Saturday, July 31, 2010

[Yasmin_discussions] hybrid cities

hello all

been too busy curating a show on experimental mapping and augmentations of
cities and architecture to post

sorry if this is short

I have been working in this area for many years so this has been an
interesting discussion

here is some of my latest work

http://www.neme.org/main/1111/writing-within-the-map

http://piim.newschool.edu/journal/issues/2009/02/pdfs/ParsonsJournalForInformationMapping_Hight-Jeremy.pdf

working also in experimental architure, ar and a third space of fluid and
dynamic interaction with geo spatial net and spaces in real time

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Re: [Yasmin_discussions] Fwd: Presentation

hello all

been too busy curating a show on experimental mapping and augmentations of
cities and architecture to post

sorry if this is short

I have been working in this area for many years so this has been an
interesting discussion

here is some of my latest work

http://www.neme.org/main/1111/writing-within-the-map

http://piim.newschool.edu/journal/issues/2009/02/pdfs/ParsonsJournalForInformationMapping_Hight-Jeremy.pdf

working also in experimental architure, ar and a third space of fluid and
dynamic interaction with geo spatial net and spaces in real time


> thanks paco
>
> i checked out radarq- very relevant to our hybrid city discussion
> hope you can tell us more about your activities and ideas
>
> open study and research works on architecture, network and city.
> http://www.radarq.net/espacio/arquitectura/
>
> and also
>
>
> Citilab Projects
> http://en.citilab.eu/citilab-projects
> Citilab is an organization in permanent innovation. A continuous
> project organized around the creation of projects of formation,
> divulging, communication, research, innovation and corporate and
> social entrepreneurship.
>
> The project Citilab, is not only a continent, but also contents. The
> first project is then the same Citilab as a new experimental center.
>
>
> roger
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Paco González <paco@radarq.net>
> Date: 2010/7/31
> Subject: [Yasmin_discussions] Presentation
> To: yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
>
>
> Hello everybody,
>
> I'm Paco González. I'm glad to be here.
>
> Here is my 140 characters bio:
>
> 1977, architect, works and researches at radarq.net
>
> And my personal blog: pacogonzalez.info
>
>
> Best,
> Paco González
>
> --
> Paco González
> @pacogonzalez
> paco@radarq.net
> www.radarq.net
> M (0034) 663.92.92.93
begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (0034)
663.92.92.93      end_of_the_skype_highlighting
> España UE
>
> _______________________________________________
> Yasmin_discussions mailing list
> Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
> http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
>
> Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
>
> HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to subscribe
> to. In the page that will appear ("info page"), enter e-mail address,
> name, and password in the fields found further down the page.
>
> HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and
> enter your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if asked.
> Click on the unsubscribe button on the page that will appear ("options
> page").
>
> HOW TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the
> "Set Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
>
>
>
> --
> Roger Malina is in France at this time
> 510 853 2007 us cell
>
> I
> 011  33 (0) 6 15 79 59 26
> or         (0) 6 80 45 94 47
> Roger Malina is  Director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille
> Provence
>  and Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press
> and member of the steering committee of IMERA the Mediterranean
> Institute for Advanced Studies.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Yasmin_discussions mailing list
> Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
> http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
>
> Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
>
> HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to subscribe to.
> In the page that will appear ("info page"), enter e-mail address, name,
> and password in the fields found further down the page.
>
> HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and enter
> your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if asked. Click on
> the unsubscribe button on the page that will appear ("options page").
>
> HOW TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the "Set
> Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
>

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[Yasmin_discussions] Fwd: amberConference 2010 - call for papers

relevant to our hybrid city discussion

roger

call for papers

*amberConference invites**papers** **around the theme **"DATACITY"***

deadline:* **1st of September 2010**
*http://www.amberconference.org

This is an international call for *amberConference* which will be take place
in the frame of *amber'10 Art and Technology Festival*. The selected papers
will be presented at amberConference in 6th-7th of November 2010 in İstanbul
and will be published in the Conference Book.

*important dates:*

· Up to 500 word abstract to be submitted by *1st of September 2010* (((
for submission: http://submissions.amberplatform.org )))

· Notification of acceptance *15th of September 2010*

· Registration deadline *1st of October 2010*

· Conference *6th and 7th of November 2010*

· Deadline for final revised paper submission *30th of December 2010*

· Proceeding book will be published in 2011

*registration fee:*

international student : 60 Euro
local student : 60 TL
internationan non-student : 100 Euro
local non-student : 100 TL


*the theme:** **
**"Datacity"*

For the first time in history the World's urban population has outnumbered
its rural counterpart. Cities have become the predominant habitat of
humanity. The requirements of rapidly growing cities, coupled with the
contemporary technological possibilities bring about new urban reality that
is data. amber'10 takes up the relationship between city and data as its
festival theme.

It is no accident that the rise of statistics as a science coincided with
the rise of the modern city as a social form during the industrial
revolution. When statistical methods of data production and measurement
coupled with reproductive techniques such as photography and printing, the
modern city entered into imaginary circulation simultaneously with its
double, its image. From its beginnings, the modern city emerged both as a
reality and a representation that were interrelated in such a manner that it
became hard to tell one from the other.

In this historical process, contemporaneous with the Enlightenment and
Industrial capitalism, the ability to understand the city became conditional
on processing and thinking through the data it produced. Data has become a
crucial factor in urban social relations and politics.

The capacity to produce and process all kinds of data has increased
tremendously with the rise of new technologies in the last three decades.
Capitalist parliamentary democracy, as it exists today, demands
transparency, efficiency and absolute security as the conditions of its
mechanism and has at its service the wide possibilities offered by new
technologies to meet these demands. This coupling brought about the
strategic importance of data in today's World. We know and define the city
through the images made up of its data. The collection, storage and
processing of the vast amount of data has become an everyday practice that
is both visible and invisible, threatening to some and absolutely beneficial
to others in a field ranging from law to ethics, human rights to health.

With the theme title Datacity, amber'10 proposes to define the modern city
as a data cluster in addition to however else the city form may be defined
today. We call on artists to interpret the life forms, production and
consumption patterns and politics of the Datacity from the vantage point of
arts and technology.

New technologies play an ever-increasing role in the social life and
administration of cities in various forms and functions. Branded as "smart
cities", modern urban spaces are now equipped with cctv cameras, GPS and
mapping systems, computerized infrastructure management systems along with
the ever-multiplying number of personal electronics and gadgets all
operating on global digital communication networks.

With objectives ranging entertainment and administrative strategy to pure
profit and public security, this network of networks tracks and traces
anything that is processed digitally and continually creates a massive
circulation of digital data that emanates from the operation of very many
animate and inanimate things in the city. The city and its data are now
heavily implicated in each other from aesthetic, technological, political,
economic and sociological angles.

In light of this new state of things, amberConference proposes to begin by
the beginning and ask the question: What is the new urban reality under the
reign of data? and what is data in the context of the city? For a through
rethinking of the pair datacity from the above angles, we invite
researchers, thinkers and artists from relevant disciplines to submit
presentations of no more than 4000 words by considering the following
subject headings.

· The politics of data and contemporary Urban governmentality.

· Politics of data circulation and use.

· Contemporary security and surveillance discourse.

· Legality and legitimacy of data collection and use.

· Political economy of data generation.

· Value of metadata in a data-driven society.

· The notion of Smart cities and urban management.

· Datazen: the consumer in a transurban dwelling pattern.

· Urban mundane and serendipity in the digital age.

· Urban artistic sensibilities in the digito-technological age.

· City as a "space of flows": Networked urban topology as an art material.

· Spatial experience and ambient information processes

*- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -*
visit *amberConference 2009* on http://09.amberConference.org

[image: amberPlatform]

[image: istanbul2010]

*ekmel ertan*

*amberPlatform*

ekmel@amberplatform.org

+90 532 473 89 71

skype id: ekmelertan

www.amberplatform.org

Necatibey Caddesi No:66 Kat:1 Karakoy

34425 Beyoglu Istanbul

+90 212 243 22 04
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[Yasmin_discussions] YASMIN protocols

Yasminers

YASMIN just participated in a proposal submitted byEkmel Ertan
in Istanbul ( organiser of the AMBER network), Claudine Dussolier
(organiser of the RAMI network), to try and get funding to hold
workshops in Istanbul, Athens and Marseille. If you are submitting
funding proposals and would like the participation of YASMIN please
contact us.

A few reminders:

a) You must post to the list from the same email address as
you used to register with= otherwise your post is rejected.

b) We have TWO lists that you can register to:
YASMIN DISCUSSIONS and YASMIN ANNOUNCEMENTS

http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin/

Please do not post discussions to the announcement list
or vice versa !

c) Post text emails, no attachments or images

d) If you prefer to follow the discussions on the YASMIN
BLOG ( some of you hate emails from mailman piling up)
= its at http://yasminlist.blogspot.com/

e) When you join the list please send a short email
introducing yourself to yasmin announcements. It is very
rude to enter a room and not shake hands with the people
you meet. In the mediterranean region we kiss cheeks but
hard to do on line.

f) If you would like to organise a discussion on yasmin
list on a subject you are excited about=please contact
rmalina@prontomail.com

g) If you would like to become a YASMIN moderator=
and are able to volunteer a little time and energy
please contact us. YASMIN is totally funded by willpower.

.

Roger Malina
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[Yasmin_discussions] Fwd: Presentation

thanks paco

i checked out radarq- very relevant to our hybrid city discussion
hope you can tell us more about your activities and ideas

open study and research works on architecture, network and city.
http://www.radarq.net/espacio/arquitectura/

and also


Citilab Projects
http://en.citilab.eu/citilab-projects
Citilab is an organization in permanent innovation. A continuous
project organized around the creation of projects of formation,
divulging, communication, research, innovation and corporate and
social entrepreneurship.

The project Citilab, is not only a continent, but also contents. The
first project is then the same Citilab as a new experimental center.


roger

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paco González <paco@radarq.net>
Date: 2010/7/31
Subject: [Yasmin_discussions] Presentation
To: yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr


Hello everybody,

I'm Paco González. I'm glad to be here.

Here is my 140 characters bio:

1977, architect, works and researches at radarq.net

And my personal blog: pacogonzalez.info


Best,
Paco González

--
Paco González
@pacogonzalez
paco@radarq.net
www.radarq.net
M (0034) 663.92.92.93
España UE

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Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to subscribe
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name, and password in the fields found further down the page.

HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and
enter your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if asked.
Click on the unsubscribe button on the page that will appear ("options
page").

HOW TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the
"Set Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.

--
Roger Malina is in France at this time
510 853 2007 us cell

I
011  33 (0) 6 15 79 59 26
or         (0) 6 80 45 94 47
Roger Malina is  Director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence
 and Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press
and member of the steering committee of IMERA the Mediterranean
Institute for Advanced Studies.

_______________________________________________
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HOW TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the "Set Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.

[Yasmin_discussions] Presentation

Hello everybody,

I'm Paco González. I'm glad to be here.

Here is my 140 characters bio:

1977, architect, works and researches at radarq.net

And my personal blog: pacogonzalez.info


Best,
Paco González

--
Paco González
@pacogonzalez
paco@radarq.net
www.radarq.net
M (0034) 663.92.92.93
España UE

_______________________________________________
Yasmin_discussions mailing list
Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions

Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to subscribe to. In the page that will appear ("info page"), enter e-mail address, name, and password in the fields found further down the page.

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[Yasmin_discussions] Hybrid City as Interface

Marcus (novak)

I want to pick on a strand of your comments on hybridity:

"Not fixating on a closed hybridity, and instead focusing on the
provision of conditions and flexible, mutating structures that ensured
the evolution of new species of urbanism and urban life would be a
start, but would not be the all that we could strive for."

And bring up the issue that our urban cultures face special situations
that require rapid evolution= whether when faced with natural disasters
( tsunami, katrina, haiti..) or climate change ( sea level rise in the
case of marseille
where I live)

Can the concept of hybrid city as interface be one part of the way that
we bring in shorter time constants into cultural evolution to adapt to
the changing environment ? BY becoming more aware of the changes
going on can we anticipate/extrapolate better so that we can bring about
non catastrophic adaptation ?

One example of work that falls into this category is that of eric paulos

http://www.paulos.net/

with the projects such as Urban Atmospheres: "Proactive archeology
of our urban landscapes and emerging technology"

http://www.urban-atmospheres.net/

but also the living environments lab:

http://www.living-environments.net/

Exploring the new digital divide between humans and our natural
environment. which
is a good example of the proliferating citizens science movement

re katrina victoria vesna's

The Katrina Project: NO-LA is a database-driven, activist website that
explores the psychological and social effects of the storm and its
aftermath through interviews with, and works by, filmmakers, artists,
dancers, musicians, architects and cooks in New Orleans and Los
Angeles.

http://artsci.ucla.edu/artsci/katrina/index.html

Cities have obviously always evolved when faced with a changing
context= but the rapidity of many of these changes today maybe
offer particular challenges= certainly our city political structures
and urban planning methodologies are just not able to work on
the right time scales= so catastrophic adaptation becomes the norm
(detroit ?)

can the new locative technologies and other ways of being more
closely coupled to the changing environment become politically
empowering ? or is this just more techno-optimism?

as you point out in your remarks= hybridity is one way that evolutionary
processes can introduce rapid mutation ( although often hybrids are sterile)

Roger
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Re: [Yasmin_discussions] hybrid city as interface

Dear all,

I would like to forward a message by Marcos Novak's to the discussion

best

Dimitris


From: marcos
Date: July 30, 2010 4:06:57 PM PDT
To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] hybrid city as interface


Hello all,

I've been following the various Yasmin discussions with fascination for some time now. Congratulations to everyone for making this one of the most informed, thoughtful, and intriguing fora for discussions of art and new media. Alas, though I've been tempted to jump in several times, I've just been too busy to do so. This time, though, between the topic and season, I can't resist. Here goes:

...

The topic of the "hybrid city" is timely and important. Many projects and events have been taking place around the world, indicating a renewed interest in the city. This time around, the terms seem to have changed -- these aren't the statistically-driven but morphologically bland urban planning discussions of old ("old" doesn't have to be that old, these days -- a recent Venice Biennale of Architecture took on the theme of the city from a statistical vantage point and tried to let the numbers and graphs speak for themselves. They didn't.) The discussions today are energized and activated by the overlay of several issues that carry a new urgency: locative media and technologies, social networking, the-city-as-display-and-interface, sustainability and ecological awareness, globalization, and also a new sense of empowerment to affect the design of cities via algorithmic design, computer controlled fabrication, new materials, and the addition of increasing "intelligence," both local and remote, to what was previously inert form. Of course, one can't have new cities without new citizens, so one of the major factors is the coming of age of a new population that has assumed ubiquitous connectivity and computation from birth. The rise of this group has meant that the inertia of resistance that characterized much of the parent generation is rapidly being replaced by a dizzying forward momentum by the offspring generation.

These and other topics have spurred various voices to try to articulate the new conditions of the city. Indeed, acting across Los Angeles and Vienna, the MAK Center, and, in particular, the MAK UFI (Urban Future Initiative), has just published a book of new "Urban Future Manifestos."

For this book, Peter Noever invited numerous voices around the world to each contribute a manifesto. I am one of the authors called upon to write such a manifesto. It was quite a challenge to write a manifesto in the 21st century, but, in the end, it was a clarifying and refreshing exercise. I wish I could share it with this group, but, due to the publication agreement, I can't make the full text available to the discussion right away (but may be able to do so soon, if there is interest). In the meantime, I can direct your attention to the book (which, in any case, contains many more manifestos pertinent to this discussion!). I've included some additional information about the book below.

...

Now, to the them of "hybrid" and the hope for converging upon a definition. I would argue that perhaps a definition might only close down an argument that is better left open. The specific term "hybrid" actually contains hints to the problem I am drawing attention to. A "hybrid" is a creature that is the offspring of two related but separate species (which is what appeals to all of us in this discussion) but, which, critically, is unable to reproduce further on its own. Hybrids are sterile, most often. This morning, in the news, there was word of a new "zedonk" being born in captivity at the Chestatee Wildlife Preserve in Dahlonega, Georgia. The "zedonk" is a hybrid of a zebra and a donkey. It is also known as a "zonkey" or, more to the point, a "zebra mule." Mules of various kinds cannot reproduce. For all their utility to humans, we must bring together horses and donkeys to make them. Other hybrids like "ligers" and "tions" suffer the same fate.

A "hybrid city" thus suggests that some combinations may be attractive and useful and yet not sustainable (and I don't just mean this in terms of energy or materials, I mean it culturally and civilizationally) -- and, since we are speaking of living things -- unable to continue to evolve. What would be preferable, I think, is not to settle on a term, but to try to understand what principles might be necessary to restore and provide for richness and ever-growing diversity. In my own discourse of "transvergence," I focus on "speciation" -- not the making of hybrids between species, but the construction of ecologies within which genuine, stable, and ever-evolving new species can proliferate.

This isn't just a semantic quibble or a fussiness about this word or that. The difference is real and structural, and hinges on the specific and real construction of openness. To give a single example that can ground that I mean this technically, let me add this: we all know about genetic algorithms by now. A genetic algorithm may evolve by mutating its own genes, but, unless it actually has the ability to extend its own genome (that is to say, modify and extend the set of genes whose values are able to mutate), it can't produce anything but variations of the same kind -- it can never produce new kinds, or new species. A closed genome is an industrial-age artifact, focused on optimization. What is needed is a post-industrial construct able to alter itself as it proliferates.

Not fixating on a closed hybridity, and instead focusing on the provision of conditions and flexible, mutating structures that ensured the evolution of new species of urbanism and urban life would be a start, but would not be the all that we could strive for. Another problem remains.

...

The next issue, I think, has to do with how we still exist within structures and value systems that can produce variety without producing difference, and, especially positive difference, by multiple definitions. Guy Debord pointed this out in "The Society Of The Spectacle," and, as far as I can tell, we have yet to extricate ourselves from that maze.Whether we have 500 channels of unwatchable television or a trillion documents online does not matter if everything is motivated by an indifference to quality, and a subjugation of every effort at qualitative assessment to a simple-minded and perceptually and intellectually impoverished logic of mere counting -- more is better, and that's that. To put it plainly -- it is not that we cannot build better cities -- it is that we don't have the will to, or, to strike more deeply, the value system for. Cities are mirrors, and we already have the cities that are the perfect reflections of our collective values. If we wish to change them, we need to address the value systems by which we make urban decisions. Until we do, we will get technological advances that look like visionary avant-garde propositions until they arrive, but that will be commodified into glorified high-technology marketing delivery mechanisms in lived fact -- "cool" for a few minutes (generously), and then abrasive and tiresome, not really pleasant to live in, and next to impossible to thrive in.

The question then shifts to a multi-headed problem: how to provide a constructive critique of our global culture and its values, how to assert positive and constructive alternatives, and how to literally structure our poetic and technological efforts to realize those alternatives. The problem I find the most vexing is the problem of values. In our community and on this forum, we are all dedicated to imagining and designing alternatives -- but the real brick wall is not our ability to imagine and design in careful and exquisite detail what would be good and beautiful -- it is to emplace our proposals in a culture that does not even seem to know how to value them, let alone desire them and support them, even if the might appear to cost more (though cost is not the real issue, quality is).

I love Venezia and have been there every year for over a decade, and, in parallel, I've lived for over a decade in Venice, California. The relation between the two cities is instructive. Venice, California is four times bigger than the original, but, though interesting, nowhere near as rich in wonder as La Serenissima. One is a human treasure. The other is pleasant beach-town with an unusual origin. Venice, California started off as an effort to create a Venice-of-America, not from any organic will of its citizens, but as a business proposition. Still, it was a pretty imaginative effort. Abbot Kinney, the developer who created it, managed to keep it going, in spite of curiously correlated pressure to build oil-wells and arson, until his death, whereupon it was handed over to the City of Los Angeles, which promptly filled in and paved the inconvenient canals, beauty (or, at least, character) be damned.

Even where a tangible effort was made to build a timidly unusual city, a hybrid of America and Venezia, and even with a strong and clear precedent in mind, the value system of the society it was built within and for could not support what was offered. Venice-of-America was not culturally sustainable because people simply did not care enough to keep it going. The original Venetians had lesser technology but stronger urban values, and they consciously named their city after Venus, goddess of beauty, and then made every effort to make it beautiful. There are places in Venezia where five bridges (almost) intersect. One would have been enough, but five, in counterpoint, are more beautiful, and, though more costly then as now, those people chose beauty. All we seem to know to do now is consume beauty, as tourists, not make it, at least at the level of urban will and the public realm. Until we address this, we will do the same with technology, and the hybrid city will not be what we really wish it to be.

...

Interface? To what? From what? From whom? Toward whom? Of what sort of benefit? Of benefit to whom?

...

The questions multiply from here. I can't even begin to outline them in this response. My manifesto offers suggestions and directions, but it is best to leave the questions hanging, and, hopefully, to have many of us engage them. The problem of the city is the problem of "us" -- of how we construct ourselves as a community and a public and how we come to value and build the public good. It is the "demos" in democracy. In these troubled times, it may be the most important question of all.

Marcos

p.s. Some more information about Urban Future Manifestos"

> Urban Future Manifestos calls upon leading creative thinkers to address urgent questions about the future of the contemporary city. Contributing architects, artists, designers, and urban scholars from around the globe consider the city from a variety of positions and posit their unique and inspiring visions. Urban Future Manifestos was produced by the MAK Urban Future Initiative (UFI), which was founded to generate concepts for the urban future by stimulating international dialogue.
> Urban Future Manifestos includes texts by UFI fellows Marco Kusumawijaya, Urban Think Tank, Ismail Farouk, Xiangning Li, Alexia Leon, Pages (Babak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai), and Alaa Khaled and Salwa Rashad are featured. Other contributors include Beatriz Colomina, Teddy Cruz, Dana Cuff, Keller Easterling, Gregor Eichinger, Nnamdi Elleh, ATOPIA: Jane Harrison and David Turnbull, Zvi Hecker, Gustaff Harriman Iskander, Doung Anwar Jahangeer, Bernard Khoury, Norman Klein, Herbert Lachmayer, Rick Lowe, Mehret Mandefro, Marcos Novak, Edgar Pieterse, Travis Price, Robert Ransick, Christian Reder, Karl-Henrik Robèrt, Saskia Sassen, Felicity Scott, AbdouMaliq Simone, Edward Soja, Michael Sorkin, Jonathan Tel, Tezozomoc, Ai Wei Wei, Eyal Weizman, Lebbeus Woods. Graphic design by Axel Prichard-Schmitzberger.

>
>
> http://makcenter.org/MAK_Bookstore.php#


_________________________________________________________

Marcos Novak, Professor
Director, transLAB
http://translab.mat.ucsb.edu

University of California, Santa Barbara
MAT: Media Art and Technology Program
CNSI: California NanoSystems Institute
Art: Department of Art

_________________________________________________________

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Friday, July 30, 2010

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] hybrid city as interface

hello all,

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 4:26 PM, Daphne Dragona <daphne.dragona@gmail.com>wrote:

> "the city is not just a built environment consisting of buildings and
> streets and subways and parks
> and waste systems and communications cables but also a living dynamic of
> cultural practices,
> intellectual circuits, affective networks and social institutions. These
> elements of the common
> contained in the city are not only the prerequisite for biopolitical
> production but also its result;
> the city is the source of the common and the receptacle into which it
> flows."
> and also
> "the politics of metropolis is the organisation of encounters. Its task is
> to promote joyful encounters,
> make them repeat and minimise infelicitous encounters"..
>
>
that was exactly one of the main points we tried to investigate and confront
when we built the Atlas of Rome and in the development of its continuation,
called ConnectiCity (and, referencing some of the past posts, i find it
quite refreshing that the name of the event in which we created the
installation was "Index Urbis" and that it was produced by the order of the
architects of Rome, probabily one of the most difficult western cities in
which to try to implement such a process).

creating wonder, joy and other playfully stimulating experiences is a tool
that can be used to break down barriers to experiment adoption processes for
new interactions, technologies, practices.

in a continum that extends from architecture, art, performance,
communication sciences and back to rave parties and interstitial practces of
the metropolis, the cities becoming displays offer novel forms for
expression, experimentation and research.

we actually could focus on simpler technologies to investigate all this:
urban graffiti and skateboarding can be seen as augmented reality practices
adding layers of meaning to the city, layers of stories, voices,
perspectives.

"Architecture must articulate the relationship between body and landscape.
It must ground us. Morphosis: translucency is a quality of the floating
world. Floating world comes alive at night, in secret courtyards and in
rooms that open up beyond shoji screens. It is concentrated in certain
quarters but permeates the city with a sensual reality." (A. Betsky - E.
Adigard)

it is probabily a form of erotic relationship that which allows street
artists to relate *through* the city to other human beings, a visual fetish
that is enacted through dresscodes and drawings, establishing discourses
that are based on reenactment, recontextualization and, most of all, by the
continuous creation of urban displays and of mind maps describing
territories, domains, influences, capabilities, possibilities,
relationships, arguments, critiques. The layering of graffiti on a wall, or
the reenactment of the acrobatics of freestyle skaters transforming badly
mantained urban furniture items into magical places for expression tell
stories and bear opportunities for expression that are practical examples of
the theories expressed by the situationists as well as the ones narrated by
the most advanced forms of contemporary, technologically and
communicationally hybridized forms of architecture.

many other forms of communication enact this sort of interstitial narratives
in interesting ways: flyers, stickers, stencils are all temporary, mobile,
disseminated narratives that create interpretative layers of meaning onto
the given reality, that suggest relational communication practices and
aesthetics, transforming the city's looks, creating temporary performative
spaces/times, happenings and ephemeral networks.

in all this, the work of prof. Massimo Canevacci is enlightning:

"the burning relationship between education and research moves along the
connections and possible exchanges between anthropology, tecno-communication
and architecture: architecture, as textuality that partly informs
anthropological representations, partly incorporates ethnographical
researches, and partly remixes both using new technologies" (M. Canevacci in
"architecture must burn")

i particularly value the term "architeXture" as it also voluntarily points
in the direction of "texture", mixing the idea of text and the sensorial
characteristics of the surfaces of our buildings, turning every urban
surface into a possibility for a display. concrete, steel, glass all
disappear, leaving only information and communication, temporary,
recombinant, interactive, open-ended, multi-authorial, interstitial,
arythmic, visually and sensorially fetishist.

"Quando l'architettura si anima, il corpo fa altrettanto." (When
architetture comes alive, so does the body)

and

"in the relationship between moving architecture and metropolitan
communication (that has very little to share with the old urban
anthropology) the concept of society - on which social sciences, politics
and the entire modernity are based - has been dissolving for a long time,
allowing for the emergence of something that is less solid and "dualistic":
the communicational metropoliss. Its boundaries are faded and full of holes:
its concepts are liquid and burning, its spaces digitalized, its identities
morphed.
Some new anthropology tried coming out around the half of the '80s. But even
if it did try to confront the relationships between writing and authority,
poetics and politics, art, ethnography and museum, it left out other forms
of visual representation (that, with time, turned out to be progressively
more dynamic and conflictual), it merely evocated the new
self-representational subjectivities, and it excluded the possible grafts
among tecno-communication and metropolis. Here lies the sense of empasse
that has been lasting since too much time."

from my point of view this is probabily one of the best answers to the
original question proposed by Daphne. Multiple forms of visual
representation, of interaction, of reinvention, of recontextualization and
of stratification of information and communication on territories,
buildings, objects, clothes, devices and bodies can, did and will implement
new practices, build new "common" models and build new spaces and
possibilities.
An idea that can prove helpful in this process is the one of
"micro-politics", in a sense similar to the one described by Guattari in his
Three Ecologies: localized, temporary, nomadic politics with embedded
ecologies and embedded in larger ones, asserting powers produced by "below",
within the tissue of social relations, distributed through network relations
and strenghtened by virtue of the destabilization of pre-existing
distinctions (as described in a nice way by Daniel Barber in his
contribution to "Critical Architecture").
Each intervention, each new "display", each new layer of meaning and
interpretation implemented through a new map or geographical mash-up, each
new interaction mode available, even in its "designed" form, as provided by
its creator(s), can be imagined as an instance of micro-politics, describing
and enacting a new claim, appropriation, chance for expression.

Practices and tactics of mapping, of creating and modifying our own city
> are
> part of today's urban commons.
> As are our disposal & interest for such processes, or our encounters and
> daily interactions.
> The space defined as "public" in a city becomes "common" through the
> contemporary interfaces and our interventions.
> The hybrid city tools and applications that we are critically discussing in
> this list do offer access
> to the formation and use of those commons. But while the power of
> contribution lies to the hands of
> their users/ participants, the ambiguous right of expropriation is also
> present...
>

i think we can join the two parts of this discourse: moving from the "spaces
of consumption" to the "consumption of space" (as Lefebvre puts it) can be
an interesting starting point. In the contemporary era, this passes through
a reconsideration of some of the classifications of how we use our spaces,
times and energies; leisure, work, relax, private, public. Also stimulated
by the changes in attitude that are also deeply affecting the distinctions
of private/public spaces, with the new emerging ethics and habits that are
clearly visible, for example, in the ways millions of people use
location-based social networks and augmented reality platforms, disclosing
their most intimate data (the location and occupation of their physical
body) and dissolving the boundaries between labour and free time that is at
the base of these kinds of interactions.
The real opportunity here is in the possibility: the possibility to create
layerings, interpretations, wonder, interactivity, insight and excitement,
emotion and relation.
As Borges said in his Aleph:
"In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and
awful; not one of them amazed me more than the fact that all of them
occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What
my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be
successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I will try to
recollect what I can."
The amazement of layering meaning onto the given reality, truly expressing
multiple voices/perspectives and making them available and accessible all
"in the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency" is a real
turning point in the way in which you conceive and imagine a urban space (or
even a non-urban space, for that matter). And this is, in my point of view,
a phenomenon that generates deeply morphing processes in society.
In this morphing process it seems clear to me that a continuous loop of
research/invention/design/recontextualization/appropriation/expropriation/research/..
is unavoidable. Ethics change with new "common" practices and new common
practices form new ethics, all redefining times, spaces and matters from the
points of view of multiple agencies, each, in turn, appropriating and
recontextualizing technologies, practices and locations/aesthetics/rythms,
in a discourse that is both global and local.
In this, allow me to make a loop back to the beginning of what i wrote,
reconnecting to the parallels with street practices, such as skating. In the
wonderful book "Skateboarding, space and the city: architecture and the
body", Iain Borden makes a wonderful dissertation of skating practices in
relation to urban architectures and the creation ad adoption of social,
relational and emotional practices, and the creation of new imaginaries and
processes.
A wonderful parallel with Lefevbre's production of space is made in the
book, that is also nicely applicable to the ways in which individuals,
groups and entire societies embrace the availability of new forms of
interactions related to their urban environments. In the book, the sequence
ranges from "Found Spaces, meaning the schools, yards, banks, ditches, pools
and pipes where skateboarders' spacial tactics of appropriation and
colonization are enacted", to the "Constructed spaces, focusing on
fabricated terrains, principally the purpose-built skateparks and halfpipes"
in which extreme/illegal/appropriation practices become "common", to the
"Body Space", describing the 'super-architectural space' by which body,
skateboard and architecture are erased and reborn in the encounter between
skateboarder and skateboarding architecture". All in the perspective of
turnig a practice into a lingistic act, into a practice of writing, into an
architeXture.

best,
salvatore
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Re: [Yasmin_discussions] hybrid city as interface

Totally agree with Daphne!!!

Adding in short a "technical" note and hopping continuing... with Negri and
Hardt

Commons (in the sense that Daphne pointed out) construct DIGITAL
TERRRITORIES (http://daisy.cti.gr/DTStudy/index.htm) ephemeral, fluid,
aiming at the continuous production of the Common itself.

"A Digital Territory is an ephemeral AmI space: it is created for a specific
purpose and integrates the will of the owner (an individual or collectivity)
with the means to achieve it (including infrastructure, properties, services
and objects) within an AmI (Ambient Intelligence) space, always in evolution
and transformation" .

In Digital Territories, BRIDGES between the physical and the digital are
discrete elements disposing of certain autonomy in their conception and
internal structure. Sensors, actuators and RFIDs are examples of bridges
between the physical and the digital. When one builds a bridge between the
physical and the digital space, it is in fact a bridge between activities
that take place in remote physical spaces in the same time.

Building a bridge is a process. It shows intention, expected functionality,
changes the nearby area of the two banks it links and probably, in the
future, invites for changes or evolution of its structure according to new
needs. Building a bridge is also a design decision. You must always decide
which part you link with what, for how long and what type of actors you let
pass. Bridging means that you create the conditions that allow communication
and exchange of data to happen. LOCATION DIAGRAMS manage the evolving
distribution of Bridges into physical space (mobile, plugged-in or
integrated)

Best

Dimitris Papalexopoulos

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daphne Dragona" <daphne.dragona@gmail.com>
To: "YASMIN DISCUSSIONS" <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2010 5:26 PM
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] hybrid city as interface


> Dear all
>
> Very interesting points have been made in the discussion so far
> and also a lot of worth mentioning links are enriching it.
>
> I would like to expand a bit on Dimitris Papalexopoulos' email and his
> phrase
> regarding the passage from the public to the common. I find this point
> very
> important - great bringing it up!
>
> Some more food for thought:
> Metropolis as the very "factory of the common" is one of the most
> important
> chapters
> according to my opinion of the latest book of Hardt and Negri, "Common
> Wealth".
>
> Describing the shift from the industrial to the biopolitical metropolis
> they
> write:
> "the city is not just a built environment consisting of buildings and
> streets and subways and parks
> and waste systems and communications cables but also a living dynamic of
> cultural practices,
> intellectual circuits, affective networks and social institutions. These
> elements of the common
> contained in the city are not only the prerequisite for biopolitical
> production but also its result;
> the city is the source of the common and the receptacle into which it
> flows."
> and also
> "the politics of metropolis is the organisation of encounters. Its task is
> to promote joyful encounters,
> make them repeat and minimise infelicitous encounters"..
>
> Possibly many of the yasminers must have read the book already.
>
> Of course Negri and Hardt do not refer directly to our "hybrid city"
> points.
> But as with their previous works, they do provide a
> theoretical/philosophical context within which
> different aspects of our contemporary society could be examined and
> interpreted.
> Practices and tactics of mapping, of creating and modifying our own city
> are
> part of today's urban commons.
> As are our disposal & interest for such processes, or our encounters and
> daily interactions.
> The space defined as "public" in a city becomes "common" through the
> contemporary interfaces and our interventions.
> The hybrid city tools and applications that we are critically discussing
> in
> this list do offer access
> to the formation and use of those commons. But while the power of
> contribution lies to the hands of
> their users/ participants, the ambiguous right of expropriation is also
> present...
>
>
> best regards
> Daphne
> _______________________________________________
> Yasmin_discussions mailing list
> Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
> http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
>
> Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
>
> HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to subscribe to.
> In the page that will appear ("info page"), enter e-mail address, name,
> and password in the fields found further down the page.
>
> HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and enter
> your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if asked. Click on
> the unsubscribe button on the page that will appear ("options page").
>
> HOW TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the "Set
> Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
>

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Re: [Yasmin_discussions] hybrid city as an interface

Dear Molly, Martin, Daphne, Roger, dear all,

I am not sure if we are drawing closer to some definitions of the "hybrid city" as a result of this discussion. A series of very relevant issues, however, have been raised by several messages, regarding this subject and Martin very well has attempted to identify the key issues around which this discussion has been evolving: real depth of audience engagement, the radical potential of these new technologies and the quality of existing examples of interventions.

With regards to the definition of the "hybrid city" term, the way I understand the term, it relates to the urban environments which incorporate ICT systems which support hybrid spatial experiences. I agree with some who have put it in their argumentation so far, that we can mostly refer to a "hybrid experience of an environment" that may or may not be urban. Sophia Drakopoulou has very well stressed the focus on a hybridized spatial "lived" experience, probably implying the need for a phenomenological methodological approach in her message. In this message, Lefebvre's social conception of space is very appropriately brought up and indeed is very useful in this research thread, however, when I was referring to the concept of "presence", to be honest, what I had in mind was the direction of research about "presence" in the context of virtual environments. I believe we can learn al lot from this research conducted since the middle of the 90s when investigating the use and experience of hybrid environments too.

Examples of technologies that we refer to here are: mobile augmented reality, mobile mixed reality systems, locative media, interactive urban screens and other kinds of displays and other types of context aware systems, whether they are accessed via mobile spatial interfaces, via the web or via display systems situated in our immediate physical surroundings. For example: a mobile AR game that takes place in the urban context may place the player in a hybrid kind of space simultaneously comprising the electronically mediated spatial context as well as the surrounding physical settings.

Souza e Silva (in her 2003 article titled: Mobile networks and public spaces: Bringing multi-user environments into the physical space. In R. Ascott (Ed.), Electronic Proceedings of the 2003 International Consciousness Reframed Conference. CaiiA STAR, University of Wales College) was one of the first to suggest the significance of these interactive communication environments, through which "virtual worlds immigrate from the Internet to urban spaces" and to refer to their "hybrid" nature. While the Internet allowed physical meeting places to immigrate to a virtual spatial context, the introduction of mobile location-based communication networks relates the concept of a "meeting place" to the physical space of an urban environment. Thus, social computing, which was previously restricted to the Internet, is now brought back into the urban realm. Indeed, the emergence of locativeness reintroduces the parameter of real location in the activity of mediated communication, thus mapping the virtual mental space of communication to the physical space, inhabited by the real bodies of communicating participants.

The city becomes a very relevant arena for discussing this issue, since (as Daphne suggests when quoting Negri and Hardt) "the city is the source of the common and the receptacle into which it flows." And this brings up another key issue that I would like to add to this discussion: the social interaction aspect of the use of these technologies and media. This refers to the use of location – based systems which support synchronous or asynchronous multi-user access to the activity taking place in the hybrid context of the representation. Although the rules dictating the manner in which this activity takes place are usually not very open (they are pre-defined by the system's designers, I believe that the activity of communicating (by appropriating the interface and the use of the system) implies a very active way of using such a system.

A series of central research questions which have been the main driving force behind our research group's work on this subject are the following:
• How can these techno-social systems be designed and used to facilitate new ways of social interaction and activity in the urban context?
• How can we enhance technology-mediated group communication and possibly the formulation of communities by the use of these systems?
• Which are the factors that should be taken into consideration to improve effectiveness, enjoyability and performance of mobile group communication engaged in social communication?
• How (and to what extent) does locative media use affect the users' perception and experience of the environment they navigate?

Howard Rheingold in his "Smart Mobs" book has discussed the potential of mobile communication media for creating new forms of social activity in the urban context. Some other useful references in this area are:
• "Shared Encounters" (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) Katharine S. Willis (Editor), George Roussos (Editor), Konstantinos Chorianopoulos (Editor), Mirjam Struppek (Editor), Springer.
• "Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces" (Digital Formations) [Paperback], Adriana De Souza E Silva (Editor), Daniel M. Sutko (Editor), Peter Lang Pub Inc.

The index city concept that Dimitris Papalexopoulos discussed is very useful to take this discussion further. The database reference brings to mind the differentiation between database and narrative structure that Manovich has discussed in his "Language of New Media" book. Judging from our recent experiments investigating the use of multi-user locative media by small groups of subjects, I can suggest that: a database structure may not adequately aid the involvement of people in such an activity. You probably need some sort of a narrative as a means to structure geo-located content, in order to get people involved into searching, navigating, "writing" and "reading" this content. This was certainly the case in Blast Theory's "Uncle Roy" pervasive game experience as well as in the "Third Woman" mobile cinema experience (but maybe Martin can say a few more things about that as this project has evolved and been exhibited in many other places too). But my suggestion above refers to a case of locative media, where the social aspect of the activity is more important than the actual environmental representation which provides a part of the context within which it takes place.

I would also like to agree very much with Martin in that we need a longer period of artistic development and better tool-sets for artists to realise the potential of locative media. If we are indeed entering a period of disappointment after the overhyping period, this reminds me a lot of the case of virtual reality in the beginning of the 90s. But I hope that this masks the process of consolidation, because in the case of VR this was probably not the case.

Finally, I would like to mention that this discussion was scheduled (for various practical reasons) to continue till the end of this week. Since I see such a great interest and great contributions from many of you I would like to propose to continue this discussion in September. In the meantime I will make an effort to invite more potentially interested artists and researchers who may contribute to the discussion too. We still have a couple of days to go though, so I m looking forward to your next messages

Best wishes
Dimitris


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Thursday, July 29, 2010

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] hybrid city as interface

Dear all

Very interesting points have been made in the discussion so far
and also a lot of worth mentioning links are enriching it.

I would like to expand a bit on Dimitris Papalexopoulos' email and his
phrase
regarding the passage from the public to the common. I find this point very
important - great bringing it up!

Some more food for thought:
Metropolis as the very "factory of the common" is one of the most important
chapters
according to my opinion of the latest book of Hardt and Negri, "Common
Wealth".

Describing the shift from the industrial to the biopolitical metropolis they
write:
"the city is not just a built environment consisting of buildings and
streets and subways and parks
and waste systems and communications cables but also a living dynamic of
cultural practices,
intellectual circuits, affective networks and social institutions. These
elements of the common
contained in the city are not only the prerequisite for biopolitical
production but also its result;
the city is the source of the common and the receptacle into which it
flows."
and also
"the politics of metropolis is the organisation of encounters. Its task is
to promote joyful encounters,
make them repeat and minimise infelicitous encounters"..

Possibly many of the yasminers must have read the book already.

Of course Negri and Hardt do not refer directly to our "hybrid city" points.
But as with their previous works, they do provide a
theoretical/philosophical context within which
different aspects of our contemporary society could be examined and
interpreted.
Practices and tactics of mapping, of creating and modifying our own city are
part of today's urban commons.
As are our disposal & interest for such processes, or our encounters and
daily interactions.
The space defined as "public" in a city becomes "common" through the
contemporary interfaces and our interventions.
The hybrid city tools and applications that we are critically discussing in
this list do offer access
to the formation and use of those commons. But while the power of
contribution lies to the hands of
their users/ participants, the ambiguous right of expropriation is also
present...


best regards
Daphne
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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] the hybrid city as interface

Isn't that just what is missing in our times? that generosity without
question. a tin cup shared. Its a lovely image,Ive been watching the road
works out in country Western Australia, the workers there were treated to a
guest house with home cooking. I'm considering mead myself as there are no
lucrative mining companies near the Aurora Art space, so it looks as if it
needs self generating capital to create art residencies and projects.
I walked the city of Perth for 3 years.. trying to work out this question
around co creation and see if artists could walk with others like planners,
architects, philosophers, and people that just lived in the area.. i would
give others my camera. we walked i called it slow walking, after the
philosophy of slow food, and using a co action to help generate or germinate
new ways to collectively imaging a city growing through its colours its
textures and patterns.
I would read a text often from Christopher Alexander's" Pattern Language",
or his earlier work "a timeless way", profound writing. A text that many
planners and architects haven't even seen. yet brilliant.
we would meander around places in the city, funny how a city can grow
through you. Noticing the details, i call palletting. Can this contribute to
better place planning and as the community development people suggest place
making.
I think We all belong on that page. Could we see ourselves as a colour
contributing to the ongoing painting of a place? being mixed with others to
form something new.
we need artists with planners, wasn't it Capra who said the whole is more
than a sum of the parts?
what a fantastic collection of thinkers this forum has generated.

Thank you so much. Id walk with any of you anytime.

warm regards
Janelle
Aurora project space
Kellerberrin
Western Australia

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Andrew Brouse" <brouse@music.mcgill.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 2010 3:33 PM
To: "YASMIN DISCUSSIONS" <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] the hybrid city as interface

> Hello Yasmin,
>
> Following is my first contribution to the current discussion.
>
> Andrew
>
>
>
> «
> How immeasurably the circumstances and comforts of the community have
> improved since the days when this road was constructed, may be known from
> the fact that Mr. M. and other workmen employed upon it, sometimes had to
> eat the fattest o! pork, raw ; their bread was baked in the hot ashes of
> their campfires - the quality of which, therefore, needs no remark and
> they drank, at their meals, hemlock tea ! To make up for such fare — we
> suppose — a barrel of whiskey, with a tin cup attached, always stood at
> the roadside, and each workman or passerby was allowed to partake ad
> libitum.
> »
> _______________________________________________
> Yasmin_discussions mailing list
> Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
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>
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>
> No virus found in this incoming message.
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[Yasmin_discussions] hybrid city, etc.

dear list,
many wonderful projects and links. much to look at.

are we drawing closer to some definitions of 'hybrid city'?
i like this city-as-index concept... would like to
see maps as databases, and visual databases as maps have
stronger relationships to in urban contexts, esp self made and
collectively made knowledge-maps for purposeful and poetic use.

something to consider is the degree to which
interest in 'mobile experience' isn't integrally linked to specific
physical, architectural, planning, and infrastructural changes
going on in cities, either, as it might seem, as an unconscious
reponse to displacement, or as part of conscious identification
with the changes? my research 'space' involves observing integral
changes in urban planning, for instance, due to wireless, as well
as the experiential use of mobile tools and media, within perceived
identities for the mobile subject...are we engaged in mediating
transitions which have everything to do with material space, but
which appear immaterial and are therefore seductive and elusive
as a result?


i post a link to an intriguing Mobile Art Project which touches on
various aspects of our discussion...most prominently, perhaps,
the purpose or artistic articulation of 'data' in the context of mobility.

Mobile Art Project
http://newmediafix.net/daily/?p=3167


all the best,
molly
--
Molly Hankwitz Cox

http://newmediafix.net
http://CityCentered.org <http://citycentered.org/>
www.justmetropolis.org
http://mollyhankwitz.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/molly-hankwitz-cv/

-------
**mobile research - architecture**
------------------------------------------------------------
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Re: [Yasmin_discussions] hybrid city as interface - is it related to situationist notions?

Dear Paolo, Dimitris, Martin, Roger, Daphne, Julian,
I am surprised that surveillance has not yet been thoroughly mentioned in this discussion.
"Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space [...] new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa." Lefebvre, Henri The Production of Space, Blackwell 1991, p. 59


"(Social) space is a (social) product [...] the space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action [...] in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power." ibid p. 26


I believe it is Christiane Paul - in one of her recent lectures - who suggested a taxonomy of art projects dealing with mobile computing technologies and stimulated a critical analysis and implementation of her system of classification, in which she devides works with GPS into those:

a. which revolve the annotation of a personal experience ('Psychogeography'), as TERI RUEB's "The Choreography of Everyday Moment";

b. Works about reposition cartography (about the concept of 'flow'), such as "Milk" by POLAK and AUZINA, in which they tracked the milk production in Latvia, Brasil and Nigeria;

c. Works enhancing behavior perception, such the Whitney Museum's commission to CROWE and PATERSON "Follow Through";

d. Works about annotation of storytelling, such as "Media Portrait of the Liberties", by NISI and others (a location based narrative taking place in an old Dublin neighbourhood);

e. Surveillance and sousveillance projects, such as "The Antiterror Line" by the BUREAU OF INVERSE TECHNOLOGY; and

f. Environmental projects, such as "Feral Robotic Dogs" by Natalie JEREMIJENKO 


See also "New Media in the White Cube and Beyond - Curatorial Models for Digital Art"
http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520255975 
I feel like I am hacking this great discussion:-)
Best,Veroniki

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Re: [Yasmin_discussions] the hybrid city as interface

Dear Yasmin,

Following is my second - perhaps obvious, perhaps implicit, perhaps not -
contribution to the current discussion.

Andrew

«
Of Exactitude in Science

...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that
the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the
Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these
Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of
Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the
Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the
Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such
Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to
the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of
the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in
the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J. A. Suarez Miranda
»

Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares


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Re: [Yasmin_discussions] hybrid city as interface

Dear Martin

You may be interested in a particular 'take' that a group of us have working
on called the Comob project.

Jen Southern and I have used the software (iPhone and Nokia) in workshops at
ISEA and FutureEverything.

http://www.comob.org.uk/

Comob is a digital arts project that explores the potential for
collaborative mapping with GPS technology. Comob was developed as a research
tool to explore social and spatial relationships between people in motion.
There are a free iPhone and Nokia applications that support this research.
The software allows members of groups to see each others movement in real
time on their mobile phones. The group is linked together by a line that
shows their relative spatial distribution. We use this Olinked line¹ to
inform a Ocollaborative conversation¹ in real-time ­ in actual urban
environments. People have been asked to work together to map pollution as a
Omob¹ in the past, the discussions that happen Oin the field¹ between a
group of people who don¹t necessarily agree with what pollution is always
provokes peronsal insights into how a landscape it understood.
The idea was initiated as a digital arts project to explore social
relationships across space.

see the blog link at the website.

hope it helps


Chris

On 27/07/2010 15:55, "Martin Rieser" <martin.rieser@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Yasminers
>
> This discussion is gradually moving in circles around certain key issues. I
> think the questions that are emerging are about real depth of *audience
> engagement,* the *radical* potential of these new technologies of mapping
> and location (Daphne and Roger) also see;
> Brian Holmes Drifting Through the Grid (
> http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1523&lang=en) and the *
> quality* of existing examples of interventions. This is also true of the
> use of urban screens and integrated technologies in architectural surfaces,
> as raised by Iouliani (I would cite the work of Art+Com for examples of
> subtle uses of such embedded technology in public space).
>
> I do feel we need a longer period of artistic development and better
> tool-sets for artists to realise this potential, Locative media has only
> been around for about 8 years as an accessible technology and has really
> only gone mainstream for the last five. That is a very short period to
> realise outstanding work artistically, or even to integrate coherent
> artistic vision into public demonstrations. At present artists can
> principally use mscape (http://www.mscapers.com/) - a technology tied until
> recently only to Windows Mobile phones or construct their own iphone apps
> There are other freeware solutions out there , but none for artists as easy
> to adapt as digital music or video software technologies. So please keep the
> examples coming, particularly at the sharp end of mapping interventions. The
> overhyping of emergent technologies is not a new phenomenon, but is
> invariably followed by a period of disappointment, which really masks the
> process of consolidation, which I believe is what is happening at present
>
> Martin
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 11:35 AM, Iouliani Theona <iouliani@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> travelling around the Greek periphery, throughout small cities, I found
>> it
>>> hard to participate in this ­extremely interesting- discussion due,
>> mainly,
>>> to connectivity issues. I couldn¹t help but wonder, if in this country,
>> in
>>> the southeast of Europe, the Ospace of flows¹ is far from a continuum,
>> then
>>> what can be said about the actual process of urban hybridization?
>>>
>>> Having a more design-oriented background I was ­and still remain-
>>> interested in the incorporation of interfaces in persistent architectural
>>> forms, such as buildings and especially public spaces, thinking this is a
>>> proper and rather efficient way to reach large groups of citizens and
>>> various social groups, without the need of rather expensive mobile
>> devices
>>> and access to high bandwidth networks, that support some locative media
>>>
>>> So, we went from urban screens, to fabrics, to membranes, to smart
>>> ­building- skins, to projections and to any sort of manipulation of the
>>> available surfacesS
>>>
>>> S but what have we learned from Prada? As much as Lev Manovich (The
>> Poetics
>>> of Augmented Space: Learning from Prada (2002),
>>> http://www.manovich.net/TEXTS_07.HTM) was optimistic while authoring
>> OThe
>>> Poetics of Augmented Space¹, it can be claimed that after a cycle of
>>> experimentation, not much is left.
>>>
>>> Maybe it is a matter of the limitations of the screen, maybe it¹s due to
>>> the content that is displayed and how it is related to the actual
>>> architecture itself, its use and its internal processes, the majority of
>>> such interfaces don¹t succeed in intriguing the potential user out of her
>>> daily routine, to engage her in novel spatial experiences and
>> interactions,
>>> and are gradually rendered invisible.
>>>
>>> So what¹s in store?
>>>
>>> Content in a surface is a retinal object and therefore is easily
>>> intelligible. Efforts towards a more invisible hybridization pose, yet
>>> again, questions that are very well articulated by Daphne in her 16/7
>>> contribution, about how can such projects be used to involve/address
>>> different social groups, other than a technologically privileged and
>>> advanced class.
>>>
>>> Kind regards,
>>>
>>> Iouliani Theona
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Iouliani Theona
>> Architect/PhD Candidate
>> NTUA Athens
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
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>
>


Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201


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Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] hybrid city as interface - is it related to situationist notions?

Hello Yasminers

From a laptop on a train, I also wonder what it is about the 60s and
70s? I went to see the University of Trash at the Sculpture Center in
NY. I went with my mother who lived in NY in the 60s and early 70s.
She said "I saw this in the 70s, why am I seeing it again?" I thought
that this was a really interesting question. I don't know the answer.
I don't think that it is just post modern fashion's lack of imagination
like Hollywood suffers from (or is it just that?).

But I was also very interested in Roger's post about phenology because
it offered a different scale of experience. It seems to me that some of
the technological tactics and the psychogeographical investigations
offer approaches to encouraging local knowledge, means for like minded
people to find each other, tactics for reappropriation of public space,
decommodification both of technology and space, but the proposition to
dig where you stand might require means to investigate different time
scales and different, perhaps non-human ways of life.

It also potentially points in another direction towards questions of
work and labour: I was reading A Call to Farms: Continental Drift
through the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor, a derive through co-ops,
organic farms and environmental activism. The places visited by a loose
and changing group of people participating in the drift were places of
long term action.

That's an interesting relationship of scale of duration - a derive of a
week visiting decade long projects in a landscape century or more of
radicalism

Chris

Chris Fremantle

chris@fremantle.org
+44 (0)7714 203016


On 26/07/2010 17:24, Daphne Dragona wrote:
> Hello yasminers
>
> I guess most people have already started their summer holidays or are
> overloaded with work trying to finish everything before holidays.
> But, here are some more thoughts of mine for those who are still on the
> laptops :)
>
> > From posts received but also generally from texts, articles, researches on
> the field of locative media, it has become quite clear that when we need
> references to support our work, we mostly turn to situationist notions. We
> often speak of phychogeographies, of drifting and of subversion. We seek for
> playful wanderings and for ludic flaneurs that may provoke changes in the
> perception of the cityscape.
>
> I have myself referred to these notions quite a lot regarding some projects.
> However a question that more and more comes to my mind lately is how close
> are we to the writings of the 60s? How much do our writings, projects, way
> of living reflect ideas like those of the situationists? I don't mean that
> these notions can not/ should not be appropriated; cause that would be the
> last thing their authors would want – for us to see a sacred side in them...
>
> But rather what I am questioning is what are we seeking and to what extent?
> Can the excitement of contributing, participating, mapping, discovering the
> cities through today's interfaces be connected to bringing changes in
> *life*itself? Do we seek to
> provoke "conditions favourable to direct living" or to our perception of the
> living experience?
>
> The participants of the " hybrid city" we are talking about are the
> participants of a networked world. They (we) are used to "geotagging", to
> "saving places", to exploring the city through location based social
> networks. Playfulness and interaction is part of their (our) everyday life
> though the use of the different applications and interfaces. Free floating
> in the space of flows and in the urban environment, they (we) follow their
> own desires.
>
> But, while we are "drifting", are we getting closer or are we distancing
> ourselves to/from what Debord and Vaneigem were talking about?
> Or is emphasis on subectivity, interaction and playfulness as we experience
> them today just the opposite side of the same coin that situationists once
> flipped?
>
> Daphne
>
>
>
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