 |
|
|
|
|
|
OVERCLOCKING THE CITY
City dwellers are increasingly constructing, maintaining, and experiencing a multitude of simultaneous spaces and times--both near and far, side-by-side, juxtaposed, morphed, and dispersed. Mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants, Global Positioning Systems and a whole variety of new software and telecommunication applications are partly responsible for these space/time shifts, giving artists and architects new conceptual tools for imagining, planning and building cities; as well as for navigating through, describing, and acting upon these cities in new ways.
Rather than "creating a technological cocoon around human beings that separate them from any direct access to the world," an emerging group of artists deploying sensors, hand-held electronics, and faster Internet connections are developing projects that actively intervene in the shaping and reshaping of public spaces in contemporary cities. They are integrating digital technology into buildings in order to make them adaptive and responsive to the flows of human activity and environmental forces (Diller/Scofidio's Blurr Building, Q.S. Serafijn's /Spuybroek's D-tower, Marek Walczak's Podium Light Wall). They are scanning the unseen electromagnetic spectrum that surrounds specific places, and turning these data into compelling audio/visual experiences that both heighten and change our perception (Free103point9's Microradio Souind Walk, DSP Music Syndicate's Upper Air). Other artists are offering new opportunities for individuals and groups from around the world to broadcast their collective desires and aspirations onto a specific park or street (Carlos de Llarena's UrBalloon, Josh Kinberg's Bikes Against Bush). Using PDAs and portable laptops connected wirelessly to databases, some artists are creating alternative social maps, counter-histories and individually annotated narratives about local populations in specific neighborhoods (Trebor Scholz's Twenty-four Dollar Island, GlobwLab's One Block Radius, Yellow Arrow). Still others are using mobile social software to coordinate large numbers of bodies for political action (TXTMob); or devising playful and imaginary spaces within the city (McGonigal's I Love Bees, Botfighers, Blast Theory's Day of the Figurines). We don't have to leave or disconnect from physical space in order to connect to digital spaces. Artists, architects, technologists, urban planners, and others are recombining the two, connecting individuals and groups together at a variety of scales and intensities.
Architects and artists are also exploring the question of how cyberspace and "virtual reality" are changing basic ideas about architectural space and the city. Rather than using traditional CAD software, "where basic geometrical forms are reproduced and then modified or rearranged, architects are using evolutionary software that produce forms that shift and transform in relationship to a set of programmable modifications and interactions" (Massumi). More currently, some architects and artists are picking up new ideas about the dynamics and plasticity of form from neuroscience and neurobiology, attempting to learn more about designing architectural experience through a mapping of the brain's events (Novak's nanotechnology).
But there are still other technologies and aesthetic practices that may be equally useful for thinking about and designing new spaces in the city--those of the video game. And although it is a technology that re-mediates the older but more popular technologies of arcade games, trompe l'oeil, cinema, and perspective painting, it is becoming one of the dominant audio/visual forms of immersive experience in the world.
Video and computer games are a multi-billion dollar global industry, and an entire generation has become versed in its aesthetic languages, navigational moves, narratives, rhetoric, and spaces of immersion. Moreover, "the progress of the industry continues to be propelled by an expanding community of avid player-producers who 'mod' games (short for modification), archive abandonware, circulate shareware," and construct their own game versions that they can upload and play (de Peuter & Dyer-Witheford).
Overclocking the City proposes that we look more critically at gaming technologies and culture as storehouses of tools, code, interactive strategies, possibilities for social networking, new spatial/perceptual metaphors, and graphical worlds that can be used, manipulated, and re-energized for purposes that lie outside corporate goals of the game industry. We propose using these popular technologies to help cure ourselves of old habits of thought, not necessarily for designing better working buildings, but for designing new kinds of perceptual experiences that might influence, disrupt, expand and integrate with the social and material practices of our public urban spaces.
Participants in Overclocking the City will:
- Discuss and present projects that utilize information and digital technologies to encounter the public domain in different ways. What kinds of aesthetic experiences, political agency, and social networks are we enabling by combining the technologies of information, simulation and physical space?
- Discuss the challenges of building multiuser virtual environments that function as public spaces. What constitutes the public domain in an electronically networked virtual world? What forms might this space take? Should the design of these spaces mimic, extend, parallel the physical world, or be entirely fictional, abstract, or phantasmagoric? What kinds of behavior and transactions do we want to enable in these worlds?
- Debate the standards and criteria with which we evaluate the success of a virtual world functioning as public space.
- Consider how virtual worlds, which by and large have been designed as autonomous environments, might extend into and have a functioning relationship with actual places, buildings, and people in physical spaces. How might virtual worlds be more embodied?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|