “open sphere” of the home, a contemporary reflection of the

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fundamental state which shapes the environment becomes evident. “Their architectural formulation of room assigned for interpretation and projection is geared to its new parameters, such as an increasing interlacing and ability to communicate, the increasing speed and the flexible mobility, which is necessary for an adequate reaction.” (l.c.: 27) The tendency towards a dissolution of the “pseudo room“ as well as the renouncement of the functional design becomes clearer in an analysis of time by Paul Virilio: “Of course, it was a giant revolution that things suddenly no longer exist because they appeared, but just because they disappear and become ephemeral.” (Virilio 1986: 200)

11

Dissolution of form – Opening of the structural system

The subject of spatial connections does not only appear in the thematisation of the relation between inside and outside. It is instead the interior space itself – in the living floor of the TUGENDHAT HOUSE it becomes especially clear – which in its structure is affected by smooth transitions between separate rooms. Mies exempts the wall from its job to bear weight and passes this function over to the freestanding columns. The walls,no longer subordinated to the dictate of statics, can be freely positioned within the room and can thus restructure the building anew. This new quality is no longer limited to closed partial rooms. It results in dividing the whole room into more or less open spatial areas that are related to each other. In an earlier project by Mies van der Rohe this becomes clear as he develops the principle of conceptual transparency and develops and modifies it later for other projects. In the BRICK COUNTRY HOUSE (project, 1924), the wall is still the load bearing element. But it can no longer be considered a concluding element, neither inside the building nor in relation to the house and its surroundings. The building is literally dovetailed with the surrounding landscape by means of three walls that extend far beyond the diffuse frontiers of the actual building. Aditionally, they not only give the building site order, they also give the house coordinates. These coordinates are necessary, as the house itself does not have an actual center. Not only the absence of a center, but also the absence of clearly defined rooms characterises the draft design. “For people with the room and living experience of 1923, the interior might have been very disconcerting. In the most modern houses they knew, individual rooms such as salons, lobby, kitchen and bathroom were defined in the first steps of planning. How these 332

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rooms later were related to each other – whether they were opened or isolated towards each other, whether they were loosely linked or subordinated to a hierarchic order – was decided in the second step.” (Huse 1986: 14) Mies’ brick house is also characterised by an almost complete inversion of previous approaches to building a house. The house is no longer built beginning with its individual rooms. The structure mainly emerges from one whole room, which is then subdivided. “In the ground plan, I left behind the common principle of closed rooms and, instead of a number of single rooms, sought a series of room effects. The wall loses its closing character and acts only as a structure for the house’s organism.” (van der Rohe, cit. after ibid.) By the reduction of architecture to its basic elements of wall, floor and ceiling, they can be combined much more freely than the former individual rooms. Thus, openings and dissolution of boundaries are not only an “external“ feature of the house. They characterise the basic structure of the building and extend into “the depth” of the architectural space.

Fig. 5: Opening and delimitation not only as „external“ topic, but distinctive for the building’s basic structure. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: BRICK COUNTRY HOUSE (project, 1924).

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Vetter refers to these constructional spatial changes within modern architecture as “dissolution of form” (cf. Vetter 2000: 31–41), in terms of a destruction of the primary concept of a house. These changes can be considered to the point of the “stripping” of the construction. These openings in the building refer to the constructional system. The recipient’s discomfort caused by such negation of the intimacy of a house is self-explanatory: “The visitors inside the building turn around and ask themselves, what shall this all be. They hardly can understand the reasons for what they see and what they feel. They don’t find anything of what is usually called a ‘house’. They feel that this here is something completely new.” (Le Corbusier cit. after l.c.: 38) A first constructional implementation of Mies’ ideas of a contemporary dwelling was the GERMAN PAVILION OF THE WORLD EXHIBITION IN BARCELONA (1929). Here, Mies freed the walls from their task of bearing and transferred this task to the freestanding columns. As a result, the walls could be freely moved or even eliminated, regardless of the structure of the house. The result was a “sensational free assembling of walls and columns and rooms, which could lead to a fusion.” (Huse 1986: 15) Within the TUGENDHAT HOUSE, the principles of the Barcelona pavillion find their first implementation in a private dwelling. In fact, the principles of the exhibition pavillion are further applied by the use of extensive glazing in the building. The realisation of such glass walls allowed Mies the utilisation of the complete potential of the system of frame construction. “They allow us a degree of free spatial design that we will never be able to relinquish. Just now, we are able to structure the space, to open it and to connect it to the landscape. Thus, the need for space of today’s people can be fullfilled.” (cit. after Huse 1986: 16) Transparency and the flow of space can here be seen as the basic design criteria of the building.

12

Conclusion

The concept of a covering or shell around a protected centre can be understood as a central theme of dwelling. Without any doubt, dwelling essentially constitutes itself by a corresponding demand for retreat and security to which it is necessary to answer constructively. The examples shown here reveal that the architectural articulation of these demands cannot only be limited by the space that is surrounded by walls, which could be interpreted as a hiding place or a castle, as suggested by Gerd Selle. “The interior space is the framework for 334

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the world (…). Dwelling means to conserve the certainty of guardedness, in reality and symbolically.” (Selle 1993: 21) For him, this security is consequently a security made by surrounding walls. He opposes these walls and the window frames as cultural-historical fundamentals of dwelling to the “capsule of transparency”, as propagated by Paxton, Scheerbart, Taut and van der Rohe, with the increasing dissolution of the wall towards transparency. However, it remained unrecognised that this dissolution of the wall was not solely a result of new constructional possibilities on a purely technical level, but rather developed due to a changed social background. This applies especially to house building. It is not only a contributing factor but rather a reflection of social change that leads to new forms of expression within architecture. It is important to understand that the new media of that time essentially influenced the “mental state of the human being in his time” and enabled the integration of the concepts of mutual relations and limitations into architectural form. The spatial spheres of the public and private, which up to then were interlaced, now converge. This culminates in an almost immersive effect, as the interior space is eradicated in favour of an overemphasis on the exterior space. This can be seen, for example, in Mies van de Rohe’s pictures of the RESOR HOUSE. In the TUGENDHAT HOUSE, an external space that can be experienced internally is added to the pure optical involvement of the outside. “That’s why the arising effect, when the two panes are retracted, (…) is not heightening drama, but a gradual attenuation through the slow abolition of other frontiers, so that wind and weather, noises and smells from outside likewise become part of the room. ” (Schnell 2001: 58) At the same time, it becomes clear that in all the projects discussed there still is a demarcation, even if much more subtle, between the public and the private spheres. In the case of the retracted panes of the TUGENDHAT HOUSE, window frames and columns provide the framing of the view as a distancing element. Furthermore, as exemplified with the TUGENDHAT HOUSE, in comparison with the houses LANGE and ESTERS, the separating line between inside and outside was treated differently, depending on the functional alignment of the respective space. Public zones within the house are extensively glazed towards the external surroundings. However, more private zones are interpreted as common room units. If this differentiation doesn’t take place, as in the FARNSWORTH HOUSE, one can see that the remaining architectural elements are not sufficient to define the necessary minimum of a barrier between outside

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and inside. This is underlined by the lack of acceptance of the proposals by the residents. In conclusion, it can be established that the borders between inside and outside, public and private in modern architecture are not in fact eradicated. Public and private are still considered as two different spheres. However, the aspect of mutual relation intensifies, as well as the aspects of penetration and completion of these spheres, which find their respective articulation in the architecture. In this sense, one can refer to it as a transcending or perforating of the border, undermining its hitherto existing clarity. In fact, the private house of the early 20th century already responds to this, which Terence Riley highlights by explaining how the drastic transformation process of society, which we are confronted with today, leads us from the Industrial Culture to the Virtual Culture. For him, the house is just “a permeable structure, receiving and transmitting images, sounds, text, and data.” (Riley 1999: 11) Private as the opposite of public seems to be discarded as a concept. The merging of public and private seems to have reached a point where borders can no longer be defined. As shown, this development is already indicated in modern architecture. The buildings and projects discussed embed the current discourse into a wider context and provide its own history.

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References BENJAMIN, WALTER (1991). Das Passagenwerk. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. V-1. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. COLOMINA, BEATRIZ (1996). Privacy and Publicity. Modern Architecture as Mass Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. COLOMINA, BEATRIZ (2003). „Skinless Architecture“. In: Thesis, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, issue 3, Medium Architektur. Zur Krise der Vermittlung, S. 122–124. FACOS, MICHELLE (1996). The Ideal Swedish Home. Carl Larsson’s Lilla Hyttnäs. In: REED, CHISTOPHER (ed.): Not at Home. The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, pp. 81–91. FREUD, SIGMUND (1999). Gesammelte Werke. vol. 11, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer. GIEDION, SIEGFRIED (1985). Befreites Wohnen, Frankfurt a. M.: Syndikat. HEIDEGGER , MARTIN (1983). Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. HEIDEGGER , MARTIN (1994). Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge. Complete edition vol. 79, Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann. HEIDER , FRITZ (2005). Ding und Medium. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos. HUSE, NORBERT (1986). Baukunst und Wohnen. In: BAUHAUS-ARCHIV (ed.): Der vorbildliche Architekt. Mies van der Rohes Architekturunterricht 1930–1958 am Bauhaus und in Chicago. Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, pp. 13–20. LEVINE, NEIL (1999). Die Bedeutung der Tatsachen: Mies’ Collagen aus nächster Nähe. In: Arch+, Zeitschrift für Architektur und Städtebau, issue 146, Die Debatte, pp. 59–75. MCLUHAN, MARSHALL (1968). Die magischen Kanäle. Understanding Media. Düsseldorf, Wien: Econ. PALUMBO, MARIALUISA (2001). Inhabiting Media. In: DE KERCKHOVE, DERRICK: The Architecture of Intelligence. The IT revolution in architecture. Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser, pp. 88–90. RILEY, TERENCE (1999). The Un-Private House. New York: Museum of Modern Art. SACHSE, ROLF (2002). Mies montiert. In: Arch+, Zeitschrift für Architektur und Städtebau, issue 161, Miesverständnisse, pp. 58–61. SCHIVELBUSCH, WOLFGANG (1995). Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise. Zur Industrialisierung von Raum und Zeit im 19. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer. SCHNELL, ANGELIKA (2001). Glashäuser. In: Arch+, Zeitschrift für Architektur und Städtebau, issue 157, Sobeks Senosr oder Wittgensteins Griff? Das Wohnhaus Sobek, pp. 56–59. SELLE, GERT (1993). Die eigenen vier Wände. Zur verborgenen Geschichte des Wohnens. Frankfurt a. M., New York: Campus. TEGETHOFF, WOLF (1998). Die „Villa“ Tugendhat: Ein Haus der Moderne im Spannungsfeld seiner Zeit. In: HAMMER-TUGENDHAT, DANIELA, TEGETHOFF, WOLF (eds.):

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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Das Haus Tugendhat. Wien, New York: Springer, pp. 43–76. TUGENDHAT, GRETE (1998). Die Bewohner des Hauses Tugendhat äußern sich. In: HAMMER-TUGENDHAT, DANIELA, TEGETHOFF, WOLF (eds.): Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Das Haus Tugendhat. Wien, New York: Springer, pp. 35–37. VETTER , ANDREAS K. (2000). Die Befreiung des Wohnens. Ein Architekturphänomen der 20er und 30er Jahre. Tübingen, Berlin: Wasmuth. VIRILIO, PAUL (1986). Die Ästhetik des Verschwindens. Paul Virilio im Gespräch mit Florian Rötzer. In: Kunstforum International, issue 84, pp. 198–201. WEBER , STEFAN (1996). Die Dualisierung des Erkennens. Zu Konstruktivismus, Neurophilosophie und Medientheorie. Wien: Passagen. ZIMMERMANN, GERD (2003). Medium Architektur. In: Thesis, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, issue 3, Medium Architektur. Zur Krise der Vermittlung, pp. 8–15.

Illustration Credits Fig. 1: Riley, Terence: The Un-Private House. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999, p. 95. Fig. 2: Colomina, Beatriz: Privacy and Publicity. Modern Architecture as Mass Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996, p. 257. Fig. 3: Colomina, Beatriz: Privacy and Publicity. Modern Architecture as Mass Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996, pp. 316–117, 321. Fig. 4: Sachse, Rolf: Mies montiert. In: Arch+, Zeitschrift für Architektur und Städtebau, June 2002, issue 161, Miesverständnisse, p. 59. Fig. 5: Tegethoff, Wolf: Mies van der Rohe. The Villas and Country Houses. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1985, p. 143.

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G ULIZ M UGAN /F EYZAN E RKIP

The Impact of Mobile Phone Use on Privacy Concerns in Public Spaces: A Preliminary Work on Young People

1

Introduction

New technologies that blend computer science and telecommunications, i.e., information communication technologies (ICT) have accelerated the transfer of information by practically abolishing space and time (Delebarre, 1992). ICT plays a vital role in transformation of urban public life and spaces by affecting the transactions between places and people. The city, which has become ‘densely interwoven with mobile and wireless devices and networks’, has remarkable effects on individuals’ lifestyles and social networks. As Townsend (2000: 85) suggested “… mobile communication devices will have a profound effect on our cities as they are woven into the daily routines of urban inhabitants”. Use of different forms of information technologies for different objectives and demands, increases the ability of human beings to process matter and information more effectively. They increase the amount of information preserved or in circulation or both (Maines and Chen, 1996). “[Societies] which developed particular information technologies were more likely to survive than those that did not” (Maines and Chen, 1996: 12). Rapid development of electronic technologies such as computers, TV, internet, video-cameras, monitoring systems and mobile telephones made us more aware of the importance of information technologies in fostering and shaping the urban field (Cash, Eccles, Nohria and Nolan, 1994; Maines and Chen, 1996; Paye, 1992). Mobile phones as being one of those ICT tools, can be perceived as social artifacts and play a crucial role in today’s social world (Palen, Salzman and Youngs, 2000; Srivastava, 2005). This study is a preliminary work on the impacts of mobile phones on the transformation of urban public life. It reveals and analyzes the qualitative data from a focus group interview with young people. In this respect, this study aims to analyze the role of mobile phone use in shaping and affecting the urban public life and every-

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day personal interactions within public spaces by focusing on privacy concerns of a group of young people. The event that the mobile subscribers overtook the number of fixed-line subscribers on a global scale in 2002 can be accepted as the turning point in the history of telecommunications. Along with this, mobile phones became both the dominant voice communication tool and a key social object of everyday life of users (Palen et. al, 2000; Srivastava, 2005) especially for young people (Bianchi and Philips, 2005; Ling, 2000; 2001; Ozcan and Kocak, 2003; Walsh and White, 2006). For many young people mobile phones have become the primary tools for socializing and to sustain social networks (Ling, 2000). Therefore, they do not recognize a difference between speaking on the phone and face-to-face communication (Srivastava, 2005). Continuous and permanent availability provided by mobile phones turns out to be a need for many young people (Ling, 2000; Vincent, 2004). The findings of a study, which examines the mobile phone use amongst children aged 11 to 16, indicate that “many respondents did not appear to have a daily need for making and receiving communications on a mobile phone but all had a need for the mobile phone to be ‘always with me’ when away from home” (Vincent, 2004: 14). However, the main drawback of this permanent availability provided by mobile phones is the privacy violation of young people through continuous surveillance by parents and peers. Hafner (2000) indicates that mobile phones are instruments through which parents can keep track of their children and can exert control on them (see also Yeow, Yuen and Connolly, 2008). In the respect of these arguments, the starting point of this paper is to discuss the integration of mobile phones in private lives of individuals. Within the scope of that discussion, the impact of mobile phones on general privacy concerns of young people is examined. Ling (1997) points out that airports, trains, busses, stores, theatres and meetings are mainly indicated as places where mobile phone use is felt to be inappropriate. Private lives of mobile phone users commonly occupy those public places (Geser, 2004; Ling, 2002; Srivastava, 2005). Especially, the audible dimension and hearing distance of those places may allow intrusion via inappropriate ringing tones, loud talks, private conversations and eavesdropping (see Haddon, 2000; Lasen, 2003; Ling, 1997; 2001; 2002; Monk, Carroll, Parker and Blythe, 2004). Ling (1997; 2001; 2002) takes attention to this audible dimension of public spaces in terms of its disturbing effects on individuals who are inside and outside the immediate circle of interaction. The 340

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findings of Yeow et. al (2008) also indicate that loud ringing tones and loud communication are serious threat to the privacy of other individuals in public places. Moreover, those disturbing effects and situations resulting from mobile phone use in public spaces cause the verbal and behavioral responses of other individuals. Accordingly, in this paper, mobile phone use in public spaces is analyzed with a special emphasis on the privacy concerns of young people within those spaces. Townsend (2000), by highlighting the spatial dimension of mobile phones in rewriting the spatial and temporal constraints, claims that potential influence of mobile communication should be reconsidered by architects and city planners for the construction of contemporary urbanization. Yeow et. al (2008) state that information concerning the negative aspects of mobile phone use in urban spaces is particularly crucial to create and plan user-friendly environments for mobile phone communications. In the following section, the methodology of the study is discussed which is followed by the preliminary results of the focus group interviews. In the final section of this paper, the spatial dimension of mobile phones is questioned to explore the appropriate mobile phone use in public spaces and the spatial control of it.

2

The methodology

This study aims to form a basis for a further and more comprehensive study concerning the role of mobile phones in shaping and transforming the urban public life and everyday personal interactions of various user groups. Therefore, it is a preliminary work that reveals preliminary results by focusing on the impacts of mobile phone use on privacy concerns of a predefined group of individuals. According to researches, adoption of new technology and use of this technology such as mobile phones are more likely and highly prevalent among younger people (Bianchi and Philips, 2005; Ozcan and Kocak, 2003; Walsh and White, 2006). Thus, we are mainly interested in examining young people who grow up with mobile phones (Weilenmann and Larsson, 2000) and are the most enthusiastic users of this technology (Srivastava, 2005). There is a rapid transformation in Turkey since mid-1980s due to economic restructuring which is nourished by the satisfaction of new consumer demands. New consumer culture that is fostered by the influence of global consumption patterns is constituted by the highest income group in Turkey.

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The structure of this new consumer culture and new consumption style is established with the idea of ‘demand to consume more and more distinctively’ (Erkip, 2003). Mobile phone ownership can be stated as a remarkable example of this new consumption style in Turkey since demand to own new, fashionable and distinctive models of mobile phones is recurring day after day. The number of mobile phone users has also increased tremendously after the adoption of mobile phone technology in 1994. In the early years of mobile phone adoption in Turkey, the main motives behind the use of them were indicated as communication without the constraints of place and the show-off. However, as the cost of mobile phone ownership has decreased, that show-off effect also seems to lose its impact among Turkish people (Ozcan and Kocak, 2003). The data indicate that “the adoption rate in 2000 was found to be 50.2 percent among urban households” and most of the users are among 18–25 age group (Ozcan and Kocak, 2003: 243). Moreover, even though there is a positive correlation between mobile phone ownership and income and education, age is negatively correlated with mobile phone ownership in Turkey (Ozcan and Kocak, 2003). In the light of these findings, Turkish youth seem to be worth of study concerning the mobile phone use. Ankara as the capital city of modern Turkish Republic is the representative of national values and lifestyles and has always been more local in its business and population characteristics compared to Istanbul which is more open to global influences as being the largest city in Turkey with many international links and relations (Erkip, 2003). Within this context of Ankara, Bilkent University, was established in 1984 as the first private university in Turkey. The university is located near a high-income suburban area of the city. The student profile of Bilkent University is mostly composed of students who are grown up in middle-income and high-income families. In this respect, continuous demand for the latest and distinctive models of mobile phones, owning more than one mobile phone and replacing the unfashionable ones frequently are widespread amongst Bilkent University students who are raised up in fairly good economic conditions. Considering the student characteristics, part of the data for this study was collected through a questionnaire that was administered to a group of students who were selected among the third and forth year students of Bilkent University. In addition to that, a focus group interview with some of the students was conducted. The questionnaires were filled up by 20 students and the participants of the focus group were 10 students – 3 males and 7 females – chosen 342

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among those 20 students on a voluntary basis. The age range of the informants was 19 to 26. Since the spatial dimension of mobile phones is aimed to be covered within the scope of the study, informants of the focus group were selected among the third and forth year students of the Interior Architecture and Environmental Design Department of the university. The young interior architects as the informants of this study are appropriate for two respects: they are mobile phone users with different privacy experiences and they are also the candidates of being a design professional with a potential and capacity to bring out design solutions and spatial arrangements. The data from the focus group and the questionnaire were examined with a qualitative approach. The data from the questionnaire were not analyzed or interpreted separately within the scope of this preliminary study in order to avoid generalizations due to limited number of informants; instead some preliminary findings from that data were used to support the focus group interpretations. The questionnaires are aimed to serve as a pilot study to investigate the general privacy concerns of young people for a further and comprehensive study. In the focus group interview, general habits of mobile phone use of young people, opinions of them regarding mobile phone use in public spaces and effects of the public use on their privacy concerns were investigated by posting a comment to the discussion. Concerning general habits of mobile phone use of the informants, 9 out of 10 reported the age of 15 as the first time they owned a personal mobile phone. All informants indicated that the most useful functions of mobile phones are SMS, listening to music, camera and vibration. According to them further technological innovations seem unnecessary. They even think that this far is too much.

3

The integration of mobile phones in private lives of individuals

Anderson (1999) indicates that the number of telephones that are available to more and more parts of the world are rapidly increasing. The main aim of the telephone was to disseminate information and to transform communication by making the entire network of social and business arrangements possible without face-to-face contact. However, those fixed-line telephones are still bounded up with a certain territory (Kelly and Freysinger, 2000). The demand

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on mobility and flexibility in the global world has resulted in improvements in information technologies. Through mobile telephones, barriers on reaching and disseminating information and communication have been removed; constraints of location, in a sense, has been conquered (Andanova, 2006; Geser, 2004; Ozcan and Kocak, 2003; Townsend, 2000). As Andonova (2006) discussed, since mobile phones are less site-specific and built on redeployable modules, they have immense effects in changing and shaping the institutions and spaces of a global world. Individuals carry their mobile phones and use them wherever they go. “Indeed, the mobile has equalized the opportunities for communication between the moving and nonmoving person: in the past, those in physical proximity of a fixed-line telephone had an added advantage. […] Communication no longer occurs only from a fixed point to another fixed point: a multitude of different points can now communicate with a multitude of moving or still targets” (Srivastava, 2005: 122–123). In other words, use of mobile phones emancipates us from the physical constraints and the need for the preplanning, since rearrangements can be organized at any moment. As Geser (2004: 20) stated, “the cell phone effects a transformation of social systems from the ‘solid’ state of scheduling to a ‘liquid’ state of permanently ongoing processes of dynamic coordination and renegotiations”. In other words, the emancipation from physical boundaries and predefined plans has to be paid for “an almost exclusive limitation to bilateral contacts” and “increased uncertainties about the current subjective states and environmental conditions of the contacted partners” (Geser, 2004: 4). One of the informants, during focus group interviews, took attention to this issue: Before mobile phones, individuals are more loyal to their plans and appointments. If you promised to be somewhere for a predefined time, you had to be there at that time. However, after mobile phones have entered into our lives, it became very easy to postpone or cancel some arrangements. You do not have to be in a hurry any more. There are different motives behind the use of mobile phones. Some of those motives for owning a mobile telephone and using it can be listed as: status symbol, instrumentality, relaxation, mobility, sociability, security, communication, fashion tool, commercial identity, storage of private information, autonomy, provision of intimacy, entertainment, accessibility, availability, security, 344

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emergency and emancipation (Geser, 2004; Ling, 2000; Ozcan and Kocak, 2003; Palen et. al, 2000; Srivastava, 2005; Walsh and White, 2006). For our informants, main motives of phone use are communication, mobility, sociability, status symbol, emancipation, instrumentality and extra functions (listening to music, camera use), storage of private information (SMS, telephone directory), provision of intimacy (between dates and friends) and accessibility in emergencies. The consumption side and campaigns provided by GSM operators promote longer uses and these campaigns are carefully pursued by young mobile phone users. They determine their time of calls according to those promoted tariffs and campaigns, for instance since night tariffs are much cheaper they prefer to make longer calls during the night to be in touch with a distant lover or a friend. “With the advent of anywhere, anytime mobile technologies, the sense of belonging to place may slowly be giving way to a sense of belonging to a communications network” (Srivastava, 2005: 112). Since mobile phones are mobile, they can exist in different spheres of urban public life and may involve the social world of many individuals who are wittingly or unwittingly a part of this communication network (Palen et. al, 2000). One of our informants pointed out that: Mobile phone users are all around us. We see individuals talking to oneself on streets, in cafes, on buses etc. Especially those bluetooth headphone users make you think that individuals are going insane. Because you cannot have the chance to see the mobile phone; the only thing you can see is a person talking to oneself on street loudly. The integration of mobile phones into everyday public life and spaces has also a significant role in personal experiences and feelings of individuals within those spaces. In other words, the use and occupancy of mobile phones in our everyday social life shape, transform and affect the urban public life and also experiences, feelings and concerns of individuals. As Srivastava (2005: 128) pointed out, “the increased convenience and extended information access afforded by mobile phones, however, is also accompanied by the potential for technology to enter the private spheres of human lives”. For most of the young people, mobile phone itself is a private belonging. During the interview, they pointed out that they do not allow other people use their phone. Only when they are busy or reluctant to answer a call they may ask a close friend or lover

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to answer the phone and make him/her lie about their whereabouts. But, they never ask their parents to do this. The use of mobile phones is mainly related to the possibility of permanent availability that mobile phones have provided (Haddon, 1998; 2000; Isaac, Nickerson and Tarasewich, 2004; Palen et. al, 2000). The permanent availability is an important motive of mobile phone use for young people. They all believe that mobile phones are necessary and useful. It is not thinkable to leave it at home or even turn it off. Most of them leave it open during the night while sleeping and the reasons of this permanent availability are explained as: it is useful and necessary for emergency situations; it provides them freedom and emancipation from parents and lovers since through mobile phones they can be reached and accessible and make their parents, friends and lovers relieved. Although seems contradictory, they explained this situation as follows: Mobile phones make our lives easy. It provides me freedom and emancipation since my parents can reach me whenever they want. The hours that I spent at the outside become more flexible with the mobile phones. In case of emergencies, permanent availability is an important issue and mobile phones are the tools that provide this opportunity. Therefore, at night I do not turn my mobile off. Even, I turn the ringing sound up in case of my deep sleep. On the contrary to these positive evaluations of permanent availability provided by mobile phones, there is also a negative side of it. People free themselves from the constraints of physical spaces through mobile phones, but at the same time, it has the drawback of potentially enabling one with the merit that they are always reachable. In other words, there is an element of surveillance, especially by parents; in the continuous availability and mobility provided by mobile phones (Haddon, 1998) and this is also the most disturbing part of mobile phones for young people. According to the preliminary results of the questionnaire about the general privacy concerns of young people, the most important things when they require privacy in a privacy condition are “no-one is bothering them” and “noone is controlling them”. Similarly, during the focus group interview, the control of parents who want to control their actions and their “whereabouts” 346

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were determined as the major privacy issue concerning young people’s mobile phone use. With the use of mobile phones, keeping track with eyes left its place to keeping track with mobile phones. We are followed by our parents through our mobile phones. I am continuously abused by my parents through my mobile phone whenever I go out. Therefore, I do not believe that permanent availability is something good for the privacy of an individual. When my mother calls, she wants to learn where I am and wants me to prove that I am really there. One day, she called me and asked me where I am. I was in a car and told her the truth. But, she wanted to hear the sound of the horn. This is the example of how mobile phones bring our parents very near to us. In addition to the control of parents, control of lovers is another concern for privacy. Moreover, they stated that such a permanent control by lovers and parents make them force to lie, especially when they do not want to tell where they really are. They stated that they use some functions of mobile phones to help in this process. Sometimes I have to lie my parents because I do not want to tell where exactly I am since I do not have permission to go to certain places. Once we had to lie for one of our friends by using the mobile phone. She had told her parents that she would be in a club with her friends, but we were having a house party. So, when she received a call from her parents, we turned up the music to make her parents believe that she was in a club. My girlfriend calls me very often. And she continuously asks me where I am and asks me to send her photographs taken by the mobile phone’s camera to prove where exactly I am. Sometimes I do not want to tell her the truth. So, I use previously taken pictures. By sending those pictures, I try to make her believe that I am in

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the place where I told to be in. In other words, mobile phones are sometimes very helpful. Nevertheless, even if they complain about the control of parents or lovers as a result of permanent availability provided by mobile phones, they indicated that they find such a control and ‘keeping track’ as normal and even do similar things when possible such as controlling the lover, sister or brother. Out of 20 students who were given questionnaires, 14 of them are living with their parents, 4 of them are living in the university dormitories. From the other two, one of them shares a house with friends and the other one is living alone in a house. All of the informants are financially dependent on their families. Therefore, the reason behind ‘normalization’ of the control of parents can be explained as the financial dependence of Turkish university youth to their families. Besides, ‘the imitation’ of parental control in young people’s own private life for their lovers and siblings can be interpreted as a learnt behavior. Through the permanent availability that mobile phones provided, the probability that users can be reached by information from political news or commercial advertisements has also increased (see Geser, 2004). As Srivastava (2005) pointed out, mobile phones are tried to be transformed into an electronic wallet and identification system by making mobile banking transactions, paying for shopping without having the queue, opening locked doors, riding public transport and receiving timely specific information possible. However, all those ‘more technological innovations’ seem unnecessary and even disturbing for young people. Especially, they indicated that commercial use of mobile phone is disturbing for their privacy in terms of intrusion by people they do not know. During the focus group interview, some girls stated that commercial use of mobile phone may even result in sexual harassment. In order to record your personal information most of the companies ask for your mobile phone number and you have to give it any way. Sometimes, the person who records your phone number may use it to harass you. For instance, a host had reached my phone number from the records of a bus company and harassed me by sending SMS or calling. I had to change my phone number due to some similar situations. Lasen (2003) indicates that letting a call go unanswered is accepted as rude and impolite in some cultures. Despite their complaints about the situation of 348

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being reachable all the time and their privacy concerns about mobile phones, the young people we interviewed also underlined this aspect. Most of them do not respond only unknown and restricted calls. They always try to answer all known calls all the time at least to tell that situation is not appropriate. When the other end of the line insists to continue with the call, they cannot refuse to talk by turning off the phone. Walsh and White (2006) point out that perceived negative outcomes of mobile phone use do not influence the level of mobile phone use of young people. Also, our interviews support that young people cannot turn their phone off or refuse to use it. They claim that it is a kind of freedom not using the phone or simply turning it off but most of them find this impossible with their own will. I feel as if I am emancipated when I forgot my mobile phone at home. I know that many of us promise ourselves to turn our phones off when we are on holiday. But we can never achieve this. After the discussion on the integration of mobile phones in private lives of young people and its impacts in terms of spatial flexibility, mobility and permanent availability, in the next section, we focus on mobile phone use in public spaces and concern for privacy within such spaces.

4

Mobile phone use in public spaces and concern for privacy

Spatial flexibility provided by mobile phones has resulted in the occupancy of mobile phones in every sphere of urban public life and mobile phones become crucial in shaping social and spatial aspects of public life. Spatial mobility provided by mobile phones by enlarging potential communication networks regardless of place and moment and distancing oneself from the immediate surrounding of social interaction assist individuals who are seeking privacy and a sense of protection, especially in public spaces. Nevertheless, the privacy or ‘the emancipation’ from the immediate surrounding by using mobile phones might be offensive for privacy of other individuals with whom the spaces are being shared since those individuals may not have the chance or be willing to leave that space (Geser, 2004; Haddon, 2000; Katz, 2003; Palenet. al, 2000). On the one hand, those individuals who share public spaces, such as those in

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restaurants, cafes, cinemas and public transportation vehicles purchase a certain amount of privacy during their stay and create their own private domain in such a public space (see Haddon, 1998; Ling, 1997; Walsh and White, 2006). On the other hand, the mobile phone user wants to preserve his/her own private conversation domain in a public space. In this situation, both the one who is on the phone and the others who have to share the same public space with phone user are affected due to their different privacy concerns (see Lasen, 2003; Ling, 2002; Palen et. al, 2000). As Palen et. al (2000) defined, how individuals experience mobile phones in different spaces, depends on their own use of mobile phones and the way they witness someone else’s use of the mobile phone in public. In other words, the way the individuals experience the public mobile phone use are determined by whether the person is the user of the mobile phone or the person is within the hearing distance of the mobile phone user (see also Ling, 1997 for the details). Thus, different privacy concerns and disturbing situations that result from the mobile phone use in public spaces need to be investigated (see Geser, 2004; Ling, 2001; 2002; Srivastava, 2005 for the details). One of the main concerns regarding the mobile phones should be the role that they played in shaping the boundaries between public spaces and private domains of individuals and the way boundaries are negotiated (see Lowry and Moskos, 2005). Palen et. al (2000) indicate that mobile phone users in a public space are in two spaces at the same time. One is the physical public space that they occupy and the other one is the virtual space of conversation on the phone. The conflict between two spaces is also the conflict between private domains of individuals and the public space and its users. As Geser (2004) stated, through mobile phones, what we have faced is a process of colonization of public space by the private communication of mobile phone users (see also Ling, 2002; Srivastava, 2005). For our informants, the main public spaces that they think their privacy is threatened are mainly public transportation vehicles, restaurants, cafes, clubs and shopping malls. The reasons why they considered their privacy has been intruded upon are related to the invasion of personal space through physical touch due to crowding. Witnessing someone else’s use of mobile phone is not mentioned as one of the main reasons that threatens their privacy in public spaces. They think using mobile phones in public spaces are acceptable at various levels. The most embarrassing use of mobile phone is on some public transports such as long distance buses and planes where mobile phone use is 350

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strictly banned. They differentiate mobile phone use in movie theatres and in live performances such as opera or theatre. According to them, mobile phone use in live performances is more disturbing and disrespectful than its use in movie theatres. However, according to them ‘disrespectful side’ of mobile phone use in live performances is an issue for the performer not for the other audiences. Nevertheless, they mostly tolerate mobile phone use in public spaces such as movie theatres, public transports, classrooms and concert halls and they also themselves use their mobile phones regardless of whether it is banned or not. I think mobile phone use in movie theatres is very normal. You simply answer the phone and tell you that you are in a movie theatre. Besides, it might be urgent. There is no privacy violation for other audiences since they are not even aware of it. I am not against the mobile phone use in movie theatres but I think it is very disrespectful for the performer in live performances. S/he tries to concentrate on his/her performance but suddenly everything is disturbed by a ringing mobile phone. This is something very irritating. Audible dimension and possible hearing distance of public spaces allows the ringing sounds, loud talks and issue of eavesdropping (see Haddon, 2000; Ling, 1997; 2001; 2002; Srivastava, 2005; Walsh and White, 2006 for the details). Young people in our focus group seek privacy most often because of problems resulting from their physical environment (such as noise and crowding) and problems related to their motivation (such as studying for exams, making drawings and design). Besides, as Srivastava (2005: 116) argued “freedom from interference or disruption” is one of the most important aspects of human right to privacy. Therefore, it seems that when they have to involve the immediate circle of interaction of a mobile phone user as an outsider, they perceive their privacy as being invaded. One of the girls in the focus group who shares her room in the dormitory complained about how her privacy has been intruded upon by her roommate: I am staying in a dormitory and I have a roommate. While I am sleeping or trying to concentrate on my design projects, my roommate is talking on the phone. This is something very disrespectful. The only thing she has to

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do is leaving the room to answer the phone. But, usually I am the one who has to leave the room instead. The study of Monk et. al (2004) indicates that annoyance caused by public mobile phone use is related to the content or volume of the mobile phone conversations. Loud talk on the phone is one of the irritating sounds for the other individuals who are in the same public space (Ling, 1997). Young people we interviewed also complain about high volume of the mobile phone conversations in public spaces as being witnesses of other private conversations However, they admit the fact that sometimes they themselves have to speak on the phone loudly in order to make their voice heard by the person who is on the other side of the line. Nevertheless, most of them prefer to leave the space if they realized that person on the other end of the phone has difficulty in hearing. You see individuals talking very loudly on the phone. This is something very disturbing and irritating. An individual has to control his/her voice while talking on the phone. While I am on a bus, I realize that everybody is speaking very loudly on the phone. But, unfortunately I am also doing the same thing. Usually, my mother warns me to lower my voice. Otherwise, I am not even aware of it. Walsh and White (2006: 11) argue that “telephone communication is no longer restricted to private or personal contexts with personal calls being conducted in public situations”. Especially the use of mobile phones in indoor public spaces makes personal calls being heard easily and entails the possibility of disturbing other individuals around (Lasen, 2003). According to our group of young people, some topics are more private and more disturbing to speak on the phone in the public. Talking to lovers or using bad words are not approved and they are disturbed by witnessing such phone conversations in public spaces. They pointed out that they try to be careful about not engaging such conversations or speaking loudly, but also admitted that sometimes they found themselves in displaying such disturbing behaviors for other individuals in public spaces.

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We do not have to hear the private conversations of mobile phone users or any one speaking in a public space. But, sometimes, unfortunately, I realize that I am doing the same thing. When I am on a bus, I cannot simply leave the bus to answer my phone so I am speaking compulsorily. Moreover, they underlined that talking about private issues, talking loudly, using bad words, staring someone are not approved in public spaces, in general. Therefore, mobile phone is not the only means for disturbing other individuals in public spaces; rather such disapproved and incivil behaviors and attitudes can be faced and be disturbing in face-to-face conversations as well. Concerning the audible dimension of public spaces, Ling (1997; 2001; 2002) underlines the forced eavesdropping of those who are expected to be outside the circle of interaction. According to Ling (1997: 12), common understanding is that “those inside a conversation fear that those outside the conversation can become privy to secrets”. His study in restaurants indicates a different perspective that those outside the circle of interaction also feared that they would have to hear too much that eventually leads to the embarrassment of overhearing the individuals’ private conversations. According to our interviews, young people who have to be in an unwilling situation of eavesdropping do not claim that they either fear to overhear the private conversation of the mobile phone user or feel embarrassed. They think that it is the problem of the mobile phone user – either as an immediate accompanying partner or a third party within a hearing distance. If the mobile phone user causes such a forced eavesdropping by providing necessary conditions, then they think it is their right to listen the conversation and they even feel curious to learn about the issue. The research of Lasen (2003) indicates that the younger the mobile phone users, the less they claim that they are bothered whether other individuals in public are listening their phone conversations or not. Same argument is also valid for our young group, since they are not interested in whether their conversations are listened or not; but they claimed that they try to be careful for not talking about private issues on the phone in the public. Eavesdropping to private conversations taking place by mobile phone user or by partners of face-to-face conversation in public spaces is a given right to the other public space users. If the person does not avoid talking private matters in a public space, it is not my problem to think about their

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privacy. If the subject is interesting and makes me curious, I even try to listen to it. Lasen (2003) states that if there is no civil inattention concerning the disturbing situations resulting from mobile phone use, it is evident that mobile phone users see more reactions and interventions from the others who are outside the circle of interaction (see also Ling 1997 for the details of the issue of civil inattention). Our young informants pointed out that they usually avoid intervening to the disturbing situation or giving reactions to the mobile phone user. But, this does not mean that civil inattention is a rule that they follow under the disturbing mobile phone uses. They usually prefer leaving the scene if it is possible when they are extremely disturbed or some stated that they use public space personnel to warn the disturbing person, though this is not a common attitude among them. Hearing bad words on the phone in a public space is very irritating. I do not want to hear such disgusting and private things. I mostly ignore the conversation as if I am not in the hearing distance of that mobile phone conversation. If I feel that I am disturbed by a mobile phone conversation in terms of either the volume or the content of the conversation, I immediately ask the waiter or the service person for warning that disrespectful mobile phone user. Camera function of mobile phones is another important issue that can be pointed out as one of the privacy concerns in public spaces related to the use of mobile phones. Camera function gives the user a chance of snapping pictures quickly and unbeknownst to be photographed. The stored photographs can be posted without the consent of the individuals who are photographed and this is an intrusion to the privacy rights of those individuals. Therefore, the user of a phone camera should be responsible for respecting such a privacy concern (Srivastava, 2005). Even though camera function of mobile phones is commonly used by our young informants, it was also indicated as one of the privacy concerns in public spaces related to the mobile phone use.

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You are in a café and suddenly you see those flashes of mobile phone cameras used by the individuals sitting next to you. One or two photographs are OK. But some individuals exaggerate the use of them. Then it becomes very disturbing. Eventually, you want to preserve your privacy in the setting. Especially men are using phone cameras in order to snap some dirty pictures. While I was in high school, boys were snapping our legs unbeknownst and they were sending those photographs to each other or simply storing them. This is a kind of sexual harassment through mobile phones. On the contrary to camera function that is perceived as disturbing in terms of privacy concerns, sending and receiving SMSs can be accepted as minimizing the threat to the privacy concerns of public space users by reducing the effects resulting from the audible dimension of public spaces such as loud talk, talking about private matters and forced eavesdropping. In addition, the possibility of witnessing to SMS traffic might be less compared to calling traffic (see Geser, 2004 for the details of SMS usage). Young people may prefer SMS to voice calls since it is less expensive and more secure and secret (Srivastava, 2005; Yeow et. al, 2008). Especially for the ones who live with their parents and who have to share their place of residence with friends, SMS can also be a good way of escape from the surveillance of outsiders. According to our informants, SMS and vibration are important functions to increase mobile phone user’s privacy and also less disturbing for the other public space occupants or the immediate partners. Our respondents mainly highlighted only one end of the privacy violation where mobile phone users infringe upon the privacy rights of public space users. As mobile phone users, they do not think that public infringe upon their private domain when they are using their mobile phones in those spaces. They only advocate the tolerance for use of mobile phones regardless of space and restrictions. In summary, young informants as mobile phone users have some privacy concerns and complaints about the mobile phone use in public spaces such as loud talks, private content of mobile phone conversations and inappropriate mobile phone camera use. However, according to them those complaints and concerns are not only related to the inappropriate mobile phone use but instead are related to general incivil behaviors and attitudes. In other words, young people seem to be very tolerant about public mobile phone use

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in various public settings. The reason of this tolerance might be explained by their attitudes as young mobile phone users who admit of being engaged in the same disturbing behaviors and invading the privacy of other public space users sometimes. In the following section, in the light of indicated problems concerning inappropriate mobile phone use in public spaces and related concerns of privacy, spatial dimensions of mobile phones are highlighted to explore the question of how the appropriate mobile phone use in public spaces can be regulated and controlled. The informants as the candidates of being a design professional are asked to bring out design solutions and spatial arrangements that promote their privacy against the inappropriate public mobile phone use.

5

Spatial dimension of mobile phones

The telephone is inherently bounded up with space (Townsend, 2000). In the case of traditional telephone, spatial arrangements like special furniture available with a place of sitting, a shelf for telephone and other decorative furniture that was intended to match with telephone are important design elements that demonstrate the fixed line telephone is a part of that physical space (Ling, 2002). Due to difficulties in attaining a fixed line in the recent past in Turkey – in 1960’s and 70’s – there was a special emphasis on the decorative elements attached to the telephone machine. Even if mobile phones are quite independent from the constraints of physical spaces, the activity of using the mobile phone still involves the occupancy of a physical space (Palen et. al, 2000). With an element of uncertainty about the physical space of the interaction, one of the introductory questions that the mobile phone users are looking for an answer is ‘where are you?’ (Barkhuus, 2003; Townsend, 2000) to understand the importance of particular locations for individuals using the mobile phone. According to Townsend (2000, p. 85), “urban planners and architects have only addressed these new technologies on a cosmetic level such as the design and placement of the increasing number of antenna towers needed to support the growth in network usage”. However, as he (2000) underlined, the conflict between the notions of public and private domains makes it necessary for architects and urban planners to consider the impacts of mobile phones on the use of different urban spaces.

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Actually, there are some space regulations, physical arrangements and restrictions against mobile phone users in certain public spaces such as restaurants, movie theatres, theatres, buses, trains, shops etc. due to widespread use of the phones within those spaces (Geser, 2004; Haddon, 1998; 2000; Ling, 1997; Isaac et. al, 2004; Palen et. al, 2000; Srivastava, 2005). One of these attempts of regulating the physical spaces where mobile phones can possibly be used is to create mobile-free zones, for instance, on the trains, restaurants and theatres (Haddon, 2000; Ling, 1997). Our informants also give some examples from clubs and bars where some empty phone booths are designed for mobile phone users who prefer having a private conversation or escape from the noise. However, it seems that they are designed to protect the privacy of the mobile phone user, rather than the others’ sharing the space. On the contrary to what we have expected, our young informants who are the design students did not suggest any design solutions or spatial arrangements for the public mobile use concerning the problems of privacy. They indicated that they do not believe that restrictions, prohibitions, fines, design solutions or spatial arrangements would solve the privacy problems resulting from mobile phone use in public spaces. In fact, they think that this kind of solutions would help to justify public mobile phone use and their users. Although some of them pointed out the difficulty of controlling the fines, some others believed that they are useless. Even though there are some prohibitions and “fines” against mobile phone use in some spaces, I think there is no one enforcing those fines. And everyone is aware of this fact. So, no one is bothering whether it is banned or not. It is ridiculous to justify the use of mobile phones in public spaces. Public mobile phone use is something disturbing for the third parties of public space any way. Why do we have to make spatial arrangements for such a disturbing activity? Besides, I do not think that any kind of spatial arrangement is a solution for the privacy problems. I heard that in some trains in Europe and the USA only one car is reserved for non-mobile phone users. I think this is a justification for a disturbing activity and for those individuals. I think only one car should

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be reserved for mobile phone users. For the rest of the train mobile phone use should be prohibited and fined. Thus, no specific design solution emerged during the interview. Interestingly enough, the reason was not the limitation on the use of mobile phone, but the concern of an increase in the use of mobile phones in public spaces.

6

Conclusion

By bringing together the literature concerning the role of mobile phones in our everyday social life, mobile phone use in public spaces, mobile phones and privacy concern and spatial dimension of mobile phones, this study aimed to reveal a preliminary work on the impacts of mobile phone use on young people’s privacy concerns in public spaces. By confirming previous researches (see Bianchi and Philips, 2005; Ling, 2000; 2001; Ozcan and Kocak, 2003; Vincent, 2004; Walsh and White, 2006; Yeow et. al, 2008), this study also indicates that mobile phone use is an unavoidable part of private lives of young people. They have some privacy concerns and complaints regarding the integration of mobile phones in their everyday life in terms of permanent availability and accessibility. Yet, despite all these complaints, it was noted that young people seem to be addicted to their mobile phones for the same reasons. Privacy concerns and problems resulting from inappropriate use of mobile phones in public spaces were analyzed from two perspectives: from the perspective of individuals who use the mobile phone in public spaces and the perspective of individuals who witness the situation of a mobile phone use in those spaces. From the perspective of mobile phone users, our informants stated that mobile phone use in every public space can be tolerated and they do not feel disturbed by other individuals around while they are talking on the phone and they do not think that third parities intrude upon their mobile phone conversations. However, from the perspective of public space occupants, who are within the hearing distance of mobile phone users, findings confirmed the past researches (see Lasen, 2003; Ling, 1997; Monk et. al, 2004; Walsh and White, 2006; Yeow et. al, 2008) by stating that they have some privacy concerns and complaints such as loud talks, private content of mobile phone conversations and inappropriate mobile phone camera use. Yet, they prefer to label those manners as incivil behaviors and attitudes in public space 358

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instead of seeing them specific to the inappropriate mobile phone use. In other words, they tolerate mobile phone use in various public settings when they are themselves mobile phone users who seek privacy and tolerance for public mobile phone use regardless of the space, its restrictions and possibility of disturbing other individuals around. Our young informants were selected from the interior architecture students and they were considered to be appropriate for the focus group interview, assuming that they would bring out some design solutions and spatial arrangements regarding the privacy concerns of both mobile phone users and third parties in public spaces. However, they pointed out that they do not agree with the justification of mobile phone use in public spaces through design solutions or spatial arrangements. From the perspective of public space occupants who have complaints and concerns in terms of their threatened privacy, they stated that mobile phone users or any kind of incivil attitude or behaviors should not be privileged. According to them, this is an issue of culture and education and therefore, cannot be solved through some legal restrictions, prohibitions or design arrangements. As it was noted at the beginning of the paper, this study is a preliminary work that is assumed to lead a more comprehensive and extensive research on the impacts of mobile phone use in shaping and transforming the urban public life and everyday personal interactions for various user groups. The impact of mobile phone use on privacy concerns of young people, emphasis on their privacy concerns in public spaces and spatial dimension of mobile phones were the underlined themes for this preliminary study. This scope may lead further issues for forthcoming researches such the effects of mobile phone use in different settings such as indoor and outdoor, in determining different feelings, perceptions and social interactions of various individual groups as well as the interaction of users with different spaces. Besides, the effect of setting on different mobile phone users and on different uses can also be another focus of further research.

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LING, R. (2001). “The diffusion of mobile telephony among Norwegian teens: A report from after the revolution”, paper presented at ICUST 2001, Paris, June, 2001. LING, R. (2002). “The social juxtaposition of mobile telephone conversations and public spaces” paper presented at conference on the Social Consequences of Mobile Telephones, Chunchon, July, 2002. LOWRY, D. & MOSKOS, M. (2005). “Hanging on the mobile phone: experiencing work and spatial flexibility.” National Institute of Labor Studies, Working Paper 153, August, 2005, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. MAINES, D. R. & CHEN, S. (1996). “Introduction.” In: C. J. COUCH, Information technologies and social orders. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. pp. 1–16. MONK, A., CARROLL, J., PARKER , S. & BLYTHE, M. (2004). “Why are mobile phones annoying.” Behavior and Information Technology, 23 (1), 33–41. OZCAN, Y. Z. & KOCAK, A. (2003). “Research note: A need or a status symbol? Use of cellular telephones in Turkey.” European Journal of Communication, 18, 241–254. PALEN, L. SALZMAN, M. &YOUNGS, E. (2000). “Going wireless: Behavior & practice of new mobile phone users.” In: Proceedings of the Conference of CSCW’00, 201–210. PAYE, J. (1992). “Technological change and urban development: An international challenge.” In: OECD, (ed.) Cities and new technologies. Paris: OECD. pp. 17–18. SRIVASTAVA, L. (2005). “Mobile phones and the evolution of social behavior.” Behavior & Information Technology, 24 (2), 111–129. TOWNSEND, A. M. (2000). “Life in the real-time city: Mobile telephone and urban metabolism.” Journal of Urban Technology, 7 (2), 85–104. VINCENT, J. (2004). “11–16 mobile: Examining mobile phone and ICT use amongst children aged 11 to 16.” Digital World Research Centre, 1–16. WALSH, S. P. & WHITE, K. M. (2006). “Ring, ring, why did I make that call? Mobile phone beliefs and behavior amongst Australian university students.” Youth Studies Australia, 25 (3), 49–57. WEILENMANN, A. & LARSSON, C. (2000). “Collaborative use of mobile telephones: A field study of Swedish teenagers.” paper presented at the Nordichi 2000 Conference, Stockholm, October 23–25, 2000. YEOW, P. H. P., YUEN, Y. Y. & CONNOLLY, R. (2008). “Mobile phone use in a developing country: A Malaysian empirical study.” Journal of Urban Technology, 15 (1), 85–116.

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S EBASTIAN H ÜBSCHMANN /RUTURAJ N. M ODY / C HRISTIAN S CHWARZ /T IM E DLER /R OLAND K ERSTEIN

The Augmented City Consumption at Change – Chances and Limitation of Urban Retail by the Digital Augmentation of Urban Space

1

Introduction

The interdisciplinary project Augmented City initially started as a student project at the University of the Arts Bremen in the international interuniversity graduate program of digital media. It merges competences of architecture, design and computer science tackling an innovative way by focusing two distinct but related fields of interest: Augmented space and urban retail. The project reflects upon upcoming technology in digital media and discusses its impact on socioeconomic structures in urban space. The available chapter is a partial result of the project and addresses activists, creatives and scientists close to disciplines such as media, urban- und cultural studies, architecture, urban geography und sociology as well as computer science, strategic marketing und brand communication. Although the theoretical background of the topic will be discussed and illustrated, the present chapter is not positioning itself as a guide or a textbook in which technical and artistic methods and solutions will be responded in all its particulars, rather than being a review and a basis for discussion of current tendencies and possibilities. In the future, we expect that a high data transfer and a ubiquitous technology presence within the urban space will alter the structure and quality of the future urban life. The conceptual and technical starting point of the project is a set of technologies, which allow us to collect and to hold data of physical attributes and behaviours of items, gadgets and individuals. This data allows as well to network, analyze and interpret miscellaneous sources with their attributes and processes as well as to make these extracted information sustainably available. This resource allows all possible ways of use to range between intelligent response and totalitarian control. Within this broad field the project

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is aimed to explore how the commercialization of urban space itself or of any kind of activity within the urban space is moving forward as a result of the deployment of existing and imminent localization and communication technologies (Global Positioning System (GPS), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Ubiquitous Computing, Wearable Computing). The present chapter focuses on two main topics: Consumption at change and the new role of the consumer on the one hand and the economy of space tending towards a commercialization of life in future urban spaces on the other. Changes are expected to affect the core economic structure of the city, in which the consumption of space and correspondingly the commercial evaluation of location (and property) is one of the most influential underlying principles. The process happens at a time, when the balance between the economy of space and other social and cultural processes has started to move. For some decades the western city has undergone a number of significant changes in which the focus of the city’s importance moved from hard facts (defence, industrial production…) to soft factors. Meaning and value of today’s city is increasingly based on representation, on images and is increasingly the product of a general cultural and social consent. Consequently at the far end of this development we observe high-end fashion flagship stores, commercial show rooms and a whole new breed of “commercial embassies” of globally active companies. They already occupy the most expensive sidewalks of the world. For an exclusive few, the costs of the city centre venue do not need to be balanced anymore with the cash flow on the counter. But doubts exist whether this model can be broadened to cushion the erosive effects that modern information and communication technology (ICT) has on the city’s economic system. Still the overwhelming majority of retail stores need to create their income on the spot. The entire economic model of the retail industry in the city centre is still based on this simple truth. The luxury experience and service of glamour shopping, the social affiliation in a brand community, the extravagance of seeing and being seen at the “right place and time” works only as long as the actual cost of this “experience” can be balanced by the sale of sufficiently “overpriced” material shopping items. One of the threats – and opportunities – of ICT is to erode that balance. New technologies which provide localized (yet remote) services, geographic orientation and boundless information anywhere, become easily accessible for the individual to make use

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of the city as the showroom and significantly save money, when it comes to the actual purchase in the end. Targeted sense and direction of the chapter is an appraisal of the current shift that the buyer more and more takes part in production- and distribution processes. With the support of new technologies customers become active cooperation partners. They become developer and producer, seller and advertiser and therewith as self-determined actors part of the value-added creating process in an unknown scale. The development is affecting the socioeconomic urban structures. The requirements for adaptation especially at the physical point of sale are investigated. The „inversion of the communication direction“ (Gerdes 2007) is a central point here. The recipient becomes „communicator“ (ibid.). Concepts for future shopping scenarios will be pictured, discussed and critically questioned. Beside a canvass of the illustration of the theoretical basic constructs, further chances and risk assessment of this development will be taken into account. The major focus of the discussion is the driving following question: How can the new role of the consumer be served by the urban retail? It will be shown, that digitally enhanced space is one of the key factors to solve this challenge of a future customer development. Furthermore it will be responded to the open question of how and where these augmented spaces will physically develop within the urban space/realm. The emergence affects the socioeconomic structures in urban space. This digital enhancement of socioeconomic urban space is closely connected to the perception and commercialization of our private und cultural life and will be critically addressed. Naturally, the concern will not be entirely with the city, but also with the people who will have to live in it. Inevitably the project and the examination in this area will touch and progress a number of the most infamous dystopias (anti-utopias): A scenario where humans are under permanent, seamless surveillance and control, where every action is being thoroughly analyzed to both push the level of permanent entertainment, ubiquitous advertising and total control of movement and action thought to a maximum.

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2

Theories and Basic Principles on Urban Socioeconomic and Technical infrastructure of the Augmented City

“The important waves of technological change are those that fundamentally alter the place of technology in our lives. What matters is not the technology itself, but its relationship to us.” (Weiser and Brown 1996)

2.1

Augmented City

The term “Augmented City”, furthermore, is open to different interpretations. In a strict sense, deriving from “Augmented Reality” (Manovich 2002) it hints at technologies supporting, generally through goggle-like devices, the superimposition on user’s visual field of a digital layer of information concerning the urban surroundings. In a broader sense, deriving from “Augmented Space” (Manovich 2002), generally hints at technologies pursuing an enrichment of the experience of the mobile user moving through the city, independently from devices and senses involved. This chapter adopts the broader definition of “Augmented City” as a particular case of “Augmented Space”.

2.2

Augmented Space, Augmented Reality und Virtual Reality

Lev Manovich coined the term “Augmented Space”. In his article “Learning from Prada” (Manovich 2002), he describes space, particular city space, as a possible place enriched by (digital) information. Basically, the term “Augmented Space” constitutes a new description. Augmented Space creates a new realm of visibility (cp. Schafaff 2005). Space will be enhanced with additional information that may have been chosen as relevant. That information can be stored in a central database to be kept there and sent at the time of access to the user’s field of vision overlaying the real world. While the previous decade in the nineties was described as a decade of the virtual where new virtual spaces were made possible with the help of computer technologies, the current decade appears to be about the physical. Physical space enriched with electronic and visual information (cp. Manovich 2002). This augmentation of space holds a wide range of demands. Unlike other monocausal technology related concerns, principles such as usability and adaptability, accessibility and finally aesthetics have to be considered. Within the last decade, the augmented space paradigm started to take over the declining virtual space paradigm. 366

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While through the nineties, virtual places as a non-local second reality sparked a lively discourse, pragmatic efforts now seem to tend to extended mobility and location based services, which support the presence and activity of individuals in real life. There is a significant trend of increasing digital augmentation of city spaces. Physical space is apparently more and more filled with electronic information. Computer and network technologies actively pervade our surroundings. Data flows from physical spaces (surveillance, monitoring, tracking) and into physical space (new media applications, computer screens) (cp. Manovich 2002). The increasing interleaving of media and architecture in the cityscape is more and more affecting the visual sphere of the urban public realm. During the last years we were able to notice a growing infrastructure of publicly located electronic displays that present digital information for city-dwellers. Without any reference to existing architecture, previous communication activities such as advertising and urban screens are expected to become much more pervasive and integrated into both, private and public space (cp. Struppek 2005). Furthermore, with the development of smaller and affordable technologies, basically every object may become a screen connected to a global network. These networked technologies are capable of delivering or extracting data from physical space. They make up the infrastructure of the digital layer. This layer produces, retrieves, spreads and sediments data. Overlaying physical space with additional information augments the urban realm. This new city space augmented by digital media is a challenge and opportunity not only for architects and designers, but also for everybody who spends his daily life in the urban society (cp. Manovich 2002). The immaterial layer, which is adding itself to already present cultural and commercial layers, allows for new perceptions of space. Currently, there is an increasing demand for solutions, especially handling the association and interaction of physical space and data. In order to facilitate a new space of possibilities, it is society’s task to effectively combine the different layers effectively. Unfortunately, technical and practical issues dominate the discussion on Augmented Reality and the awareness for possible cultural, social, political and economic consequences is little developed (cp. Schafaff 2006). As a result of the deployment of imminent localization and communication technologies (GPS, RFID, Ubiquitous Computing, Wearable Computing and Calm Technology) recently opened new possibilities concerning the development of augmented space. It creates the ability to deliver dynamic and interac-

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tive information to people navigating the city space. These possibilities were previously not available to traditional urban infrastructure and its socioeconomic space in which the visual field of a person is superimposed by dynamic and context-specific information. The emergence of augmented space within the physical urban environment has the potential to significantly influence and alter its meaning. Overlaying the physical city with an immaterial digital layer has very material consequences for social, cultural and economic realities. The augmentation of space with additional data is closely connected to the monitoring of space. Tracking and monitoring of the user delivers not only information to the user in space, it also extracts information about the user (cp. Manovich 2002). Thus, activities connected to the digital leave data traces behind. In the augmented city, people “are structurally forced to carry out their business and lives in such a way to generate data” (Becker 2005).

2.3

Ubiquitous Computing, Pervasive Computing and Ambient Intelligence

“Ubiquitous Computing” (Weiser 1991) is paradigmatically used for a term, strictly related to “Augmented Space“ (Manovich 2002), aiming at embedding computers into our everyday lives so thoroughly to allow them to be taken for granted. It envisions a future in which, instead of users having to adapt to computers and their language, computers are integrated as such into everyday’s objects and practices to become almost “invisible“. Making computers “invisible“, though, incurs risks making the underlying power and control relationships invisible as well (cp. Galloway 2003). Weiser, chief scientist of Xerox PARC, describes his imagination as so called post-modern computing, which turns away from the virtual and returns to the reality of our social and spatial environment. Such post-modern computing could be realized in the use of Ubiquitous Computing and Calm Technology (cp. Weiser 1991). Ubiquitous Computing takes into account the natural human environment and allows the computers themselves to vanish into the background (cp. ibid.). It is a return to letting things in the world be what they are, instead of reducing them to data or ‘virtualising’ them into illusions. Ubiquitous Computing honours the complexity of human relationships (cp. Rheingold 1994).

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2.4

Urban Space, Consumption und Retail

Already as early as 1903 Georg Simmel described the city in his discourse “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (Simmel 1903). He characterized the city as a focal point where all relevant social developments come together paradigmatically (ibid.). Hosting a dense social and economical structure, cities are the ideal case of a cultural aggregation. In the present chapter, the term „City“ (as part of the term „Augmented City“) refers to larger cities, especially pointing at the consumption-oriented, commercial and cultural structures of urban space. The highest density of these urban retail centres is usually located in the geographically or historical centre. As urban areas, hosting the most frequent cultural spaces, city centres are multifunctional spaces carrying out several important functions. The City centre is usually typified by a high concentration of retail and a variety of other commercial institutions. Normally not just consisting of stores, but also cafés, grocery stores, service centres of banks, insurances, cell phone contractors, hair cutter, even cinemas or other cultural institutions adding up to a healthy and ergonomically city retail area. Urban retail areas are a key factor for the image and attractiveness of a modern city. While the term „metropolis“ is used to point out at a specific region or alternatively for the purpose of specific function, the reference here is a cosmopolitan city with global meaning and a distinct socioeconomic shape. Concerning these attributes, cities offer multiple possibilities and appropriate audiences for a digital augmentation of urban spaces. They are potential strategic centres in the network of a global consumption movement to connect the virtual and the physical communication space. Such typical global consumption cities are for instance Tokyo, New York, Sydney, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Paris, London and Los Angeles, as well as increasingly Shanghai, Singapore, Berlin, Barcelona and Stockholm (cp. Superfuture). Against this background, the inner city centre is a place of local culture and identity describing the space where the society meets. The city centre carries out one of the most important function to merge economic and cultural processes of a city. These urban retail centres are a complex mixture of cultural and commercial interests.

3

Consumption at Change

With the digitalization of our environment the consumer more and more takes part in production and distribution processes. With the support of new tech-

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nologies, customers become active cooperation partners. They become developer and producer, seller and advertiser at the same time, and therewith part of the value adding creation process. In this sense, the current power shift is characterized by several phenomena, pushing the consumer to be a selfdetermined actor in an unknown scale (Gerdes 2007). The challenge with this shift phenomenon of the classic retail in the city centre of the urban areas is that they do not meet these requirements and loose attractiveness through their inflexibility. The companies are just producing themselves today without embedding any social or participating aspects. The solution can include the adaptation of the current power shift of the consumer behaviour. The strong need of participation and production asks for a reaction of the urban retail and therewith, a key factor in the concept of future urban retail platforms. This process is actively supported by a new tendency of mass customization with the connection of the strength of urban retail with the power of new technologies. Mass customization picks up the changing requirements of the consumer. In consequence to the initial question on the background how the new role of the consumer to become a self-determined actor can be served by the urban retail in a better way, the following part 2 is positioned: Consumption at change is going to picture the new role of the consumer as well as to discuss already existing implementations and their underlying principles. The following outlined cornerstones of this alteration build the foundation for the development of a new information and communication architecture of the future socioeconomic urban space.

3.1

The New Role of the Consumer

In times of increasing individualization, the need of social closeness and affiliation rises. The own identity consists of a multiplicity of elective affinities. This is also changing the consumer’s behaviour (cp. Wippermann 2007). The consumer has given up his traditional passive role. He is not the last element in the chain anymore, but rather wants to take part in decision-making and creation of the goods actually consumed (cp. Gerdes 2007). Currently, most of the producers do not exceed the offering of their own online platforms. They rather transfer the content of existing catalogues without adding additional services. Also at the physical point of sale, the technical possibilities are not exploited (cp. Gerdes 2007).

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Under the aspect, that still the overwhelming majority of urban retail need to create their income on the spot, the urban retail need urgently to prepare for the altered needs of the consumer. The real shopping experience gains importance despite or rather by the potential of e-commerce. The point of sale becomes aware of his inherent power. Actually it is a renaissance of the point of sale. Nevertheless, it is important to fit the expectations of the consumer asking for sensuality, participation and codetermination.

3.2

Augmented Shopping

Consumption is taking place on various channels in parallel; consequently brands have to appear multilayered. The point of sale is focusing on its typical strength compared to e-commerce and defends its position by involving the consumer in its selling process. This renaissance of the point of sale is actively supported by a new tendency of mass customization. Digital information and communication technologies first enable these new shopping concepts at the point of sale. In contrast to the virtual world augmented space is an enrichment of our environment with electronic and visual information. It operates as a merger of digital and physical space with the potential to take over an important function connecting these today as far as possible separately handled processes. In the world of the augmented space, the user provides the content in the form of information; the recipient becomes “communicator” (Gerdes 2007). The changing perception and use of the Internet in the course of the web 2.0 can be assigned to the real life. Beside complex methods to analyze and interpret instances of the surrounding, a solution which is easy to realize could be given in near future: If the retail companies replace the current barcode system to use Radio Frequency Identification instead, the virtual and the real could be merged to one augmented reality. The retail organizations today realize the enormous potential and benefit of this technology and the possibilities to offer integrated processes for the consumer. This highly controversial discussed process, the possibility to record sales profiles and criteria to lasting data sets has to be seen critical when introducing this new technology. Personal data are already collected in popular present web 2.0 portals like MySpace (Myspace:Myspace.com), YouTube (Youtube: youtube.com) and Flickr (Flickr: Flicker.com) as well as blogs, forums and other communities. Despite of this fact the online society currently seems to have generally ac-

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cepted and keeps providing private data to be used for individual profiles. In a scientific study of the University of Münster, Germany, and the Frankfurt based strategic consultancy Ogilvy Brains, it is discovered that 90 percent of all consumers in Germany own at least one store card. Indeed just 30 percent make use of it regularly, but this frequent use is already enough to extract a large amount of data including detailed sales samples of each individual (Kirchhoff). This tendency suggests a willingness of the consumer to be ready to tolerate a certain data collection, compilation and further usage of these data sets to benefit from the advantages and fulfilments of his changing needs. One example to fit the need of the consumer to exchange information could be solved naturally through the use of RFID tags instead of barcodes in the urban retail. So far, the consumer was researching and exchanging information participating in online communities and services as well as to be present in the real sensual world of shopping afterwards and consequently requires an improvement of this closely linked process. If there would be the chance to access this information directly on the spot by the product itself, the shopping experience would be extended by a key factor: the context sensitive enrichment of linked information and real product, an augmented space with the merge of reality and virtuality. The relationship to the brand would be strengthened by the direct access to extended information of the product and the integration of the customer. He could act independently and access product information such as origin, availability and price range as well as user opinions and test reports. Stores such as Prada New York, USA, and the Metro Future Store in Düsseldorf, Germany, already implemented prototypical instalments. Unlike local portable product scanning systems with fairly limited functionality to be used for the duration of the display, the usage of a personal device to access, store and administrate the collected data would be essential. The communication of the consumer through online networks without any physical relationship could be assigned to a real scenario to aspire an extension. If the customer would have the chance, to access a unique identification of a product and linked data in a global system directly at the spot, the consequence would be a location dependent and product based information system, which can be compared to the structure of the web 2.0. The solution for such a system is already available. Nokia introduced an adequate mobile phone back in the year 2004 to access such accessible information. The product supported near field communication (NFC), an emerging radio frequency identification technology. It could have significant implications for the mobile trade (M372

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Commerce). Current mobile phones are increasingly used as general computer systems. We are soon reaching the point where mobile phones could even act as servers (cp. Johan Wikman, Ferenc Dosa and Mikko Tarkiainen Nokia Research Centre Helsinki) Beside the negative aspects the transparency of the shopping activity of the consumer by using RFID and NFC these technologies provide a lot of opportunities. An intelligent and responsible usage could keep the customer in good and current status regarding quality of the offer, availability and variation. It is just a question of time that the barcode still used in the urban retail is going to be replaced by RFID technology as it is already implemented in logistic systems at airports or passports. Cost-intensive factors of the classic store set-up such as central cash points, security systems and complex accounting systems would be replaced or just left out. An imbalance would occur, if the consumer would not have the chance to be part (of and benefit from) of that extension. The direct access to product data would merge communication and distribution channels making information available for the customer where it is actually needed. While the social networking platform MySpace introduced MySpace Mobile, a virtual portable network to be available anywhere, the German based Telekom supports Qiro (Qiro: myqiro.de), a location based mobile service merging local mapping and social networking. Consumption, which is currently more and more happening in parallel on various channels, would get a new opportunity to be available through just one. Once independently handled, the communication channels would be symbiotically merged to complementary units. The consumer would get a transparent and more flexible handling of the product. In continuation of these thoughts the unique identification of products could offer a system with independent use of its local occurrence. Accordingly, a mobile device would access the implemented unique number in the RFID-chip. While the current solutions are made to work in an operating range within the physical boundaries of a store, the customer would be able to navigate independently to access any product and information offer to save, collect and administrate personal lists. These lists make up the shopping card of the new customer. To finally receive the product the customer could easily place an order to make the product available at any physical point. As digital product example, as a passive urban advertisement, could be itself a point of sale then. The customer as the new point of sale or rather the customer as an extension of the point of sale could manage to create a completely new information and communication architecture to distribute

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and place goods and information. The customer finally closes the discrepancy between virtual web 2.0 and reality resulting in a naturally digitally enhanced urban space. This possibility could be soon available for the consumer in real life to create an augmented shopping experience. The agency IconNicholson initiated a project for renowned designer Nanette Lepore to show how to merge first possibilities of virtuality and real shopping experience. Through a web cam in the fitting room of a store, friends of the customer are able to advise him using instant messaging and e-mail. In this case IconNicholson is talking about the concept of Social Retailing™ (Icon Nicholson: Iconnicholson.com). The principles of the web 2.0 are assigned to the real shopping world (cp. Nachtwey 2007). Technically, such a digitally enhanced space is realized by using a transmitter (RFID label with unique ID code). It is implemented in the product or its instance that connects through Near Field Communication. This ID is accessed by a (mobile) device, which is connected online with a central data system linked with further content being globally available. The concept of augmented shopping describes the possibility of accessing and providing context-sensitive product or service information bidirectional through a digitally enhanced space. The decentralized information architecture of augmented shopping causes a shift of the point of sale in urban space. By such, this shift is a bypass of the intermediary trade directly to production or distribution. It encourages the urban retail to rethink and restructure their own space to fit the new expectations of the consumer.

3.3

The Decentralization of the Point of Sale

What happens if it would be possible to access a product instance directly by using a mobile device anywhere? Or even being promoted as a server? So far, there are only a few concepts out there for the urban retail, which rather implement new technologies than asking for the need of its potential consumers. If the consumer would also act as a server, products and information would be available outside the fairly limited boundaries of a sales room. The consumer as a point of sale would force interpersonal exchange and merge existing virtual and real channels. In the following, concepts will be outlined to directly connect the consumer to products and information. These concepts withdraw the intermediary trade its actual function just superficially. They rather carry on the process at the point of sale to focus on its new role as trade and product stage. 374

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Compared to a central operating system, the advantages of a decentralized peer-to-peer network as an extension or alternative are its equivalency to take up and to offer services. This deregulation of the role allocation could be assigned to the urban shopping field. The consumer is going to be integral part of the distribution network and benefits as a reseller, getting a share of the disposal. While a central point of sale due to its fixed location is dependent of opening hours and available resources, it changes in a natural fashion to a decentralized information architecture assigning itself to the consumer as well as to temporary communications. These information and communication structure would be similar to a hybrid peer-to-peer system. The consumer could adopt different roles. A peer is connected to a global network with the chance to access other peers to share data (peer-to-peer). One or more servers centrally distribute the underlying information. The information in such communication architecture is available in real time and could be user generated. Clients are all available peers at a given time in immediate geographical distance. Clients could act as peers and share information. These providers are potential point of sales. With urban advertising channels like billboards, posters and screen, they could make up the infrastructure of a new distribution network. The communication is bidirectional. The consumer accesses a digital identification, which is linked to information, stored on a global server. This information could be a product offer, a newsgroup or an online community. The development has to be clearly defined as an extension of the urban retail: the intermediary trade will be bypassed by this decentralization but is not in danger of extinction. The point of sale realizes its power and further progresses. The merge of real and virtual solutions for communication does not include the extinction of the discrete sales channels. Depending on the currently changing requirements of customers, solutions based on actually available technology and structures are used. The symbiosis of the channels aims at more than the sum of its single elements. It is an extension of the distribution possibilities with a direct integration of the consumer. The customer will be involved into active marketing measures. He influences productand distribution processes to become an active co-operation partner. But also the real decentralized shopping needs a structure. The adaptation is important for both, the consumer as well as the urban retail. The future urban trade concepts could benefit more than ever, if they would react accordingly. Likewise the web 2.0 phenomena, they have to offer a platform to support the activity of naturally developing trade communities. Beside temporary architec-

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ture like installations, product staging and exhibitions it will be urban space, which is explicitly dedicated for certain clients. A meeting point for likeminded people. A Nike Flagship-Store for instance has insufficient reproductions of various sports fields in their urban stores, rather than integrating their store into a sufficient sports field where all activities can be accomplished in their whole range. The point of sale would be integrated in the environment by staging products but also as natural process with the consumer himself.

3.4

The meaning of urban space

The commercial exchange of goods is not bound to any central physical or virtual space anymore. The customer of the future buys when, where und how he wants. The distribution structure is decentralized. Beside classic sales rooms, goods will be sold directly through advertising efforts and media or through the customer himself. What will happen to the classic sales room by digital augmentation, if shopping becomes independent and the buyer becomes a reseller? How does this affect the socioeconomic urban space? This development indeed is a challenge for today’s urban retailer. They have to surrender this process to concentrate on their real inherent strengths. Beside the sensual experience and service offers, it is particularly the allocation of space for customers. It is more important than ever before to create room for experience and gatherings as well as to stage products. Whereas the product search und testing belongs to the real shopping experience, the pure selling process seems to release itself from the point of sale. The customer is searching for beneficial possibility afterwards to buy the product. The urban retail space becomes a social space, to meet and to exchange. The urban retail has to offer a platform for that. Future stores have to stage and present. The physical product staging and the sensual experience are key factors for the buying decision. The new Hamburg, Germany based Nivea Haus (cp. Nivea: Das Nivea Haus) is exemplary in this context. In an urban wellness centre the company Beiersdorf AG presents its famous Nivea product family in a completely new fashion. On three floors the visitor gets massage, cosmetics and consultancy. The brand Nivea becomes uniquely perceptible. The purpose of the traditional urban space changes with the implemented technology and the control the customer is getting. It is the mode of usage that will be different in a natural way. This has to be taken into account while thinking the future concept of urban retail solutions. The point of sale is less bound to physical 376

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space. But, we do not expect that the trade will not spread randomly over the city just because of this new ‘mobility’ of the distribution of goods. The customer is still in search for inspiration, information and support in terms of his buying interest. We expect customers to meet in trade communities, which gather at specific locations, trade community centres. These communities are a natural process of future urban trade. Instead of just providing goods, companies offer a platform for such communities and therewith for exchange product transactions. The physical point of sale retires while the experience and the stage come to the fore. Trade communities reference locations, where people meet because of reasons relevant for shopping. They share, search and exchange about products and get inspired. A dedicated company, for instance a converted café, could serve these spaces. This café could also be a specialized provider of distinct information and products for a individual group of interest which may be sponsored by other external companies which extend their distribution platform.

4

Opportunities and Limitations of the Augmented City

4.1

Commercialization of urban life: Limitation and Risk Assessment of Augmented Shopping

Today we begin to understand that in the city of the future digital media (information, communication,…) will permeate and strongly influence the aesthetic, the actuality, and the fundamental conceptual understanding of space. At the same time we start to sense that both aspects – namely the influence of digital information on the construction of spatial reality and the influence of ‘space’ as a concept on the structure of digital information – are interlinked in a complex bilateral relation. The connecting line between space i.e. spatiality and digital information is one of the principle axis’ of the “augmented city” topic. On one side it leads to a renewal of the understanding, the aesthetic, the function and ultimately the actuality of the (digitally augmented) physical space. On the other side the connecting axis leads deeply into the fundamental conceptions of digital design: spatiality as a metaphor, as a fundamental structural framework for the construction of language in general has now, since the adoption of the graphical user interface, become the intuitive core principle for the aesthetic and functional structure of the vast major-

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ity of existing computer interfaces. The rise of the digitally augmented space within the physical urban realm has the potential to significantly influence and alter its meaning. An augmented space is able to transform into a digital image; an instance of the physical space amplified by additional information. It sets up an infrastructure, which allows, to access context-relevant data. Information is a primary resource of the new economy. Information profiles are profitable usable and easy to manipulate and exploited. The ownership of data means power und the individual looses control. Against this background the control of access to digital data und therewith to literary property is an essential task of urban politics and economy in the augmented city. The risk of reduction of autonomy as well as the risk of undermining of civil rights as a result of constant surveillance and control requires a high awareness about individual unalienable digital data bodies (cp. Becker 2005). At this point the concept characterized by ubiquitous or pervasive shopping, where every person becomes a potential point of sale and therewith an actor of commercial exchange, describes a gloomy vision of the future: an anti utopian vision of extreme commercialization of life where every situation of activity and communication becomes a potential carrier of commercial exchange. Despite the fact, that the urban realm is already widely enhanced with digital media and meant to be used in the current form, the prerequisites for an augmented reality are not ready to be build for mass production yet. In the course of inventing always newer application possibilities of augmented space, it is finally just a question of time.

4.2

The Relation of Image, Space, Architecture, Media and its Meaning

The fundamental potential of urban space, its quintessence, is communication, meeting other people and exchange. A traditional perspective now renewed. Not instead but amplified by the potential of digital technologies. The outcome disproves the common perception that digital technologies decrease direct interpersonal relationships with the rediscovery of the urban “forum”, the “agora”. Meeting becomes the root of both, economic development and political emancipation. A happy end? Indeed, the new attractiveness of the direct interpersonal contact must be seen critical, because not really things have changed, but their real meaning. What looks like a typical bar or a coffee lounge or a theatre foyer becomes something different! It is an arrival back in 378

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the city centre – the starting point of the quest – and yet somewhere entirely different. Both society and the city to which people look at are different from what we are used today. Therefore it would be a mistake to only emphasize the architecture of the new commercial centre, because it might be less about the architecture or function of the place itself, but rather the mode of usage. The stage looks the same, just the plot has changed. Private life, cultural life and business have merged and have become inseparable.

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References CHRISTIANSEN, F. (29.06.2007) Der Strichcode wird 30. Abgesang auf die Weltsprache des Handels – bald kommen die Funk-Etiketten. In: Weser-Kurier. D OHMANN, A. Windzerzaust und tiefgefroren. In: PAGE 05.07. Konsum 2.0. ECKARDT, F./ZSCHOCKE, M. (eds.) (2006). Media City. FOUCAULT, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (edited by Colin Gordon). New York: Pantheon Books. HEDERLEIN, A. Interview mit Jutta Nachtwey. In: PAGE 05.07. Konsum 2.0. KRIES, M., TRANSFORM-BERLIN E.V. (ed.) (2006). Designcity. Designmai 2006. Design for Urban Space and the Design City Discussion. L A BIENNALE DE VENEZIA (ed.), Cities. Architecture and Society. 10th International Architecture Exhibition MCLUHAN, H., M. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of the Typographic Man. University Toronto (Canada) Press. MCLUHAN H., M. (1964). The medium is the message. Understanding Media: The extension of a man. New York (USA): McGraw Hill. MANOVICH, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA): MIT Press. MUMFORD, L. (1937). What is a City, In: The City Cultures Reader, Second Edition, The Routledge Urban Reader Series, 28–32. NACHTWEY, J. Konsumtrip 2.0. In: PAGE 05.07. Konsum 2.0. SCHAFAFF J. (2006). Augmented Reality – Ein neues Reich der Sichtbarkeit. In: A. GEIGER (ed.). Imaginäre Architekturen. Berlin: Reimer. SIMMEL, G. (1903). The Metropolis and Mental Life. In: MILES, M., HALL, T., B ORDEN, I. (ed.). The City Cultures Reader, Second Edition. Routledge: London. TOFFLER , ALVIN (1980). The Third Wave. Random House Inc. WARNER WILLIAM B. (2001). Computable Culture and the Closure of the Media Paradigm – Review of: Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. University of California, Santa Barbara (USA), 2002. WILSKE, J./ERLEN, A. (eds.) (2002). Mein erstes Shopping-Buch. Verlag der Buchhandlung König.

References online ADIDAS: Adidas. http://www.press.adidas.com/DesktopDefault.aspx/tabid-11/16_read7162/, (accessed August, 12 2007). APPLE: Mac OSX. http://www.apple.com/de/macosx/, (accessed August, 13 2007).

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BECKER , K. ET AL. Data bodies (online). Word information. Available from: http://www.world-information.org/wio/infostructure/100437611761, 2005 (accessed August, 14 2007). BURTON: Series 13. http://www.series13.com, (accessed August, 13 2007). BURTON: Burton. http://www.burton.com, (accessed August, 14 2007). FLICKR: Flicker.com. http://www.flickr.com, (accessed August, 12 2007). GALLOWAY, A.: Resonances and Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City (online). Draft. Available from: http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/mobile/ cult_studies_draft.pdf, 2003 (accessed August, 14 2007). ICON NICHOLSON. http://www.iconnicholson.com, (accessed October, 2007). KIRCHHOFF, PETRA: Wenig Bonus für viel Information. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. http://www.faz.net/s/RubC8BA5576CDEE4A05AF8DFEC92E288D64/ Doc~E1F2F3C3DFD2A464A85F13A20624E97DF~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.htm l, 2007 (accessed August, 16 2007). MANOVICH, L.: The Poetics of Augmented Space: Learning from Prada. Available on the internet from: http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/augmented_space.doc, 2002 (accessed August, 14 2007). MYSPACE: Myspace.com. http://www.myspace.com, (accessed August, 12 2007). NIKE: Nike ID. http://www.nikeid.com, (accessed August, 13 2007). NIVEA: Das Nivea Haus. http://ext.nivea.de/specials/haus/haus.php, (accessed August,17 2007). QIRO: myqiro.de. http://www.myqiro.de, (accessed December, 27 2007). SEPULVEDA-SANDOVAL, P.: Digital Shelters (online). Royal College of Art London. Available form: http://www.interaction.rca.ac.uk.research/ projects_card/shelters/text.html, 2001 (accessed August, 14 2007). STRUPPEK, M.: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society (online). Available from: http://culturbase.org/home/urbanscreens/text.html, 2005 (Accessed August, 14 2007). SUPERFUTURE. http//:www.superfuture.com, (accessed August, 20 2007). WEISER , M.: The Computer fort he 21st Century. Scientific American (online). Available from: http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html, 1991 (accessed August, 14 2007). WEISER , M. AND SEELY BROWN, J.: The Coming Age of Calm Technologiy (online), Available from: http://www.ubiq/hypertext/weiser/acmfuture2endnote.htm, 1996 (accessed August, 14 2007). YOUTUBE: youtube.com. http://www.youtube.com, (accessed August, 12 2007). ZMK: YOU[ser]: The Century of the Consumer http://www.zkm.de/you, (accessed August, 12 2007).

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M ARTIJN DE WAAL

From BLVD Urbanism towards MSN Urbanism: Locative media and urban culture

The goal of this article is to explore developments in locative and mobile media and connect these with reflections on ‘urban culture’. What could the introduction of locative and mobile media and the cultural practices through which they are adapted mean for urban culture? To get a grasp on these developments I have coined eight ‘urbanisms’ or particular manifestations of urban culture that are arising or could emerge from the social practices through which mobile and locative media are appropriated in society: MySpace Urbanism, Google Earth Urbanism, iPhone Urbanism, Starbucks Urbanism, Long Tail Urbanism, Ebay Urbanism and MSN Urbanism. For the sake of argument I will contrast these with BLVD Urbanism, a synthesis of a range of theories on urban culture in the pre-digital modern metropolis. Before I start, I wish to express a word of caution. Many locative and mobile media services are in their infancy. If they already do work, they hardly ever offer the seamless experience that their commercial promoters usually promise. Although this is a very important point to make, in this article I will try to analyze current developments, research findings and trends. This approach is taken not to boost share prices of the telecom-companies and handset makers, but rather to start thinking through in an early stage what the cultural consequences of these developments could be. Another important point I wish to make is to warn against technological determination. These new technologies do not have an outside impact on society. It is through social practice embedded in an existing (urban) culture that these new technologies acquire their meaning and produce new cultural practices and perhaps new urbanisms. And last, the labels that I have chosen for these new urbanisms mostly refer to commercial brands. Again, this is not meant as an endorsement of these brands or their ‘coolness’, but rather meant to emphasize the fact that many of the new hybrid infrastructures and technologies are not public goods; rather it is mostly through commercialized services that we start to experience the city.

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1

BLVD Urbanism

What exactly do we mean with urban culture? Although the term is used in different contexts, what many definitions have in common is the idea of the city as an ‘organization of differences’. Starting with the Chicago and German School, urbanists have pointed out that the modern city brings together diverse groups of people with diverse backgrounds and different identities, lifestyles and goals. As Robert Park wrote: ‘It is characteristic of city life that all sorts of people meet and mingle together who never fully comprehend one another. The anarchist and the club man, the priest and the Levite, the actor and the missionary who touch elbows on the street still live in totally different worlds.’ (Sennett, 1969: 117). Yet at the same time, others noted that urban culture it is not a simple antagonism of different groups with their particular spatial strategies and practices. Individuals can belong to different groups, loyalties change, (group) identities themselves are unstable and new identities can emerge through confrontation between groups or through lack of social control that had characterized traditional societies. ‘No single group has the undivided allegiance of the individual,’ wrote Louis Wirth. ‘The groups with which he is affiliated do not lend themselves readily to a simple hierarchical arrangement. By virtue of his different interests arising out of different aspects of social life, the individual acquires membership in widely divergent groups, each of which functions only with reference to a certain segment of his personality’ (Sennett, 1969). Urban culture can be understood as the ‘interface’ – both geographically and culturally – that organizes these differences, that makes the city liveable, and that confronts these differences and/or reconciles them into a whole. It encompasses both top-down approaches of space-making (city-planning, policing, law-making), as well as bottom-up ones of appropriation and social spatial processes. So, urban culture is a complicated concept that deals with the relation between urban space and social and political processes such as identity formation and relations between groups. It is about ‘who’ lives ‘where’, and ‘who’ makes the ‘where’ and how the ‘where’ makes the ‘who’, and how the different ‘whos’ relate to each other. In philosophy two concepts are related to the idea of urban culture. The first is ‘Wohnen’ or ‘Dwelling.’ Wohnen is not just about the address on one’s driver’s licence or tax forms. Wohnen is about the process of making or feeling oneself at home, the process in which local structures are appropriated or 384

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exerted to express or strengthen one’s (group) identity. My interpretation of Wohnen comes close to this one, given by Norberg-Schulz: ‘Der Mensch wohnt wenn er sich in einer Umgebung orienterien und mit ihr identifizieren kann, kurz, wenn er seine Umgebung als sinnvol erlebt. Wohnen bedeutet deshalb mehr als Unterkunft’ (One can only say to dwell (wohnen) somewhere, when in an environment one can find one’s bearings, and one can identity with one’s surroundings, or shorter: when one can experience his environment as meaningful. Thus dwelling is more than just having a roof over one’s head). (Quoted in Hennig, 2006: 126) . When we look at the literature, there are different conceptions of Wohnen (Boomkens, 1998, Boomkens, 2006, De Cauter, 2004, Soja, 2000). One is a defensive one that is often linked to the suburbs, or the bourgeois-ethos of locking oneself up in a spatial capsule. According to this critique the subject tries to remake the world after its own image, trying to fully control it, overriding the contingency that is so characteristic of urban life. ‘Many suburbanites’, writes René Boomkens, ‘revel in a cult of quasi-authentic dwelling, exchanging the dynamics of modernism for a static sense of being guarded from [these dynamics]’ (Boomkens, 2006: 98) . The second type of Wohnen is the ability to feel or make yourself at home in exactly that contingent urban condition. It can be traced back to theories by Walter Benjamin, who wrote „The street becomes a dwelling for the flaneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls” (Quoted in Varnelis and Friedberg, 2007). The next concept that is related to urban culture is the German term Offentlichkeit, or the public sphere. This is the place and process of confrontation and exchange, of battles of representation, of clashes, innovation, political organization and cultural development. Also the idea of a public sphere can be understood in two different ways: some theories interpret the public sphere as a place for rational debate. This interpretation relies on Habermas’ idea of the public sphere, where citizens irrespective of their background (as long as they weren’t women or other excluded groups that Habermas overlooked) could engage in discussion with one another. Other theories on public culture acknowledge a public sphere that operates on a more subconscious level. It is a place not so much for rational debate, but for bodily performance, for encounter and confrontation with all kinds of means. As Amin and Trhift write: ‘The human body … is usually conceived as a centred cognitive being, as the chief source of agency in the city, setting plans and carrying them out. But in fact

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very few bodily actions require motive (attribution of intent, justification, accounting) Nearly all the activity of the human body takes place in what Lakoff and Johnson call the cognitive unconscious’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002). Public space thus becomes a stage where subjects acquire an identity through performance. In his interesting essay Drag Spaces Neil Leach refers to Judith Butlers theory on performance to make a similar point. According to him performance is a matter of remixing (bodily) citations and quotes that subjects copy from others through mimetic processes of confrontation and identification in public space. ‘Butler figures identity not as something interior – an essentializing given – but rather as something exterior, a discursive external effect. It is borne of acts, gestures and enactments that are performatively repeated’ (Leach, 2005: 175) . Most of these theories on urban culture are not neutral analysis but rather ethical stances. Take for instance this quote from Richard Sennett: ‘Cities have the potential to make us more complex human beings. A city is a place where people can learn to live with strangers, to enter into the experiences and interests of unfamiliar lives. Sameness stultifies the mind; diversity stimulates and expands it’ (Sennett, 2001). In other words, it is imperative that we all become flaneurs and embrace an active public culture. I will call this stance BLVD-urbanism, after the Hausmannian Parisian Boulevards that form one of the main icons of the centralized modernist metropolis, home to Habermassian coffeehouses and Benjaminian flaneurs, connecting the public space of the inner city with the more private dwelling area’s on the outskirts, while also stressing the powers of the central state in the process of place making. To sum up, BLVD-urbanism is the idea of the metropolis as a place where people with different identities live together. Traditional ways of life are exchanged for a more free floating modern experience that is both exciting and threatening. The public spaces of a city play an important part, these are where differences are confronted with each other. A well functioning urban society cannot do without these public spaces. As Boomkens writes, ‘Thanks to its public places, the city creates its own sphere in which individuals are more than just subjects of a particular state and at the same time also more than just anonymous and abstract actors in a worldwide market economy. … The city creates a community of strangers’ (Boomkens, 2006: 114). Yet, the mere existence of these spaces is not enough. It also requires that citizens do not entrench in their defensive dwellings. They should actively take part in a public culture. 386

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Many discussions on contemporary urban culture claim that this BLVDurbanism is under attack. The advent of the automobile, television, suburbanisation, the internet, neoliberalism, individualization, globalization have remade the city into a different entity: it is now an automobile dependent polynucleated amalgam of edge cities, more a product of the logic of the space of flows than that of a localized culture, full with uprooted cosmopolites, either cosmopolites by choice such as the creative class, or cosmopolites by necessity, such as the many migrants who have flocked to these cities (De Waal, 2007). Commercial forces turn public spaces into privatized non-spaces while consumers have now replaced citizens. As Sennett has written in The Uses of Disorder, urban culture is no longer about a ‘display of difference’ but a ‘play of difference’ (Sennett, 1970), that goes hand in hand with indifference towards each other. To put in the phrases of zeitgeist magazine Wired: Public culture is ‘tired’, defensive dwelling has become ‘wired’. The scope of this essay doesn’t allow an in depth analysis of all these claims, but it should suffice here that there are four different critiques. The current metropolis can be characterized by a shift from citizens to consumers, from public space to private space, from space to non-space and from inclusive community to excluding ‘tribes’. Thus Manuel Castells concludes one of his essays on urban culture as follows: ‘Cities have always been communication systems, based on the interface between individual and communal identities and shared social representations. It is their ability to organize this interface materially in forms in rhythms in collective experience and communicable perception that makes cities producers of sociability, and integrators of otherwise destructive creativity … How to safeguard this Culture of Cities into a New Culture of Cities, geared towards the information age that may or may not create urban tribes rather than citizens?’ (Susser, 2002: 382) .

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Locative Media

In the following part of this essay I will examine the part locative and mobile media might play in our contemporary and future urban culture. I will interpret the term ‘locative media’ in a very broad sense, in the same way as we did in the conference text for The Mobile City conference organized in Rotterdam in February 2008 (De Waal and De Lange, 2007). Insightful of our approach there was a quote by Julian Bleecker:

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“Locative media that is of most immediate concerns is that made by those who create experiences that take into account the geographic locale of interest, typically by elevating that geographic locale beyond its instrumentalized status as a ‘latitude longitude coordinated point on earth’ to the level of existential, inhabited, experienced and lived place.” (Bleecker and Knowlton, 2006) From this definition it is hard to make a true division between locative media and the broader category of mobile media. As different researchers (Bull, 2000), (Ito et al., 2006) have pointed out, mobile media such as the mobile phone or the personal stereo are often used in a way described by Bleecker: creating or appropriating a geospatial experience. More abstractly, Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis see two categories of locative media. One is annotative – these are media technologies that allow its users to virtually tag (and consequently filter) the real world. The second is phenomenological – tracing the action of a subject in the world (Varnelis and Tuters, 2006). Another way to categorize these new media is between media that take an actual spatial context of a communicative practice as its point of departure (for instance a ‘mobile city guide’ that gives touristic information about a particular location) and media that provide a virtual but spatially organized interface related to an actual geography for communicative and informational practices (for instance a Google Map that is connected with traffic or crime information or live feeds from local weblogs). Combining these different points of view, we can differentiate between (at least) six ways in which locative and mobile media can transform our notions of urban culture. • The use of spatially organized interfaces to information databases, for instance Google Earth-mash ups. • The annotation of geographic places (and the attribution, construction and contestation of maps, meaning, and territories) • The mapping or tracing of objects and persons and the use of locative media as tools for micro-coordination such as real time and real space social networking. • The use of locative media as filtering devices: either selecting relevant places from the perspective of the subject. Or the other way around: systems that grant or refuse access to certain places. 388

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• The use of locative media as a ‘space making devices’, altering the experience of a certain space through its use. For instance mobile phones or personal stereo’s or urban screens. • The issue of address: framing space and/or subjects in a certain way, providing us with ontologic metaphors, starting to understand our subjectivities in other ways. In what follows I will try to connect this perspective on locative and mobile media with the concept of urban culture and especially the notions of dwelling and public sphere. The basic assumptions of what I have called BLVD Urbanism are used as ideal-typical frames of reference. Not necessarily because I underwrite all the claims, of BLVD Urbanism, but to get a better grasp on what is different and what is not. Of course the risk of this approach is that we end up with urbanisms described as ‘horseless carriages’, or rather simplistic remediations of the old, rather than coming up with terms that accurately describe phenomena that are perhaps truly new. I will try to avoid this by summarizing the most striking shifts in urban culture in the last paragraph called MSN Urbanism.

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Myspace-Urbanism

As I have mentioned above, in many discourses about urban culture, the city is described as a stage for identity formation. The city is a stage for bodily performances through which subjects shape their identities. In her book Goeie Buren houden zich op d’r eigen Dutch sociologist Talja Blokland shows how this process used to take place in the Rotterdam neighbourhood Hillesluis (Blokland, 2005). She describes how people used their daily routinely interactions in their neighbourhood to discern between different social categories. Performed behaviour of co-citizens showed them whether they were like themselves, or whether they belonged to other social groups. ‘We identify ourselves socially by continuously comparing ‘us’ with ‘them’. (Blokland, 2005), Blokland writes. The behaviour of people that ‘we’ like to identify with also provides a repertoire of behavioural codes, while the behaviour of ‘them’ could also function as frame of reference of how ‘we’ do not behave. Blokland uses the concept of ‘public familiarity’ (minted by Fischer (Fischer, 1982)), to describe this process. ‘[public] familiarity’ provides knowledge, and we can use this knowledge to

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make social distinctions.’ (Blokland, 2005: 92). Carlinde Adriaanse also uses the concept of public familiarity in a slightly different way: ‘Public familiarity emerges from recurrent encounters between people in public space that enables them to assess who they can trust and who they can’t.’ (Adriaanse, 2006). She uses a quote by Jane Jacobs to make her point: ‘‘The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts.’ (Adriaanse, 2006). Such ‘trust’ or ‘public familiarity’ can only arise when there are sufficient ‘social seams’ (another term by Jacobs) where people with different backgrounds can run into each other routinely. Exactly that is one of often stated problems of our current era urban culture. Blokland has described how through many different processes the neighbourhood has lost its position as a collective stage or as meaningful social seams. Due to increased mobility, the neighbourhood has become a less important stage for everyday life. Second, lives of neighbourhood dwellers are lived less synchronously than before. One of the issues up for debate is the question whether online and locative social networks can be understood as remediations of processes of public familiarity, social identification and trust-building. Can we speak of a nascent Myspace Urbanism? When looking for processes of public familiarity or trust building, it doesn’t take a huge conceptual leap to go from urban public space to online social networks. As Dana Boyd writes: ‘because the digital world requires people to write themselves into being, profiles provide an opportunity to craft the intended expression through language, imagery and media. Explicit reactions to their online presence offer valuable feedback. The goal is to look cool and receive peer validation.’ (Varnelis and Friedberg, 2007). Boyd describes how American teenagers use their profile pages to perform their identity. And through all sorts of widgets, they can also publicize their favourite music, their agenda, their favourite films etc. Thus Boyd concludes that ‘hanging out has moved online’ (Varnelis and Friedberg, 2007). That however seems only part of the story. Online social networks also show many links to real life activities, for example through Facebook’s ‘Status Updates’ that enables users to tell their contacts what (and where) they are currently doing. A series of new mobile services has emerged around this idea: microblogging services like Twitter, or Jaiku let you update your ‘status’ from your mobile phone, services like Plazes or Bliin let your contacts know where you are in the city. It thus becomes possible to watch our contacts – or at least their representations on social networks – closely as their life unfolds. We can 390

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identify ourselves with their lifestyles, and use their behaviour as a series of cues for our own practices. Our lives may indeed be less synchronous both in time and space, microblogging makes the process of public familiarity and socialisation distributed. These developments leave a lot of questions. The first is how ‘public’ this hybrid version of public familiarity really is, since we usually only follow the lives of friends and friends of friends. On most social networking sites it is even impossible to get acquainted with some-ones performance without authorization of that person. Will we thus be able to learn the subtleties in the behaviour of ‘others’ through social networking? Another issue related to MySpace Urbanism regards social control. Is our increased visibility to friends and peers either liberating or increasing social control? Castells and others write how the mobile phone has changed socialization structures. Young people are less influenced by their parents, and more by their peers; the process of socialization has become more horizontal. (Castells and a.o., 2007: 141). In The Neherlands, similar findings have been reported in Jaarboek ICT en Sameleving: De Digitale Generatie (De Haan, 2006). Castells a.o. see the emergence of a ‘networked sociability’: ‘It includes, naturally, the Internet and mobile phones, but it can also be face to face. The critical matter is not the technology but the development of networks of sociability based on choice and affinity, breaking the organizational and spatial boundaries of relationships’ (Castells and a.o., 2007: 144). However within these groups, with all these media through which users can update each other on their ‘status’, social control could actually be on the increase. While the often lauded advantage of the modern city was the fact that its public urban culture provided a certain degree of anonymity, and liberated individuals from their traditional identities. Exactly this anonymity could be at stake.

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Google Earth Urbanism

MySpace Urbanism is thus about the city as a hybrid stage in which performance in online social networks and real space are related to each other. The idea of Google Earth Urbanism is related to this concept, but works in a slightly different way. It is not so much about performing one’s identity, but about the traces these performance could leave behind in the city, either to claim a certain space or as an act of communication with known or unknown others.

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There are two ways to do this: through ‘geotagging’ or through ‘lifeblogging’. Geotagging is the process in which urbanites either add data to a particular place or add geographical metadata to existing information. In both cases it is about making a connection between information and place. Planting new pins on Google Earth and connecting them with photographs, webpages or other information is an example through which layers of information are added to physical locations. Lifeblogging is a term used by the telecom industry that means that actions of users of particular devices are automatically marked up with (geographical) metadata and saved into an archive. For instance with the Dutch service Bliin users can save the path they take through a city, display it on online maps and share it with others. Photo’s taken along the route are also automatically placed on the map. One purposely records one’s traces in actual space and keeps a virtual record of them. Of course, as Malcolm McCullough has pointed out, inscriptions are nothing new to the city. (McCullough, 2006) From monuments and frescos to graffiti and stickers, both authorities and users have been adding their particular tags to city space. However, new technologies potentially open up this process to larger groups of users. Locative media could thus provide the public with new tactics to appropriate space to counter the superimposed orders of city planning and commercialization etc, perhaps even creating urban ‘folksonomies’. We find a similar proposition in the work of William Mitchell. ‘Today a fundamentally new urban condition is emerging – one that was anticipated by [James] Joyce’s repeated sardonic reference to Dublin as Doublin, a city marinated in narrative, and inescapably bound up with narrative’s capacity both for reflection and for duplicity. Multiplying thousands of electronic eyes and ears continuously capture the city’s unfolding interwoven narrative threads and spin them out into cyberspace. Some of these threads are ephemeral and disappear instantly. Others sit on voicemail, email and other servers for a while, then are deleted or automatically fade away. Yet others accumulate permanently to form an expanding, long-term electronic memory trace.’ (Mitchell, 2003) Such annotation or digital layers of collective memory may enable a process that Lily Shirvanee calls ‘social viscosity’. Through the use of locative media, user might become aware of memories, experiences or other data that they 392

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wouldn’t perceive without them. These tags might function as conversation pieces or symbols around which (imagined) communities are formed, experienced and performed. ‘This viscosity of space is perceived as a bond that may exist not only between people with established relationships who can find each other ‘on the street’ in a mobile context, but also between strangers, thereby inspiring a new community and, possibly, creating the potential for a more democratized public space.’ (Shirvanee, 2006) In the examples above, the authors describe locative media as a potential positive force that enables citizens to name and claim their own spaces. However, at the same time we also see other trends, such as the emergence of a discipline like geodemographics. In this marketing discipline, software is used to analyze consumptive patterns and connect these to geographical area’s, effectively tagging these areas as the domain of certain lifestyle groups. In their article Geodemographics, Software and Class Roger Burrows and Nicholas Gane describe how large marketing companies are gathering data about consumption patterns of individuals. They do this by aggregating data from loyalty cards, subscription databases, and other sources. It is a practice that is not very different from Life Blogging, yet with other purposes. From an analysis of these data, about 50 different lifestyle-types are drawn-up and connected to particular postal code areas. Different marketing companies use different lifestyle-types. Burrows and Gane have found amongst others ‘Happy Families’, ‘Burdened Optimists’,’Coronation Street’, ‘Counter Cultural Mix’, ‘Pastoral Symphony’, ‘Bungalow Retirement’, ‘Prudent Pensioners’ and ‘Bluecollar Roots’ (Burrows and Gane, 2006: 799). These categories are tailored for the customers of these marketing organizations: other companies who want to know where their prospective customers might live. Categories are exclusive (one can only belong to one lifestyle type), and each postal code area is labelled by a select number of lifestyles. ‘You are where you live’, is the motto of the companies that collect and analyze these data. With Amin and Thrift, Burrows and Gane state that these categories are one more way in which the city is being fixed: ‘The map, the census, postcodes, area codes, license plates and other means of producing location have been joined to technologies like GIS, global positioning systems and so on … to produce spatial categorizations, so that the portion of human subjects dwelling in databases becomes increasingly determinate.’ (Burrows and Gane, 2006: 804). These datasets are not only used by companies deciding on new franchise locations, but are also accessible for consumers themselves. The popular Dutch

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real estate website Funda.nl connects each listing of houses for sale with the three dominant lifestyle categories found in the area. Burrows and Gane conclude that such ascriptions of identity to local areas might work in different ways. First they can produce feelings of belonging (or un-belonging): I feel at home in this neighbourhood, because people that live here are like me.[these services] ‘are successful with the consuming public because they are designed to make individuals feel at home somewhere, both socially and physically’ (Burrows and Gane, 2006: 809). They might even become a sorting force in their own right. Prospective house buyers might decide to locate or not locate in a specific neighbourhood based on the lifestyle categories provided by these services. These services also stress consumption as key identity markers: ‘Now more than ever before, for example, the places in which we choose to live, eat, holiday, and more generally consume are key factors in defining who we, as individuals, are, and the social groupings to which we aspire to belong.’ (Burrows and Gane, 2006: 809). Now, it is easy to see how locative and mobile media might attribute to this sociology-for-the-market. If customers agree, a lot of data can be automatically gathered and added to their databases. With lifeblogging and geotagging users are not only ascribing their own meaning to urban space. The same data could also be used to determine marketing lifestyle categories and fix these to specific locations.

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iPhone Urbanism

Both Google Earth Urbanism and MySpace Urbanism are about a display of identity. iPhone Urbanism works the other way around, it is about using mobile and locative media to create a new private space within the public space of the city. Being in the city means being in the crowd. That can be both an exciting and liberating as well as a threatening experience. Already in the beginning of the last century Simmel noted that contemporary urban culture ‘forces us to be physically close to an enormous number of people’. It would be impossible to deal socially with all these people and the solution described by Simmel is to objectify social relationships, i.e. to act as if the other does not exist (Bull, 2000). Several researchers have written how mobile and locative media seem to perform a similar function. We see clear resonances of Simmel in what Ito, 394

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Okabe and Anderson call the ‘telecocoon’. The mobile phone is used to create a virtual ‘bubble’ in which one retracts while in public space. “One of the primary functions of mobile media that is carried in public and semi-private places is to provide a personalized media environment that is attached to the person and not the physical place. … [creating] a cocoon that sheltered them from engagement with the physical location and co-present others, a private territory within the confines of urban space, temporarily appropriating public space for personal use.” (Ito et al., 2007) Fujimoto, in a study of mobile phone use by teenagers in Japan, describes the keitai – as it is called in Japan – as a ‘jamming machine that instantly creates a territory – a personal keitai space – around oneself with an invisible minimal barricade. With a keitai a girl can turn any space into her own room and personal paradise.’ Michael Bull, has studied how the Walkman and later the iPod changed our sense of place in a similar way. These technologies give their users an active role in the process of place-making: they can customise the soundtrack of their surroundings. “Listening to their own music gives listeners a feeling of control, it gives the world a known soundtrack that connects the dots between fragmented spaces and helps to exclude unwanted contingency. With their music, they ‘cloak the alien with the familiar’ (Bull, 2000: 74) . These defense-mechanisms are somewhat different than the ones Simmel saw in his railroad and newspaper-days. Current tactics are not only defensive shields, or ‘space-makers’, they can also be understood as centring devices. There is a difference in hiding behind a newspaper and hiding beneath one’s earphones connected to an iPhone or other device that plays a customised soundtrack from one’s own personal library and allows private sms-messages from trusted persons within one’s own network. One could even go one step further. Where once the suburbs where seen as the ordered safe haven alternative to chaotic city life, now the mobile phone can become a tool that brings order to the chaos. This however is a personal order, imposed on an individual or networked-group basis, just like the bottom-up folksonomies and tagging systems that now are supposed to bring order to the chaotic information spaces of the world wide web. The (virtual world) remains a chaos, but it becomes possible to reorder and customise the system instantly, over and over again. The mobile phone or the iPod can be seen as taming systems, that as Anthony Townsend writes, can make urban sprawl liveable and navigable. (Townsend, 2000: 89). Yet again there is a

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difference between retracting in the safe spatial surroundings of the suburb (defensive dwelling) and putting on earphones within the city: the earphones can easily be removed, one can easily shift between defensive and more offensive ways of dwelling. In fact one can do both at the same time, the juxtaposition between these two positions becomes more like a gradient than a binary one.

6

Starbucks Urbanism

Where iPhone Urbanism is about ‘space making’, or using networked information structures to domesticate the contingencies of the city, Starbucks Urbanism is about the physical consequences of this. At what kind of sites do we feel at home in the city? The coffeehouse is of course one of the central tropes in BLVD-urbanism. It represents both Habermas’ thoughts on the public sphere, as a place where anyone can lay-off their subjective identity and participate as equals in the debate. And – if we include the outside terraces with a view of everyone who passes by on the sidewalks – it can also be seen as a central spot for the flaneur. It is in other words, it is a place where the seams of society can be experienced, a true public space. No wonder that some theories on today’s urban culture start off with scenes from today’s coffeehouses, the paradigmatic Starbucks. Yet this time the designer-coffee house is usually presented as an example of what went wrong with urban culture. In Starbucks people congregate not so much to communicate with one another. Rather they use it as a comfortable semipublic base in which they read a book or the daily newspaper, check their mail or from which they keep in touch with their personal friends or colleagues through the 3 and 4-letter acronyms that make up the network society: GSM, SMS, UMTS, WIFI. Coffee is not the base for a social ritual, but a caffeine-rich productivity booster. (Although no one goes as far to completely deny that people do use Starbucks to meet other people). As Marc Tuters writes in a key essay on locative media, this emerging Starbucks culture has often been described as antithetical to the public culture of the coffeehouses. ‘By contrast today’s ubiquitous Starbucks cappuccino bars offer the digital, mobile class a refuge from the pace of city, a space of introspection rather than random encounter. [these places] … form an archipelago of 396

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pseudo public spaces throughout the world’s cities. Particularly in the post-911 world, the function of these places to provide random encounter is practically eliminated in these insulted pay-access locations under the operative logic of ‘risk aversion’. Based on these observations, sociologists and urban theorists have developed a narrative of loss and decline in the contemporary literature on public space – Zukin (1991), Sorkin (1992), Hannigan (1998), in which contemporary public spaces are characterized theme parks, or walled gardens.’ (Tuters, not dated) The Starbucks is described as a commodified non-place that sells customers the experience of public culture, but without the risk of true confrontation or unpleasant surprises. Moreover these places are not grounded in a local culture, but have the same design-interior and music-channel whereever you are in the world, they are non-places. (Auge, 1995) Yet other more empirical research studies, such as Portable objects in three global cities: the personalization of urban places by Ito, Anderson and Okabe show that this binary opposition between public and private and place and non-space is too simplistic. In the article they describe a number of tactics through which people appropriate urban space. One of them is camping: One brings a personal media device and works with it in a public space. Yet the goal is not to completely shut off public space, the public space is especially chosen because one finds it an agreeable location to work from. Like reading a paper in a café rather than at home. … They put down roots that have temporal limits, but are more extended than commuters who are simply passing through. (Ito et al., 2007) Camping is not so much about shutting out the environment, it is slightly different from telecocooning: ‘people saw value in residing for a period of time in a desirable location. Just as people seek out beautiful campsites to set out there gear and reside for short periods of time, urbanites find attractive public places to temporarily set up camp with the help of their information technologies.’ (Ito et al., 2007) For campers Starbucks is not a proverbial non-place, but a local place they engage with, where they perform their identity, yet at the same time keep in touch with absent others, still being part of their ‘full-time intimate communities’.

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As Ralf Hennig quite paradoxically writes in Tokyo Homezooms, it might exactly be their non-place character that makes places like Starbucks suitable as ‘campsites’. In his research on convenience stores in Tokyo, he concludes that in Tokyo places like 7–11 are perceived as extensions of the home, exactly because they are predictable elements in a heterogeneous cityscape. ‘Der Konibi [Japanese vernacular for convenience store, mdw] kann als Erweiterung des Hauses über seine eigentlichen Wände hinaus als funktionale wie auch psychosoziologische Erweiterung gesehen werden.’ (The Konbini can be understood as a functionele as well as psychosocial extension of the home beyond its walls) (Hennig, 2006), p. 123 And although one could argue that these Starbucks-like places – just like Habermas’ coffee houses – are not universal and neutral places but culturally coded and geared towards the neobohemian neoliberal bobo creative class ((Lloyd, 2005),(Zukin, 1982),(Brooks, 2001),(Florida, 2002) ) – I think Varnelis and Friedberg’s insight is much more insightful than just juxtaposing public coffeehouses with themed non-places. They argue that visitors of local Starbucks do develop a meaningful relation with that particular place. It is true, they state, that many people in Starbucks are communicating with absent others rather than with those sitting next to them. But that doesn’t mean they are connected to an ahistorical space of flows. ‘We argue that culture is no longer localized in time and space, but neither is it non-place. Instead, individuals inhabit a physical world of simultaneous environments, of localized time and space as well as of multiple telematic worlds in which they can be co-present with others at a distance.’ (Varnelis and Friedberg, 2007) Yet, this still leaves some questions. To what extent are the sites of Starbucks-urbanism semi-private dwellings rather than public spaces? And if they are mainly experienced as non-contingent home sites, to what extend is that a threat to urban culture? Are critics clinging on to old, nostalgic ideas about a public culture? Should we perhaps look at other places than the coffeehouse for social seams? Or could new locative media ‘discovery’ services introduce new forms of contingency into Starbucks Urbanism?

7

Long Tail Urbanism

Urban culture is thus a double process: on one side it is about crafting one’s own place in the city. And on the other hand it is about connecting or being 398

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confronted with others. What is the role of locative media in the latter process? Could locative media help in reinstalling some of the contingency that plays such an important part in BLVD Urbanism? Could Chris Anderson’s theory of the Long Tail provide any insight? The Long Tail-theory claims that in the digital universe, new ways are emerging to introduce customers to a wider variety of content. This is done by analyzing the media use of a user and comparing it with that of others. A special algorithm then recommends new products. (Buyers of this book also bought … Your friends are listening to …). In the new media industry this principle is sometimes called ‘discovery’. While ‘search’ is about helping people finding what they are looking for, ‘discovery’ guides them to products or places they didn’t know they were looking for. Mobile phone and navigation companies are right now in the process of experimenting with such discovery services. Rather than new books or CDs to buy, these services help you ‘discover’ unknown places in the city, or set you up with people you might like to meet. For instance, the American service Dodgeball can recommend you friends-offriends that have reported to be on a specific location near you in the city. Can we understand such ´discovery´-processes as a remediation of the confrontations that are supposed to take place in the public sphere of BLVDurbanism? Do services like this bring the contingency back into urban culture? Or should we understand it as a comfortable yet pseudo-contingency, since all the recommendations are ultimately based on your personal profile rather than truly contingent. They may even purposely filter out unwanted contingencies. In other words: does Long Tail Urbanism promote dwelling or rather public culture? It is interesting to connect the idea of Long Tail Urbanism with the insights of Claude Fischer. In his 1975 article Towards a subcultural theory of urbanism (Fischer, 1975) Fischer writes it is likely that in large cities different subcultures will emerge. The density of cities accumulates critical masses of individuals with particular lifestyles who will be able to meet up to perform their particular subcultural lifestyle (Fischer, 2005). Cities, do not necessarily lead to anomy, as some Chicago School scholars would have it, but rather to cultural specialization. The findings of Anthony Townsend three decades later provide an idea of how the mobile phone might have a similar effect. The mobile phone may lead to what he calls a speeding up of the ‘urban metabolism’. The mobile phone enables people to form their own decentralized networks, and to perform

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these spatially. This doesn’t lead to the annihilation of space through time, but rather to the possibility to appropriate even minute spatial differences: ‘The use of mobile phones offers an ever-finer level of identifying and exploiting minute variations in conditions between location, the micromanagement of space as a result of the micromanagement of time and the always-accessible individual’ (Townsend, 2000:100) . So rather than the coherent, universal modernist order of large institutions, we now have the co-existence of independently superimposed orders of individuals or groups of people. Spaces become heterotopic places, where meaning can become imposed through all sorts of virtual grids that can be superimposed on actual space. In other words, mobile phones, social networks and geo-annotation might lead to strengthen subcultures and connect individuals with the like-minded. Shirvanee’s viscosity might well be a subcultural viscosity, rather than strengthen urban culture in general. This might lead to a paradox: the total number of different lifestyles may increase, since locative media could enhance the cultural specialization that Fisher thought so characteristic of Urban Culture. They might even live very close together or use the same urban spaces, yet whether this will also lead to a growing number of confrontations and thus Sennett’s valued experience of complexity remains to be seen.

8

Ebay Urbanism

Where Myspace-urbanism deals with processes of identification through performance in both public space in the city and media networks, and Long Tail Urbanism is about connecting different subject with one another, Ebayurbanism deals with trust amongst citizens. Will locative media enable new systems that can build trust amongst different groups within the city? The reference to Ebay is based on the reputation systems that Ebay uses to build trust between buyers and sellers. After the transaction, both parties can leave feedback on the other’s behaviour. Did the seller really deliver the article as promised? Did the buyer actually pay? Ebay functions as the institutional party that runs the reputation system. They have provided the software and the interface design. They have determined the behavioural categories that are to be rated as well as the algorithms that come up with the scores. They have set the rules and even an arbitration service to settle disputes. So what exactly will these reputation-systems – if 400

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they are ever to function properly – be used for in urban culture? And who exactly will provide the institutional embedding? Who will provide the categories, the rating-algorithms, the arbitration services? The government? Commercial providers? Citizens themselves? Authors like Howard Rheingold start off with examples off simple possibilities to set up connections between citizens, like enabling ride sharing for commuters (Rheingold, 2002). Rather than picking up a stranger, the reputation system will provide you with a high probability that the anonymous will not run of with your car at the filling station. Similarly, reputation systems could be the base for Long-tail urbanism that introduces citizens to unknown others. Reputation-systems are already in use in relations between customers and companies. Ito, Okabe and Anderson use the concept of ‘footprinting’ (Ito et al., 2007) to shows how consumers carry loyalty cards that are used by companies to discern between regular and loyal customers. Customers can earn points for each transaction, and they may reclaim certain benefits when a certain amount of points is collected. While earning points, they leave a trail of digital footprints (their transaction records). Currently this system works mainly through swipe cards, but in the future it could easily work through RFID-chips or mobile phones. Some people internalize the logic of these cards: they work their itineraries in the city out in such a way to maximize bonuses connected to the cards, their daily routines are adjusted in order to collect as many points as possible. Other users are more or less indifferent to them. In their book Mediapolis Schuilenburg and De Jong take a critical approach of the trend in which rating systems become more prevalent. They connect this development to a broader cultural shift in which civil rights are no longer indefeasible, but have to be ‘earned’, or are related to your reputation. For instance, in some countries drivers loose their licence when they have collected too many penalty points. They see a trend in which these systems of accountability become more prevalent and are also connected with the tendency to militarize urban spaces. They call the latter phenomenon the urban container: capsular spaces that look like public spaces, but are in effect private spaces such as shopping malls or atria. Access to these spaces is granted by the owners, and this right can be abolished at any time. Access could be tied to reputation systems, where citizens with too few or too many points are simply kept out. ‘In the culture of control accountability systems will arise that will coerce us to live up to their unwritten rules. We are no longer born with

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unalienable and fundamental rights but we will have to earn them by performing or refrain from certain acts’ (Schuilenburg and De Jong, 2006: 46) .

9

Conclusions: towards an MSN-urbanism?

In an article on Seoul, Anthony Townsend describes how the mobile phone is a great match for life in an Asian Metropolis: ‘The challenge of living in a large Asian metropolis is eased through the convenience and flexibility provided by mobile phones. … [it] provides a way of organizing a modern life across the many public and private rooms – for moving, working, eating, playing, and resting – that define life in the Korean metropolis. The all-important social ties to groups can be frequently reinforced through conversation and messages while ornamentation of devices and the freedom from parental supervision provides some outlet for individuality to manifest itself.’26 (Townsend, 2007) We could wonder whether this analysis of life in Seoul is also becoming applicable to life in western cities. From what I have written above it follows that home is no longer a secluded place to retract into from the wild and dangerous city, a place to foster one’s private identity. Rather the idea of ‘home’ should be understood as a mode of being. It means ‘feeling at home’ rather than being at a certain location that bears one’s home address. Locative and mobile media stretch the idea of homeliness even to unknown territories. They can be used as territory-machines, or as ‘magic wands’ to tame the urban contingency, or to ‘discover the familiar.’ That doesn’t mean that physical urban space don’t matter anymore. Rather the mobile phone guides us to places where we feel at home, because the interior is familiar, or the crowd is like us. And if we are really adventurous, it could guide us to truly unknown places. The practices in which people use mobile media create networked urban spheres. It connects parochial spaces with social networks. At the same time within these spaces, presence is becoming a hybrid experience: one can be present in one location, and be connected with people at other locations. The mobile phone, Ito e.a. conclude, ‘is a membrane between the real and the virtual, here and elsewhere, rather than a portal of high fidelity 402

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connectivity that demands full and sustained engagements’ (Ito et al., 2006: 29). The boundaries between being in public or in private soften. It is not so much where you are, it‘s more like being on MSN or Skype: a green icon means: ‘I am up for a chat’; a red one says ‘don’t disturb I am not really here.’ However, these same media devices can also be used for sharp delimitations, providing or preventing access to physical spaces, thus producing a ‘splintering urbanism’. (Graham and Marvin, 2001) Just like you can ‘ban’ people from your MSN-account, and form your own personal network where strangers are not allowed, some locative media practices lead to a similar spatial effect. In his Splintering Urbanism and Software Sorted Geographies critical geographer Stephen Graham claims that the city as an urban interface for the organization of differences now has competition from software interfaces and their algorithms. (Graham, 2005) For example locative media might be used to grant or prevent access to certain spaces. ‘Smart’ places might analyze who is coming in, through rfid, biometrics or algorithms analyzing images taken by cctv software, and may sound an alarm when people without the right reputation try to enter, or when ‘abnormal’ behaviour is detected – where abnormal is encoded into the software. Software also plays a role in a shift that Graham sees from the Keynesian welfare state to a neoliberal economy. In the first, cities can be understood as sets of infrastructures that are rolled-out on basis of equality for all city-dwellers. In the latter, infrastructure is sold as urban service to consumers on a pay per use base, for instance through electronic toll charges on highways. (Graham and Marvin, 2001) These locative technologies address their users in a new way: they are not addressed as equal citizens, but as private consumers. This might in the end undermine the whole concept of a public sphere, and lead to the further production of a splintering urbanism, where people start seeing the city not as a community but a range of services they can or cannot consume, and where the production of those places is geared towards those consumers and their consumption patterns.

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ITO, M., OKABE, D. & MATSUDA, M. (2006). Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. LEACH, N. (2005). Drag Spaces. In GUTIERREZ, L., RUGGERI, L. & PORTEFAIX, V. (Eds.) Hk Lab 2. Hong Kong, Map Book Publishers. LLOYD, R. (2005). Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City, New York, Routledge. MCCULLOUGH, M. (2006). On Urban Markup: Frames of Reference in Location Models for Participatory Urbanism. Leonardo Electronic Almanac. MITCHELL, W. J. (2003). Me++ : the cyborg self and the networked city, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. RHEINGOLD, H. (2002). Smart mobs : the next social revolution, Cambridge, MA, Perseus Publishing. SCHUILENBURG, M. & DE JONG, A. (2006). Mediapolis, Rotterdam, 010 Publishers. SENNETT, R. (1969). Classic essays on the culture of cities, New York, Appleton-CenturyCrofts. SENNETT, R. (1970). The uses of disorder : personal identity and city life New York, Norton. SENNETT, R. (2001). A flexible city of strangers. Monde Diplomatique. SHIRVANEE, L. (2006). Locative Viscosity: Traces Of Social Histories In Public Space. Leonardo Electronic Almanac. SOJA E. W. (2000). Postmetropolis : critical studies of cities and regions, Oxford ; Malden, Mass., Blackwell Publishers. SUSSER , I., CASTELLS, M. (Ed.) (2002). The Castells reader on cities and social theory, Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishers. TOWNSEND, A. (2000). Life in the Real-time City: Mobile Telephones and Urban Metabolism. Journal of Urban Technology, 7, 85–104. TOWNSEND, A. (2007). Seoul: birth of a broadband metropolis. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 34, 396–413. TUTERS, M. (not dated). The Locative Commons: Situating Location-Based Media in Urban Public Space. VARNELIS, K. & FRIEDBERG, A. (2007). Place: Networked Place. In VARNELIS, K. (Ed.) Networked Publics. Los Angeles. VARNELIS, K. & TUTERS M. (2006). Beyond Locative Media. DE WAAL, M. (2007). Powerifications. In DE BAAN, C., DECLERCK, J. & PATTEEUW, V. (Eds.) Visionary Power. Catalogue Internationale Architectuurbiennale Rotterdam. Rotterdam, NAi Publishers. DE WAAL, M. & DE LANGE, M. (2007). The Mobile City Conference Text. Rotterdam. ZUKIN, S. (1982). Loft living : culture and capital in urban change, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.

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O LE B. J ENSEN /B O S TJERNE T HOMSEN

Performative Urban Environments: Increasing Media Connectivity

Architects and urban designers are typically taught to design toward stasis. Any notion of urban stability, however, is sooner or later contradicted by the city’s inherent flux (Klaiski 1999:106) Flow needs fixity. Persistently embodied intentional settings, also known as architecture, provide a necessary context for Flow (McCullough 2002:4) For a long time architecture was thought of as a solid reality and entity: buildings, objects, matter, place, and a set of geometric relationships. But recently architects have begun to understand their products as liquid, animating their bodies, hypersurfacing their walls, crossbreeding different locations, experimenting with new geometries. And this is only the beginning. We will see more and more architects realising spatialised moments, through staging narratives, through event designing, working with effects and emotions. (Bouman 2005:22)

1

Introduction

This is a paper about how temporary architectural structures can become media for bottom-up approaches to urban development. Much established urban theory take point of departure in understanding urban interaction of the sidewalks seen as locally bounded neighbourhoods (Jacobs 1961). However, the contemporary urban situation and its technological new dynamics necessitate alternative ways of conceptualizing. Thus we need to understand the complex nexus of global-local flows and interactions in urban environments (Shane 2005). Accordingly, the paper explores how advanced architectural computing and sensor technology can attach the individual perception of place to temporary

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structures acting as agents for urban experiences. As well we are interested in investigating how architectural media-constructions become ‘capsules’ of a particular quality (Cauter 2004). The case discussed in this paper show that there is potential for the ‘in-between spaces’ in the city to become new meaningful places and hence new types of ‘public domain’ (Hajer & Reijndorp 2001). This way of thinking leans on a notion of ‘performative environment’ focusing on what a building or a place does rather what is said to be. Seen this way urban architecture may be thought of as dynamic and open, facilitating self-organising, communicative environments for an organized complexity between flows of local interactions and network behaviour (Krugman 1995, Urry 2004). The paper applies the concepts on the case of the Pavilion Project, NoRA, built for the 10th International Architecture Biennale in Venice. The structure of the paper is as follows. After the introduction, section two present the context for the case; The 10th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. In section three the conceptual starting point is presented. In section four we go deeper into the design process. In the fifth section we discuss NoRA as a media for local connectivity and in the sixth section we relate it to place and media discourse. The paper ends with a few concluding remarks in section seven.

2

The 10th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice

The opening event at the 10th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice marked the performative element of NoRA (Northern Research Application) emphasizing the ability for architecture to establish new types of urban spaces in interaction with the local flow of people. The Architecture Biennale in Venice is one of the primary global venues for professional architects and designers to exchange knowledge on architecture and urban development and to communicate these to future public agendas. On the basis of this NoRA should stimulate the current debates on architecture and urban design by the concept developed by students from Department of Architecture & Design, Aalborg University. Venice contains at its starting point a special historic condition and urban situation. As such Venice has been a main tourist and festival venue for always shifting and overlapping spaces of repeatedly events and the temporary occurrences in the city occupies much of the current city image and history. 408

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Throughout time it has probably been one of the cities been most copied or generated the most variations at other urban environments trying to catch the milieu and brand of this extreme city. For an event like the Architecture Biennale with the theme of Cities, Architecture and Society, Venice is basically transformed into an extravagant conference and tourist centre and with no signs of treating the local space in the current exhibitions. However settled on these dense islands also implies that the movement in a city like Venice is a constant challenge and mystery as described by Baudrillard: The city is build like a trap, a maze, a labyrinth that inevitably, however fortuitously, brings people back to the same points, over the same bridges onto the same plazas, along the same quays. By the nature of things, everyone is followed in Venice; everyone runs into each other, everyone recognizes each other… Better yet, the only way not to meet someone in Venice is to follow him from a distance and not to lose sight of him. (Baudrillard in Leach 2002:49–50) The general fluidity of Venice and the condition never to escape its ties is embedded in the central experience of intersecting urban flows moving through Venice in conscious and unconscious patterns. As with other cities Venice is a representation of a certain time acting as a mysterious and theatrical venue “frozen in time” with exceptional sites of history and narrative as a colony of tourism. At the same time the mystery of Venice lies in never knowing the actual reality of Venice hidden between the ‘masked’ facades and inner courtyards. This concealment is very much part of the myth of Venice. The ‘mask’ has played a central metaphoric role in constructing the city since at least the end of the eighteenth century. Georg Simmel, writing of Venice, suggested that it was the mask which hid reality whilst also revealing the absence of that reality. For Simmel, Venice presented dualities which could not be resolved. (Leach 2002:154) In this way the starting point for the project in Venice was occupied with the onerous background of Venice, the multiple narratives and myths and not at least its multicultural aspect and performance venue during the biennale exhibition.

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From the beginning the specific exhibition site in Venice did not have a fixed location. The site was constantly moving according to a dialogue with the Biennale Board and local authorities, and as always in flux the exhibition needed to rest somewhere to find its point of departure. The starting point was not to line up among the participants presenting global problems and distant proposals for design solutions but to experiment with a design process treating a local situation. Furthermore when Department of Architecture & Design, Aalborg University was presented for the possibility of participating in the biennale, it was not the intension to attend with a panel or projection, or just a model or ambitious image or representation. Urban Design should be felt and entered into the very spirit of living and experiencing space, and it was decided to build a physical structure to be able to show the capabilities of the design process and most important to test the imaginative of the media. When architecture and education had a live audience, it should also carry a live space in order to embrace theory for people and place, staging designs and making them interactive and participatory as spatial facilitators. The building was intended to be an event base for the National Culinary Team of Denmark as well as a temporary generator for urban development, site initiator and forum in urban environments. After half a year of design work, collaboration with local contractors, package shipment and construction in Venice the project now stands out as a significant contributor to the discussion of future urban environments. The building, NoRA, constructed to activate and involve the citizen in an urban scape was based on the idea that architecture in an urban dialogue is able to do more than just be owner and admitter of a site; instead architecture could act with the urban environment and the surrounding social patterns. Architecture should take part in the dialogue and negotiation of urban space through modern media technology and sophisticated building technologies. NoRA was opened with a building ballet as a theatre where the audience, designers and urban space were integrated in a symphony of sound and light orchestrations. A special sound and light piece was prepared and at the opening mixed with the movements of the designers and visitors establishing a synergy between the system, the site and the activities in the given moment embracing the building envelope in clouds of light textured by the multicoloured shadows of the physical movements inside the building.

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Fig. 1: NoRA in the evening, photo by Bo Stjerne Thomsen

On the Biennale in Venice an area of about 35 m2 was occupied mainly as an exhibition space and with the integrated technologies activated as local generator and attractor. On special occasions NoRA was occupied with events from the National Cooking Team of Denmark and University institutions, which utilized the kitchen, lounge and media functions for the main purpose of establishing a dialogue with the local site. In the future the pavilion will house the National Culinary Team of Denmark on annual events and presentations as a centre for culinary exposure at different locations. Even though the pavilion was going to be moved to different locations it was not intended to be constructed only for a temporary use and to minimize current site impacts and costs. This would easily lead to generic constructions and systems with the flexibility in mind instead of a local and beneficial focus for the interaction with the local environment. To intensify the current mobility debates in continuation of migration, globalization and culture mix, the pavilion was to be constructed specifically based on local site characteristics and hidden values of Venice. The initial entry point was the multicultural location at the centre of the Guardini Biennale area in Venice. A location with an interesting history and a mixture of national pavilions, global and local flows of people as well as varying climatic conditions on different times of day and season. As from the

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initial studies and experiences of the movement in Venice always caught between not knowing the location and suddenly meeting a friend, the different flows on site were registered, analyzed and obtained in the building volume itself through fluid dynamics simulated in computer software. The basis for the building envelope was the initial programmatic parameter of an area of about 35 m2. The fluid dynamics software RealFlow was used to simulate the complex flows and intersections on the site as a starting point for NoRA to become an active and sudden node for the area. Through the dynamic patterns of people, light and shadow the fluid was reorganizing itself until a temporary state of 35 m2. As with the mysteries of Venice and the hidden realities the NoRA concept was based on an immediate hidden reality releasing one moment of the frozen Venice. Through sensor technology adjusting light and sound the building would further embrace and emphasize the unseen movements around the building and always changing its ‘face’ to the environment.

3

Conceptual starting point

NoRA emphasizes the importance of local characteristics in the debate about global architecture and the urbanism occurring in the relations between architecture, city and people. The focus was on developing a process which could be stimulated through the spatial changes occurring in every local urban site at this exact moment. Each moment is unique and in respect for an increased migration and exchange of people, knowledge and goods, each location constantly appears in a new refined condition of locality which can be framed through the optics of fluid dynamics. The notion of NoRA as an interactive mediated urban artefact thus extends the now classic notion of housing (and architecture) as the extension of the body: Clothing and housing, as extensions of skin and heat-control mechanisms, are media of communication, first of all, in the sense that they shape and rearrange the patterns of human association and community (McLuhan 1964:138) A global design process and technology was used to optimize the project for build-ability but not to compromise the existing local starting point and still to

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maintain change in the sound and visual environment when the overall form found its final state. The project was initiated by interactions releasing invisible forces on site and realized through the fluid dynamics with a shape able to absorb changes in the surroundings. In this way the project started up as a piece of “virtual clay” able to react and interact with global and local flows of peoples movements, light and shadow and then finally optimized for construction still maintaining the original local site actions. The NoRA building does not finalize a local site and do not tries to limit the possibilities for an urban agenda. Instead it maintains its ability to continuously stimulate the surroundings through an intended non-representative design potentially initiating further agendas or ideas about architecture and program; the architecture becomes a performative urban environment setting up a framework for interactions instead of only performing itself. NoRA is intended to become a relational element in the complex networks of reality guiding people to a personal identity of place, instead of becoming another build object constrained with initiatives to maintain a static condition. The building focuses on acting with its surroundings and not just being part of a locked and finished urbanism. This parallels McLuhan’s notion of a cool medium as NoRA invites participation by its users and visitors: A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition”. High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually “high definition”. A cartoon is “low definition”, simply because very little visual information is provided. A telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meagre amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience (McLuhan 1964:24–5) NoRA is acting as an extension of a site when first arriving at a new location and its dynamic character is fed by the activities around it blurring the boundaries between architecture and the city and always changing its face to the site. Creating a dynamic and attractive focal point for the inhabitants in the

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global network city would make architecture both the media and the objective for the city as a benefit for a mutual development of the city. Conceptually citizens would be able to affect architecture in realtime and the attendants on site decide the aesthetics of the environments as well as the architecture outstands as an extension of the urban flow as a bottom-up approach. In contemporary society form matters and space matters but the city development should not be determined by scale alone but instead by intensities and the relations and interactions between people, society and architecture of the city. The project itself therefore includes a strategy for emphasizing that site actual still matters. Or in the words of Rob Beauregard: Places are never emptied. Rather what occurs is a form of discursive displacement. Planners and designers substitute a professional narrative for a multitude of shared histories, collective remembrances, and personal experiences. Unwieldy stories about the place are suppressed and replaced by more actionable understandings. Planners and designers abhor narrative vacuums. Even a cleared site has to have a meaning attached to it. To be cleared is to be prepared for, receptive to, a particular intervention … intervention cannot occur, development cannot happen, until site is brought under control, situated in a professional discourse. To arrive there, prior narratives are reduced in number or, in some instances, totally eliminated. Emboldened by simplification and standardization, analytical description thrives. Such representations cast a particular place in terms of a category of “problems” that the professional knows how to solve (Beauregard 2005:54) Furthermore we argue that each moment in the urban change matters by conscious or unconscious characteristics, and it is our aim as architects and designers to absorb changes in the surroundings and embed these in the actual building. That is originating from and maintaining actions at each new location as well as inspiring for new uses and behaviours.

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Setting the Scene – looking into the Design Process

The design of NoRA is developed in a research and educational collaboration by the students of Department of Architecture & Design, Aalborg University, 414

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with professional companies and advisors in North Jutland, Denmark. As well it is a unique example of an interdisciplinary collaboration between the network of Food College Denmark and Department of Architecture & Design. The initial sketch for NoRA was developed digitally using the 3D software Realflow, incorporating three parameters from the chosen site in Venice; sunlight, shadow and flow of people. Each parameter was represented by a “planet force” used in the form generation process, pushing or pulling liquid matter generated by a particle “emitter” at the specific location of the pavilion. This method of architecture privileges process over appearance: Architecture becomes the result of competing forces. It is a programmatic architecture that registers the impulses of human habitation, and adapts to those impulses (Leach, Turnbull and Williams 2004: 73)

Fig. 2: NoRA design process, illustration by the NoRA project team

With regards to NoRA the planet forces are not based on factual physical simulations, why the pavilion is not an optimized building in terms of solar gains or wind flow affecting the final shape. Rather the forces can be perceived

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as digital moulding tools, used to shape the “digital clay” generated by the emitters and as such this tradition is inscribed in works by design studios such as UN Studio, Lars Spuybroek and Ocean North. Each parameter was intuitively chosen as data input by the architect, based on an intuitive reading of the site characteristics. Hence the method merely describes a digital sketching phase quite similar to preliminary analogue sketching, focused on the initial positioning and orientation of the building on the site. The subsequent design process is carried through using advanced 3D prototyping and manufacturing, maintaining a stimulating design process with rapid prototyping. Throughout the project progress the design process were communicated to users, collaborators and the local manufactures through drawings, animations, physical models and diagrams. From the initial digital 3D sketch the optimization was followed by functional and technical analysis. The capability of the functions to adapt to the design was based on the concept that functions and thereby the visitor and user activities are as well inspired by the original flow conditions or affects from the simulations. The functional elements, kitchen, library and lounge, was extracted and developed directly from the initial design element as investigating the potentials of the original creative process leading to new uses and behaviours. When working with complex forms the designs required higher demands and research on the functional and legal demands for the interior. As well the static calculations, wind loads, ventilation etc. was investigated through 3D CAD simulations not leading to specific optimizations and changes in the original design but prepared to research on the performativity of the structural and ventilation system as well as limits in use in different climates and periods. The project itself lead to an increased knowledge about university and business collaborations and advanced architectural models as well because of the complexity of the project a higher profile and technical capability at the local contractors. As with these complicated geometries the actual challenges of realization started when engaging with the builders: The builder is trying to decipher the architect’s design intent, and as the construction team actually tries to construct the building, they find ambiguity in the design. There is a considerable amount of back and forth communication in order to clarify what was originally meant and reconstruct the information (Pittman 2003: 257) 416

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The structural system of NoRA is based upon a steel tube frame with individually sizes and joints welded together and later detached for galvanization. The envelope was extracted from the 3D model maintaining the outer surface and the center measures for the steel frame based on an offset of the envelope. The location of the 17 steel frames are extracted from planar sections through the envelope in order to simplify the structure and providing one angle to adjust to when welding the distance profiles. The steel frame is fixed on a base frame constructed by 60 I-beam parts bolted on site. Upon the base frame is a floor grill system with 42 triangulated floor grill elements jointed with a butterfly system to the base.

Fig. 3: NoRA structural system, photo by Bo Stjerne Thomsen

Individual profiles and angles are designed for each of the individually sized 79 composite façade panels maintaining between 6 – 12 fixing points for each panel on the steel frame. The composite panels are mounted on the steel frame with a 3M Dual Lock system to be able to maintain a flush outer surface and later demount the panels. Inside a red laminated MDF furniture consisting of 121 individual milled plates with angled edges is moving through the interior appearing as partly lounge, show kitchen and library elements as refined sensitive items inside the steel skeleton. In this way every detail is unique and no angles, joints, tubes or screws are located in a similar way.

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The audio visual system of NoRA is controlled by three computers located inside the furniture piece. The computers control a tracking system with infrared cameras located in the satellites (see figure 7) by using the software Eyesweb. The signals from the satellites around the building are filtered in Eyesweb and send to respectively the software Max/MSP for lighting control and Ableton for sound control to trigger the sound compositions and colours from the LED lights.

Fig. 4: NoRA satellites around the building, illustration by the NoRA project team

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NoRA – media for local connectivity

NoRA takes up one of the central issues of globalization regarding the relation between building and the local behaviours to create a new kind of interactive city scape. The increased use of mobile technologies and various other mobile media’s creates an imbalance in the attention paid to the local environment in 418

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relation to the global network. The global citizens are carried through the city in private spaces by transport systems and capsules and always online with friends, services and business ready to reply on the digital network demands: Now, spatially dispersed yet coordinated, fluid collections of wirelessly interconnecting individuals – perhaps assembled, from the beginning, in cyberspace rather than at any physical location – are becoming a crucial fact of urban life (Mitchell 2003:161) When observing people in these environments it is evident that attention is less paid to the physical reality of urban space, and the urban material flows are mostly maintained as a guiding tool for moving the body. Instead global media flow directs city life; global media and network technologies become the main control point for society and city flow: We have begun to see how urban life is placed by lines of mobilities and travel and by namings and imaginaries … The city thus needs to be seen as an institutionalised practice, a systematized network, in an expanded everyday urbanism … an ontology of encounter or togetherness based in the principles of connection, extension and continuous novelty … In such a conception, the city is made up of potential and actual entities/associations/togetherness which there is no going beyond to find anything ‘more real’ … In other words, it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming’ (Amin & Thrift 2002:26 & 27) Thus NoRA is inscribed in a conceptual re-thinking of place as a ‘container’. Rather places are therefore better thought of as ‘moments of encounters’ (Amin & Thrift 2002:30l). Such thinking opens up to understand cities and urban relations as marked by processes of flows and is therefore a conceptualisation that: … lays a stress in movement, fluidity and ‘mixity’ in such a way that it becomes apparent that any approach to urban governance and urban planning, say, cannot proceed on the basis of some final, formal plan, nor work with an assumption of a reachable permanent harmony and peace. The order of cities is a dynamic order. What is necessary is a way of approaching this fluidity, openness and density of interaction: a thinking about process’ (Massey 1999:161)

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Such a relational geography understands NoRA as a permeable site of interaction and flow with a reach of global-local connectivity. The relational theory of contemporary cities means a rejection of space, place and time as having fixed meanings (Graham & Marvin 2001:203). Thus cities are seen as social processes rather than as things – ‘the city is a gearbox full of speeds’ (Graham & Marvin 2001:204). The relational and process-oriented thinking therefore requires an ontological break with the notion of space as a ‘container’: Rather than the bounded container defined by physical resource flows and populated by socially anonymous individuals encountered in much sustainability literature, we envisage a rather different city. In the contested city a heterogeneous mix of actors and agencies shape city development, framed by their social, organisational, temporal and spatial contexts of action (Guy, Marvin & Moss 2001:204) NoRA is build upon a dialogue between the local site and global technologies. It maintains a non-representational architectural image based on a local narrative and urban moment from the flow of people and climate. It furthermore addresses the issues about global connection through an online condition of 5 online cameras that always are able to track the local site accessed through a webpage. The architecture of NoRA becomes the eye to the local society as it mediates the local and the global by switching the fixity and flows. NoRA becomes an example not only of the fact that ‘flow needs fixity’ (McCullough 2002:4) but also of the fact that we need to understand the current global complexities of flow by understanding their dependence on friction and moorings: … it is the dialectics of mobility/moorings that produces social complexity. If all relationality were mobile or ‘liquid’, then there would be no complexity. Complexity, I suggest, stems from this dialectics of mobility and moorings (Urry 2003:126) The technologies of NoRA track the movement of people in the surrounding environment through infrared cameras and filter the local movements of people into sound and light. The soundscape is generated from a large resource of real time sounds from the visiting places of NoRA. Initiating the sound scape are therefore sounds from the design and production process and the landscape of North Jutland, Denmark. When attending the Biennale in 420

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Venice new sounds are recorded to the database from Venice and gradually inserted in the changing sound pattern of NoRA slowly making it an adaptable soundscape between past and present and applying both new and recognizable elements to the local environment. The changes in movements around the building are furthermore attached to three satellite units at each corner of the building each initiating sound scapes from the local surroundings. The interior light of NoRA is partly arranged with controllable RGB LED lights for performance activities and halogen lights for the specific cooking events. The light colours on the building are determined by the surrounding movements and coherent with the changing sound pattern. Thus NoRA is a reactive space always acting towards a changing context both according to changing light and sound from movements as well as the main soundtrack slowly adapted from location. NoRA exists in a feedback with the surroundings and as part of our current society we are constanly redefining space through interaction with the changes in our surroundings. NoRA thus do not exists as only a building but extends into having a communicative behaviour and facilitating self-organising, communicative environments for an organized complexity between flows of local interactions and network behaviour. The architecture as media increases the connectivity among the citizen acting as firstly an informal node of exchange and secondly as unit for creative processes as a pavilion where concepts can be developed and exhibited. The importance of this increased connectivity is that it is acting on open premises for the urban space and are not limited by an otherwise increasing privatization and control with both physical and digital environments. The public space is open for physical as well as digital exchange: In consequence, the city and its public sphere become increasingly virtual as we move toward interpersonal systems of communication and the “netropolis” at the expense of face-to-face communication in physical and public space (Boyer 1996:229) In this way NoRA is trying to bring out the digital communication into the public sphere and from this dialogue establish the relation between the digital and physical space with architecture as the media. The logic of the urban space is in this way not determined from the preconditions of the architect and

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designer but maintained open for performative impulses simulating dynamic relationships for the local site. During performances inside NoRA the users are able to manually control the lights and sound through an AMX system with a wireless touch panel. The panel is programmed for the different culinary activities that the users would like to communicate through light and sound. The activities inside the pavilion are tracked by a top-mounted camera monitoring the central stage area of the pavilion as well as a 360 degrees camera, which can be controlled manually according to which activities and details that are interesting to communicate or record. During performances the pavilion becomes an instrument for the performers, who are using the technologies of the space to enhance the performance experience as a piece of interactive architecture. In this way NoRA not only becomes the media for interaction in the city but as well the other way around an actual media and instrument for a theatrical environment where the participant is able to affect the act. With the embedded digital technologies and audio-visual systems NoRA becomes a cultural attractor where the narrative of NoRA is embedded in a sound and visual database. The intensity in movement around the building is reflected in both exterior and interior light and sound blending the architecture and city scape into one entity between the physical reality and global data scape. When activities and events take place inside the pavilion behaviour can be communicated out from the pavilion through the same light and sound system in the satellites. From the webpage visitors are able to visually observe the activities and previously recorded activities in and around the building. NoRA invites user-involvement in distance urban areas using NoRA as a media for a bottom up approach to urbanism involving the onsite inhabitants in a direct interaction with the building. As such NoRA epitomizes a ‘social infrastructure’: … information technology, like buildings before it, has become social infrastructure. Conversely, architecture has acquired a digital layer, which involves the design of organizations, services and communications (McCullough 2002:4)

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Fig. 5: NoRA as a dynamic focal point, photo by Bo Stjerne Thomsen

Besides the technologies of NoRA connected to an online homepage, the functions of NoRA are based on recreational and sensible activities establishing in its context an open leisure space. It is a space both acting as a gastronomic theatre and rethinking a mix between a construction office and design office to present and discuss the local proposals for new planning initiatives with the local inhabitants visiting the place. The cameras and technologies of NoRA are then directed to the local site conditions following and recording these and always storing the new events on a web database.

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NoRA in a place and media discourse

NoRA seeks to combine an architectural element with a personal sense and interaction with space maintaining building design as starting point for the urban development but opening it up as a media for bottom-up approaches to create life and involvement in the urban space.

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This involves that buildings are no longer only units of representation and containers for taking up urban plots leaving strict lines between the public and private. Instead it focuses on a more personal architecture, which is able to act in the field between network and urban flow becoming media for an urban scape. The performativity of urban spaces relates to previous concepts by Cedric Price in e.g. Fun Palace (1961), where network and information is embedded in urban flows with a structure which becomes the “University of the Streets” (Price 2003:11). The concept of the Fun Palace and similar projects were highly dependant on the personality of Cedric Price and his poetic and optimistic approach to urban development.

Fig. 6: NoRA, daytime, photo by Bo Stjerne Thomsen

However, other theorists see the rather adverse trends looming in the horizons, as in the words of Cauter who see the upcoming of sealed off capsules and cocooning architecture rather than the fun public domains of Price. Cauter argues that the contemporary urban situation is marked by the increased usage of ‘capsules’ in architecture and urban design (and in many other respects). We live in a culture of concealment where we increasingly are sealing ourselves off from the external environment by means of all sorts of capsular devices. According to Cauter, the phenomenon of ‘capsularization’ has to do with the way architecture and urban design is sealing off, cocooning, and

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fortifying an increased number of anti-public and isolated places. The argument is that people make use of these technologies and forms of ‘Capsular Architecture’ to withdraw from the public interaction and the meeting with strangers which until now has been seen as the pre-eminent urban quality by numerous urban scholars (Jensen 2006). Cauter’s argument runs like this; Neo-liberal individualism + the suburbanisation of daily life = Capsularization (Cauter 2004:82). Cauter may have a point in his analysis of the Capsular Civilisation, but it seems to us that the pessimistic outcome may only be one option. Therefore, we want to explore the notion of capsule but from a point of view where we argue meaningful places and new public domains (Hajer & Reijndorp 2001) may be the result. In fact, we argue that NoRA is a test bed of this alternative way of thinking about the capsule. To make this argument we shall therefore turn to the notion of ‘new public domain’. Hajer and Reijndorp define the notion as: ‘places where exchange between different social groups is possible and also actually occurs’ (Hajer & Reijndorp 2001:11). We need a policy and design for the mobile agora so to speak, or put differently: The expanded and mobile city implies a new agenda for the design of public space, not only in relation to the urban centres or in the new residential districts, but especially in the ambiguous in-between areas … Furthermore, we seem to think too much about public space in the sense of fixed and permanent physical spaces, and we give insufficient consideration to the way in which public domain comes into being in flux, often extremely temporarily (Hajer & Reijndorp 2001:14 & 16) Precisely this capacity for generating new public domain may lie within the potential of NoRA as it is able to be influenced and act with the surrounding flow through light and sound patterns recorded to the digital network. NoRA is not a kinetic structure but is utilizing the building as an audio-visual media, which initiates meetings between the local and global flows and an exchange of information. Through the sensor technology and the interaction with the building, the visitors enter a feedback loop with the urban setting establishing a temporary urban environment from the flow of local actors and maintained through live recordings. In this way the architecture of the city is used to increase local connectivity from a bottom-up approach through mediated

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capsules located temporarily in urban environments as vibrant performance settings.

Fig. 7: Performative environments; sensor technology attaching urban flows to architecture

Sensor technology is in this way used to trigger common experiences in the urban environment and making the citizens able to exchange experience on the elsewhere privatized mobile spaces. The traditional capsules carrying people through the urban scape are not reflective and communicative but are merely elements of one-way oriented flow from one point to another. The media of NoRA and its ability to change according to the city activities directs a possible way for mobile units to act on behalf of the flow context that they are embedded in and interact with the local urban scape catching the urban flux of society. The moments of change are caught in the urban space and maintained through light and sound scapes and recorded for the web emphasizing change as one of the key elements in understanding the complexity of the city. In this way urban scapes should be understood through complexity and impermanence and can be described through the notion of Rhizomic Assemblage as described by Shane: Rhizomic assemblage mixes the concept of the narrative path of the individual with the networked or shared information of the group, forming a group consciousness form the collective experience of individuals in communicating with each other (Shane 2005:147) As in NoRA the design process outstands from the local flows of an intercultural and historical meeting point and an extra layer of the narrative is constructed as a sound assemblage extracted from the different locations of NoRA (origin and temporary dwellings in urban environments). These sounds attracts the audience of NoRA in the city scape and the individual behaviours influence the media patterns of the envelope and sound scape (sensed through

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the satellites around NoRA) forming a collective experience as part of a performative urban space. In this urban scape, that outstands in the field between NoRA as a reflective capsular, the urban flow on site and the digital media from communication and internet, the project seeks to link up the dislocated elements of contemporary urbanism emphasizing an increased local connectivity between architecture as not only a private concern, personal digital medias and internet as potentials for local and collective behaviour and the inherent qualities of an urban space. Therefore counteracting on the consequences noted by Bull: We demand our own space but increasingly discount the spaces of others…. Much of our movement through the city is solitary, in-between destinations and meetings (Bull 2004: 279) There are potentials for connecting the presence of the isolated media in the contemporary urban space if architecture seeks the technology to participate in the interaction with the city. Then architecture contributes to the city as active facilitators of meaningful public domains linking the individual experiences of the mobile citizens through interactive sound and visual environments.

7

A few concluding remarks

In this paper we have illustrated how temporary architectural structures can become media for bottom-up approaches to urban development. Inspired by the contemporary urban situation seen as one of dynamic local-global fluidity and interaction, we argue that urban media experimentations such as NoRA may work as fruitful devices for showing a new way towards interacting with physical artefacts and urban environments. NoRA is a way of exploring how advanced architectural design with sensor technology can link the individual perception of place to temporary structures acting as agents for shared urban experiences. Rather than dismissing the current technologically mediated urban forms as dystopian elements of a ‘capsular civilisation’ (which we do agree is a real risk in many cases), we have thought to interpret NoRA as a prototype for new inactive urban artefacts and sites of interaction. Spaces that may be coded with new public forms of inter-

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actions and thus facilitating new public domains that may work as a venue for until now unseen ways of relating and interacting. The experiments with NoRA has offered a window into some of the potentials in building new mobile, plural and open platforms for social interaction mediated by technological artefacts and urban architecture. We might start to explore how various communication links may be facilitated by urban architecture that dynamically performs rather than just exist. Furthermore, we would argue that there is a progressive potential for transgressing the commercialized media scapes of urban architecture that we know in the guise of urban ads and electronic facades communicating the gospel of consumption. This especially applies to the potential of linking mobile and personal media to responsive and performative environments attaching the virtual flows and the physical relations of place. In the experimentation with NoRA and related types of performative urban environments we may start to see various social, ethnic and cultural groupings performing and appropriating this new mobile agora across linked spaces. The story of NoRA and these beginning conceptualisations and interpretations are only in their infancy – as is the technology embedding the pavilion. More experimentation will have to follow, as well as the multiple ways of using NoRA and interacting with it now needs to be mapped, registered and further developped. Furthermore, the practical experimental work needs to be accompanied by more coherent theoretical reflections making sense of the new performative urban environments as of which actors to control and affect the media of the city.

References AMIN, A. & N. THRIFT (2002). Cities. Reimagining the Urban, Oxford: Polity Press BEAUREGARD, R. A. (2005). From Place to Site: Negotiating Narrative Complexity, in C. J. BURNS AND A. KAHN (eds.) (2005) Site Matters. Design Concepts, Histories, and Strategies, London: Routledge, pp. 39–58 B OUMAN O. (2005). Architecture, Liquid, Gas, in BULLIVANT L. (Ed.) 4dspace: Interactive Architecture, Architectural Design Vol 75, No 1, London: Wiley B OYER , C.M. (1996). Cypercities, New York: Princeton Architectural Press BULL, M. (2004). “To each their own bubble”, in C OULDRY, N. & MCCARTHY A. (Eds.) (2004), Mediaspace. Place, scale and culture in a media age. London: Routledge

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CAUTER , L. D. (2004). The Capsular Civilization. On the City in the Age of Fear, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers GRAHAM, S. & S. MARVIN (2001). Splintering Urbanism. Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition, London: Routledge GUY, S., S. MARVIN & T. MOSS (Eds.) (2001). Urban Infrastructure in Transition. Networks, Buildings, Plans, London: Earthscan HAJER , M. & A. REIJNDORP (2001). In search of New Public Domain, Rotterdam: Nai Publishers JACOBS, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Vintage Books KALISKI, J. (1999). The Present City and the Practice of City Design, in CHASE, J., M. CRAWFORD & J. KALISKI (eds.) (1999) Everyday Urbanism, New York: The Monacelli Press, pp. 88–109 PITTMAN, J. (2003). Building Information Modelling: Current Challenges and future directions in KOLAREVIC, B. (2003) Architecture in the Digital Age: design and manufacturing. New York: Spon Press KRUGMAN, P. (1995). The Self-Organizing Economy, Cambridge Mass.: Blackwell Publishers LEACH, N. (Ed.) (2002). The Hieroglyphics of Space, London: Routledge LEACH, N., TURNBULL, D. & WILLIAMS, C. (2004). Digital Tectonics, Chichester: Wiley MASSEY, D. (1999). On Space and the City, IN MASSEY, D., J. ALLEN & S. PILE (eds.) (1999) City Worlds, Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, pp. 157–170 MITCHELL, W. J. (2003). Me++, The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, Cambridge: MIT Press MCCULLOUGH, M. (2002). Digital Ground: Fixity, Flow, and Engagement with Context, Doors of Perception 7: Flow, http://flow.doorsofperception.com MCLUHAN, M. (1964). Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man, London: Routledge PRICE, CEDRIC (2003). The Square Book. Chichester: Wiley SHANE, D. G. (2005). Recombinant Urbanism. Conceptual Modelling in Architecture, Urban Design, and City Theory, Chichester: Wiley URRY, J. (2003). Global Complexity, Oxford: Polity NORA PROJECT TEAM: Architecture and Digital Design, 8th Semester, Architecture & Design, Aalborg University, 2006.

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Contributers

Arianna Bassoli is a PhD student in the Information Systems and Innovation Group at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her interests lie in interaction design research, urban computing and how it can be informed by a situated understanding of people’s everyday life. She has experience in the design of proximity-based and mobile applications that allow people to exchange digital resources in various everyday occasions. Contact: [email protected] Johanna Brewer is a PhD student in the Informatics department at the University of California, Irvine working with Paul Dourish. Her thesis is focused on urban computing, particularly in the design of technologies which can forge new types of connections between people and how it can transform or reinforce old ones. Her recent research centers around how an examination of mobility in urban spaces, specifically the London Underground and the Orange County Transit systems, might help to inform these designs. Contact: [email protected] Andrea Mubi Brighenti is post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Italy. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology of Law (University of Milan, I), an M.A. in Sociology of Law (Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, E), and a degree in Science of Communication (University of Bologna, I). Recently, he has published articles in Current Sociology, Thesis Eleven, Law & Critique, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, Polis, Sociologia del Diritto, Quaderni di Sociologia, and the Canadian Journal of Law and Society. Contact: [email protected] Carolina Briones teaches at University Diego Portales, Chile. She studied architecture at the University of Chile and did her diploma studies at L’Ecole d’Architecture du Bordeaux, France. She has recently finished MSc Adaptive Architecture and Computation at The Bartlett School, University College London and MA Computer Imaging in Architecture at University of Westmin-

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ster, both programs in London – England. Carolina is interested in exploring the relation between new technologies and architecture in the public environments by developing interactive body-input installations and responsive architectural surfaces/artifacts and exploring their impact. Contact: [email protected] Dimitris Charitos is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies of the University of Athens. He teaches “Human-Computer Communication”, “Art & Technology”, “Visual Communication”, “Digital Communication Environments”. He has studied Architectural Design (National Technical University of Athens, 1990) Computer Aided Design and has a PhD on Interactive Design and Virtual Environments (University of Strathclyde, 1998). He has taught at an undergraduate and postgraduate level since 1994 in Scotland and Greece. He has authored or co-authored more than 60 publications in books, journals or conference proceedings. Contact: [email protected] Konstantinos Chorianopoulos is a lecturer at the Department of Informatics, at the Ionian University (Corfu, Greece). During 2006–2008 he was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of Architecture at the Bauhaus-University Weimar (Germany). Since 1997, he has been a member of four academic research labs in Europe (Greece, England, Germany), which specialize in the areas of multimedia, e-commerce, intelligent systems and interaction design. He has participated in many European Commission research projects in the field of human-computer interaction for information, communication and entertainment applications in TV, mobile, and ubiquitous computing. Contact: [email protected] Laura Colini is a postdoctoral researcher in urban studies whose work touched upon public participation, social inclusion, community organizing, governance and grassroots media. She studied in Europe and USA, and holds an EU Marie Curie fellowship at the Bauhaus-University Weimar, where she currently teaches and does research. She works as independent consultant for EU and NGO projects. Member of INURA and LaPEI. Contact: [email protected]

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Martijn de Waal is a PhD-candidate at the department of Practical Philosophy at the University of Groningen and the department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Recent publications include ‘From Medialandscape to Media Ecology. The cultural implications of Web 2.0’ in the Dutch magazine Open (2007), and ‘Powerifications’, a contribution to Visionary Power. Producing the Contemporary City – the official catalogue of the International Architectural Biennale Rotterdam (2007). He participated with the exhibition ‘Greeting from Pendrecht’ in the Biennale of Architecture of Urbanism in Shenzhen and Hong Kong (2007). He is also the co-founder of TheMobileCity.nl, a weblog and a conference on locative and mobile media and urban culture. Contact: [email protected] Katerina Diamantaki is a Ph.D. candidate in Communication at the Department of Communication and Mass Media of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where she also completed her Masters Degree. Her research interests and publications focus on the sociology of new media but also centre around diverse facets of communication in mediated and face to face interpersonal and collective settings. Contact: [email protected] Frank Eckardt is professor for sociology at the Bauhaus-University Weimar, Germany. He holds a PhD in Political Science. Since 2004, he is the coordinator of the research project MEDIACITY. His main research question within the project is however the virtualization of social processes takes place, can be understood against the background of general changes in society and the possibilites of the media technologies. From a sociological point of view, he is looking on the effects and impact of technological and spatial transformations, how they are linked together, which new perspectives they are giving for enhancing the quality of urban life. Contact: [email protected] Tim Edler runs realities:united together with his brother Jan Edler. Tim Edler studied computer science and architecture in Berlin. In 2000 they founded their studio „realities:united“ in Berlin. All their projects deal with issues of space, information, message and communication. Aside from their projectrelated work both of them have taught at/for various institutions such as the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, the Technische Universität Berlin or the Pasadena

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Art Center College in Los Angeles. From 2005 to 2008 Tim Edler held a visiting professorship at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen. Contact: [email protected] Feyzan Erkip (Ph.D. Middle East Technical University-METU) has obtained her Ph.D. degree from the Department of City and Regional Planning at METU in 1993, Ankara, Turkey. She has been working in the Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design in Bilkent University, Ankara since 1988. She is currently teaching graduate courses in the field of environmental psychology and design. Contact: [email protected] Ava Fatah gen. Schieck is a registered architect and a senior research fellow at the Bartlett, UCL, London. She is primarily interested in exploring the relationship between new technology and architecture. Her current research is into the use of location-based computing within the urban context (Cityware) and into exploring the role of Urban Media Screens and how they interweave with the built environment (SCREAM FOR COMMUNICATION). Previous research includes interface design for augmented reality collaborative environments and its impact on the design process, information space and automotive design. Ava also runs the Digital Space and Society module on the MSc Adaptive Architecture and Computation course at the Bartlett Graduate School. Contact: [email protected] Jens Geelhaar works as a media artist and designer and is professor for Interface Design at the Bauhaus-University Weimar since 1999. He is a guest professor at Tongji-University in Shanghai. He earned a diploma in chemistry after studying at the universities of Karlsruhe and Heidelberg. He earned a Diploma in New Media Art from the Art School in Saarbruecken. He holds a Ph.D. of Heidelberg University in Medical Sciences. He was a scholar at the Academy of Art in Berlin and won the 1st price in the international art competition of AEG. His main field of interest is the interaction between humans and digital systems. Contact: [email protected] Jan Hatt-Olsen, poet/artist, born in Copenhagen, member of Danish Writers Union 1999. Cand. mag., master thesis William Blake’s Cosmos, in History and 434

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Philosophy from University of Copenhagen 2003. Hatt-Olsen has worked with augmented poetry, both in print and on the web. From 2003 primarily with conceptual, public, new media, urban space art. 2004 making downtown Værløse in the grater Copenhagen metropolis into a collection of poetry. He has besides works of art participated in cross-over’s between art, new media, architecture, urban planning and urbanism. Contact: [email protected] Ralf Hennig is a PhD-candidate at the chair of Theory and History of Modern Architecture at the Bauhaus-University Weimar. His prior research interest is focussed on history and present of the interaction between media and architecture as well as the influence of the alliance of these entities on traditional principles of dwelling. 2004–2005 he was responsible for conception and constitution of the postgraduate Master’s degree programme MediaArchitecture at the Bauhaus-University Weimar. Since 2007, he has been working here as a scientific associate at the chair of Sociology of Globalisation, among others within the research project Mediacity. Contact: [email protected] Sebastian Hübschmann studied at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, at the University of Bremen, Germany as well as at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg, Austria, and received the Bachelor of Science degree in Digital Media in 2005. Since 2002, Sebastian works as freelancer in various media projects with a current focus on interactive design, motion design and corporate communication consultancy. He graduated as Master of Arts in Digital Media from the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany, with a focus on Digital Media and Urban Space. Currently, Sebastian is enrolled in the program of study Leadership in Digital Communication at the Berlin University of the Arts, Germany, in collaboration with the University St. Gallen, Switzerland. Contact: [email protected] Hana Iverson was the invited speaker for the Practices section of the MEDIACITY conference at Bauhaus-University Weimar, and is currently implementing the Neighborhood Narratives project at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. The Neighborhood Narratives Project is based on her installation and multimedia project, View from the Balcony, installed at New York’s Museum at Eldridge Street from 2000–2003. http://www.viewfromthebalcony.org.

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VFB shares with her earlier work a grounding in the performative, using the body as nexus of experience and incorporating gestures of reconciliation on broader cultural levels. She is the former Director of the New Media Interdisciplinary Concentration at Temple University. Contact: [email protected] Ole B. Jensen (b. 1965) BA in Political Science, MA in Sociology, PhD in Planning. Ole B. Jensen is Professor of Urban Theory, Department of Architecture and Design, Aalborg University, Denmark. Research interests: The Sociospatial relation, Urban Mobilities, Narrative, Power and Place. Select Publications: Jensen, O. B. & T. Richardson (2004) Making European Space. Mobility, Power and Territorial Identity, London: Routledge, Jensen, O. B. (2006) Facework, Flow and the City – Simmel, Goffman and mobility in the Contemporary City, Mobilities, Vol. 2. No. 2, pp. 143–165. Contact: [email protected] Roland Kerstein, associate dean for academic affairs at the faculty of art and design, teaches audio-visual media in the program of study in digital media at the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany. Contact: [email protected] Karen Martin is an EngD candidate at University College London, currently investigating the articulation between social, spatial and telecommunications networks in urban environments, and developing methodscfor designing for mobility in the city. Her background is initially in interactive arts and she obtained an MSc Virtual Environments from the Bartlett School of Architecture in 2003. Contact: [email protected] Shannon Mattern is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and Film at The New School in New York City. Her teaching and research focus on relationships between media, architecture, and urban space. Her first book, The New Downtown Library: Designing With Communities, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2007, and her work has also appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education, Invisible Culture, The Senses & Society, and Public Culture. Contact: [email protected]

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Cristina Mattiucci is an architect. She is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Environmental Engineering at the University of Trento. She holds a Master in Landscape Architecture from the University of Naples Federico II, where she graduated. Her main research interests are include landscape and planning. As her main PhD activity, she is currently focusing on spatial planning for sustainable development. She has taken part in several project competitions and she has teaching duties at the IUAV in Venice. Contact: [email protected] Ruturaj Mody is currently pursuing the Master of Arts degree in Digital Media at the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany, to acquire expertise in new media design and sciences. His undergraduate course-work is in Interior Architecture from the renowned Center for Environmental Planning & Technology, Ahmedabad, India (CEPT). Before starting the Masters’ education, Ruturaj has also acquired practical work experience for 3 years. At present, he is working as a user interaction designer, developing scenarios and interactions for location based social networking tools for mobile touch-devices. Contact: [email protected] Chiron Mottram is originally an artist, has been working for the last 12 years as research fellow at Bartlett, UCL on programming projects relating computing to architectural design processes specialising in questions on virtual reality and agent simulation. Chiron has contributed to live performances and interactive art pieces, using original programs/software developed during this time. www.vr.ucl.ac.uk. Contact: [email protected] Guliz Mugan (MFA Bilkent University) has obtained her M.F.A degree from the Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design at Bilkent University in 2005, Ankara, Turkey where she is currently a Ph.D. student and a part-time instructor. She is teaching an undergraduate course in the field of environmental psychology and design. Contact: [email protected] Alessandra Renzi is writing her PhD dissertation on Telestreet, an Italian network of pirate television producers, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. She is a member of CAMERA (The Com-

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mittee on Alternative Media Experimentation, Research and Analysis), and a founding member of the labour-immigrant rights network Precarity Toronto. Contact: [email protected] Rickie Sanders is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies and Director of the Women’s Studies Program at Temple University. Her interests are urban geography, critical pedagogy, and visual and narrative analysis. She has published widely in both geography and Women’s Studies. Her work appears in Progress in Human Geography, Gender Place and Culture, International Research in Geographic Education and Environment, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Professional Geographer. She is currently working on a book, Images of the City in Popular Culture. Contact: [email protected] Christian Schwarz finished his Bachelor of Arts in Digital Media at the University of the Arts Bremen in 2005. He took classes in Design Management for the Creative Industry at the Nottingham Trend University, laying foundations in media organisation, urban development and cultural management. With a growing interest in audiovisual media, he produced an animated short film in his Bachelor Thesis. ‘Der Traumwandler’ tells the story of an apocalyptic city which is inhabited by a society striving for absolute uniformity. The film has been shown on various local and international film festivals. He is currently working as a free–lancing designer for agencies in the UK and Germany with a focus on motion design and corporate communication consultancy. Contact: [email protected] Bo Stjerne Thomsen (b. 1978) M.Sc. in Architecture and Design with specialization in Urban Design is PhD Student at the Department of Architecture & Design, Aalborg University, Denmark. Employed 5 years at the Austrian architects Coop Himmelb(l)au and with own design practice since 2001. Research interests: Performative Environments, Interactive Architecture, Advanced Architectural Design and Urban Change. Contact: [email protected] Lorenzo Tripodi, born in Naples, Italy, 05.06.1964, architect, develops parallel activities as an academic researcher in the urban field and as a media artist. PhD in Urban, Regional and Environmental Planning with the dissertation 438

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“The invention of Public Space. Practices of resistance to the public sphere’s erosion in the global landscape. Florence, New York, Berlin”. Co-founder of Ogino-Knauss, artist collective dealing with audiovisual language, urban cultures and human environment’s transformation. Under this collective signature is author of numerous films, installations. Coordinates the Cartografia Resistente workshop in Florence and the CoMMa research project, developing tools and practices for collaborative mapping and community narratives. Contact: [email protected] Katharine S. Willis is a researcher, artist and architect whose interests lie in exploring the ways through which we interact with our spatial environment. This work investigates navigation, wayfinding and identity and the transformative possibilities of mobile and wireless technologies. A key aim of the work is to propose approaches to understanding how we can create legible environments when urban public space is experienced through new media. She is currently an EU Marie Curie research fellow on the MEDIACITY project, BauhausUniversity Weimar and was previously a DAAD researcher in the Spatial Cognition program at the University of Bremen. Prior to this she worked on interactive site-specific art projects and installations in UK and internationally. Contact: [email protected] Miya Yoshida is a curator and an art historian from Japan currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. Apart from art-critical publications on contemporary art and technologies, she has curated a series of exhibitions on mobile telephony, “The Invisible Landscapes,” in Sweden and Thailand. She has recently received her PhD degree in Fine Arts at Malmö Art Academy and Lund University, Sweden. Her doctoral thesis was on mobile telephony and constructions of subjectivity. She is preparing to continue her series of thematic exhibitions at Künstlerhaus, Dresden in 2009. For more details, please see www.invisible-landscapes.net. Contact: [email protected]

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