Editors
Susa Pop, Tanya Toft, Nerea Calvillo, Mark Wright
Project manager
Joanna Szlauderbach
Editorial staff
Gabriella Arrigoni, Lesley Taker, Curators of Connecting Cities Network
Proofreader
Lesley Taker / FACT Liverpool
Editorial & Photography Assistance
Christina Mandilari, Sarah Langnese
Design by
Iva Arandelović
Concept
Susa Pop, Tanya Toft
Production
Public Art Lab
Cover Image by
Iva Arandelović
Printed by
Printera Dr. F. Tudmana 14/A 10431 Sv. Nedelja, Croatia
Distributed by
avedition GmbH Verlag für Architektur und Design Senefelderstr. 109 70176 Stuttgart, Deutschland Phone: +49 (0)711/220 22 79-0 www.avedition.com
Funded by
European Union, Culture Programme 2007-13
ISBN
978-3-89986-255-3
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the materials is concerned, and specifically but not exclusively the right of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in the other ways, and storage in databases or any other media. For use of any kind, the written permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. © 2016 with the editors © For the texts with the authors © For the photos with the photographers and designers
Editors
WHAT URBAN MEDIA ART CAN DO
WHY WHEN WHERE &HOW
Susa Pop Tanya Toft Nerea Calvillo Mark Wright
2016
PART 1 Introduction 19
Connecting Cities in the Framework of the European Union
by Barbara Gessler
21
Preface
by Tanya Toft & Susa Pop
31
Connecting Cities Network Urban Media Art Practices
by Susa Pop
43
Collective Curatorial Statement
by Mark Wright
in collaboration with Yannick Antoine, Ana Botella, Nerea Calvillo, Diāna Čivle, Darko Fritz, Jasmin Grimm, Céline Jouenne, Katharina Meissner, Susa Pop, Mike Stubbs, Minna Tarkka, Gernot Tscherteu
50
What Urban Media Art Can Do
by Tanya Toft
PART 2 Action 66
Artivism. Media, Art and Democratic Action in the Twenty-First Century
by Peter Weibel
73
Public Agency in Hybrid Space. In Search of Foundations for New Forms of Public Engagement
by Eric Kluitenberg
81
Urban Media Art Paradox: Critical Fusion vs. Urban Cosmetics
by Maurice Benayoun & Josef Bares
ART PROJECTS 91
WAR VETERAN VEHICLE
Krzysztof Wodiczko
95
GHANA THINKTANK
Ghana ThinkTank
99
BE AWARE
Robin Hood Cooperative
103
SMSLINGSHOT
VR/Urban
107
THE SPECTRE OF PEOPLE
Media Facades Helsinki Team
113
OPEN URBAN TELEVISION
JARD (Javier Argota, Rodrigo Delso) & Alberto Gรณmez
117
UNITED COLORS OF DISSENT
Orkan Telhan & Mahir Yavuz
121
INTERRUPTING THE EVERYDAY
Tactical Technology Collective
Shared Experience 126
The Rise of Network Culture
by Kazys Varnelis
137
Netspaces: Space and Place in a Networked World
by Katharine S. Willis
145
Spectacle and Participation
by Claire Bishop
ART PROJECTS 157
URBAN ALPHABETS
Suse Miessner
163
VIDEO PAINTING
Blake Shaw & Bruno Levy
169
SAVING FACE
Karen Lancel & Hermen Maat
173
G-FRAME
The Constitute
177
LIGHT WALK
Sandra Linton Huezo & David Heaton Bauhaus University Weimar
181
HIDDEN HISTORIES
A collaboration between xm:lab & the Hybrid Publishing Group, the “Hidden Histories” team included Henrik Elburn, Silvia Font, Loraine Furter, Flavien Gillié, Daniel Jackson, Gabriel Lucas, Francoise Marneffe, Luz Santos, María Castelló Solbes, Jeanne Trottier, Simon Worthington & Soenke Zehle
185
URBAN TAKES HELSINKI
Michelle Teran
Human Presence 190
Interfacing Urban Media Art
by Nanna Verhoeff
200
Interaction, Participation, Networking: Art and Telecommunication
by Inke Arns
ART PROJECTS 223
BINOCULARS TO… BINOCULARS FROM…
Varvara Guljajeva & Mar Canet Sola
229
READY TO CLOUD
The Constitute
233
HERE ALL ALONE
Anders Weberg
237
MASTER | SLAVE INVIGILATOR SYSTEM
Jeremy Bailey
243
SELFIESÃOPAULO
Moritz Stefaner, Jay Chow, Lev Manovich
247
OCCUPY THE SCREEN | PEOPLES SCREEN
Paul Sermon & Charlotte Gould
251
O.25 FPS
Radamés Ajna & Thiago Hersan
255
MÉGAPHONE
Moment Factory & Etienne Paguette
261
LINZERSCHNITTE
Ars Electronica Futurelab
Environment & Sense Ecology 266
Predictive Geographies
by Mark Shepard
274
Smart Cities Need Privacy by Design for Being Humane
by Norbert A. Streitz
283
Smart Complexity?
by Henriette Steiner & Kristin Veel
ART PROJECTS 291
ORGANIC CINEMA
World Wilder Lab
295
HUMAN BEEING
The Constitute
301
SONNENGARTEN
Johannes Marschall, Till Fastnacht & Abraham Ornelas Aispuro Bauhaus University Weimer
305
(WE ARE) LIGHT CATCHERS
Michael Ang
311
PARTICLE FALLS | PARTICLE FALLZ
Andrea Polli
315
SAVE-O-METER
Melanie Nobis, Achim Friedland & Ricardo O’Nascimento
319
RECOIL
Robert Seidel
325
A FOLDED PATH
Circumstance
Placemaking 330
The Future of the City: a Smart City or a Social City?
by Martijn de Waal
339
Communities, Spectacles and Infrastructures: Three Approaches to Digital Placemaking
by Martin Tomitsch
348
Futurecraft
by Matthew Claudel & Carlo Ratti
ART PROJECTS 357
SONIC SKATE PLAZA
Pablo Serret de Ena - in collaboration with: Daniel Fernández, Sergio Galán, José Manuel González, Fernando Sarro & Reza Safavi
361
TRANS EUROPE SLOW
Sergio Galán
365
ETERNAL RECURRENCE
Jim Campbell
369
LEUCHTTURM
Florian Licht
375
COISA LIDA
Lucas Bambozzi
379
UNINTENDED EMISSIONS
Critical Engineering Working Group – Bengt Sjölén, Julian Oliver & Danja Vasiliev
383
SHIFT (SILOS)
Matěj Al-Ali & Tomáš Moravec
389
SMART CITIZEN SENTIMENT DASHBOARD
Nina Valkanova & Moritz Behrens
393
URBAN ENTROPY
Dietmar Offenhuber
397
ESEL-COMPLAIN
Florian Born & Christoph Fraundorfer
PART 3 Urban
Media Environments
402
Design Space for Media Architectural Interfaces
by Moritz Behrens & Ava Fatah gen. Schieck
414
Media Façades and Urban Media Environments – Developments of Art Practices
by Darko Fritz
424
Common Conflicts, Imperial Imaginaries: Exploring the Becoming-Environmental of Media
by Soenke Zehle
433
Participation in Urban Interaction Design for Civic Engagement
by Marcus Foth & Martin Brynskov
URBAN MEDIA SHOWCASES 442
SCREENS IN THE WILD
London, Nottingham, UK
446
XM:LAB
Saarbrücken, Germany
450
OPEN SKY GALLERY
Hong Kong
454
STREAMING MUSEUM
New York City, USA
458
SCREEN CITY
Stavanger, Norway
462
FLEDERHAUS
Aspern Seestadt, Austria
466
SESI SP DIGITAL ART GALLERY
by Verve Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil
470
ARS ELECTRONICA CENTER
Linz, Austria
474
CONNECTING CITIES CHINA
Guangzhou, China
478
URBANE KÃœNSTE RUHR
Ruhr District, Germany
482
QUARTIER DES SPECTACLES
Montreal, Canada
488
FEDERATION SQUARE
Melbourne, Australia
492
TIMES SQUARE ARTS
New York City, USA
Overview
496
Connecting Cities' Art Projects
507
Connecting Cites' Partners Organisations
514
Authors' Biographies
520
Credits
Be Aware (2013) by Robin Hood Cooperative, Medialab-Prado, Madrid, CC Network, 2013 Š Marisa Gonzålez
98
BE AWARE
What
Robin Hood Cooperative
Action
shoot with a laser bow at an illustration of the mutating monster of financial economy projected on a street wall or displayed on a media façade. People can win chunks of information about the hegemony of finance, the big banks’ operations and their effects on each and everyone’s life. The script for the animation was developed by integrating theoretical knowledge and results of experiments on the relation between aesthetics and economy, art and politics. This interactive piece is part of the Robin Hood Cooperative campaign and presents (in a more playful way) the structure and complex ideas behind the Robin Hood project, which aims to profanate finance, giving everybody access to its hidden structures. Robin Hood Minor Asset Management is a counter investment cooperative of the precariat founded in Finland in 2012 by artists and economists. With the sophisticated algorithm called Parasite, Robin Hood makes use of the same tools of investment/ exploitation that are used for stock exchange, in order to return its capital to people and projects with contrary goals to those of the eternally expanding Wall Street investors. Why The aim of the project is to share and mobilise the group’s activist knowledge in cities. Robin Hood analyses the functioning of financial markets, biopolitical economy, semiocapital – a form of social production essentially focused on the production of signs – and how they relate to our problematic condition for autonomous organization. The group considers the ways in which the changes in the nature and relationships between economy and immaterial production (and how they affect our precarious states of mind) are not transparent to the broad public. Robin Hood seeks to propose a new form ofcollectivity. Their main organisational questions are:
99
Be Aware is an interactive installation that invites people to
Open Urban Television (2015) by JARD & Alberto Gómez, Medialab-Prado, Madrid, CC Network, 2015 Š Medialab-Prado
OPEN URBAN TELEVISION
What
JARD (Javier Argota, Rodrigo Delso) & Alberto Gómez
Action
non-profit platform to monitor spaces of protest, and engage interactively with them. The project deploys a network of realtime streaming cams on the most iconic spaces for public demonstrations of the city, whose content can be remotely accessed by any citizen 24/7 and projected on an urban screen. Instead of the surveillance systems of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV), Open Urban Television (OUT) is a network designed to be re-appropriated by citizens – due to its open information, collaborative communication and research approach. Monitored public spaces are signposted with different QR codes, which can be scanned by citizens with their mobiles, refreshing the content of the webpage and the media façade, as an expression of citizens’ mood across the city. Fostering a distributed citizen communication system, OUT can provide critical continuous information for urban studies, e.g. for improving mobility, citizen mobilisations, activist practices or daily scheduling. OUT also makes visible the blurring limits between public and private spheres, the increasing privatization of urban space or the diversified ways in which the urban environment is experienced. Different visualisations of the streaming received are being tested to be used as an analytical tool. Why The increasing streaming of cities and its protests – by public and private agencies – mutates its relation between control, surveillance or recognition by adding remote monitoring to the physical presence of police corps. Within this framework, OUT aims to analyse, think, and act on this specific urban infrastructure traditionally monopolized by private agencies through the spaces of protest. It is a project about equalising and democratising the use of urban visualisations by generating an infrastructure that could empower citizens. In this
113
Open Urban Television (www.openurbantelevision.com) is a
Saving Face (2011) by Karen Lancel & Hermen Maat, Public Art Lab, Bauhaus Foundation Dessau, CC Network, 2013 © Ruthe Zuntz
168
SAVING FACE
What
Karen Lancel & Hermen Maat
Shared Experience
face to share and explore identities with others. The work consists of two components. Firstly, a personal sculptural interface equipped with a camera, small screen and face-recognition technologies on which individuals can capture their face and interact with the system. Secondly, a large urban screen on which the faces of individuals are shared and transformed in view of an audience. As audience members caress their own faces in front of the camera, their faces appear to be “painted” onto the urban media infrastructure, and a unique, intimate, tactile interaction emerges. Each portrait transferred onto the urban screen then slowly merges with the portraits of previous visitors, family, friends and strangers worldwide. Saving Face acts as a form of “social sculpture”. The work seeks to express a new form of social, digital, tactile meeting ritual for the human need to feel, to touch and be touched, to communicate, to get to know each other, and to build trust, by making participants “digitally tangible” and visible to each other, allowing audiences to experience a digital sphere of intimate human contact. Why Meeting in the public sphere is often associated with developing relationships based on reciprocal body language and face-to-face connection and touch. Telepresence technologies extend our bodies beyond biological boundaries in time and space, but prevent us from touching (to quote Arjen Mulder). In today’s urban condition, “meetings” as personal experiences are increasingly being replaced or alienated by technologies for identiy scanning, for biometric screening, surveillance, social media, and brain-computer interfaces. Consequently, the more these technologies are developed, the less people get to create reciprocal physical bonds between each other. Saving Face is intended to contrast forms of mediation that negate intimacy and tactility. The digital meeting ritual provides a sense of meeting in a form of extended body interface, both digitally and
169
Saving Face explores a new form of tangible, social, digital inter-
258
Mégaphone, (2012) by E. Paquette & A. Lupien, Quartier des Spectacles, Montreal, 2013 © Frédérique Ménard-Aubin
Human Presence 259
322
323
Introduction Recoil (2015) by Robert Seidel, City Visions Jena, 2015 © Christian Seeling
ARS ELECTRONICA CENTER Linz, Austria
Mission
The Ars Electronica Center (AEC) is a landmark of the city of Linz. It has a prominent, highly visible location across the river from the city centre, and its mission is to engage the citizens of Linz (and the wider region) with the relationship between art, technology and society in a multitude of ways. These characteristics, along with continuing support from the city government (and therefore the people's representatives) give the citizens a strong sense of connection to and ownership of the building. The media façade, built in 2009, is a very direct way of making the presence of Ars Electronica visible in the built environment. By curating content for the façade in a way that incorporates a variety of events and projects in which the citizens of Linz feel invested, the sense of ownership is reflected on an architectural scale.
470
Content
There are several layers of content. A range of artistic projects constitute the standard programme, scheduled every day and every week. This also includes the daily “façade terminal” slot, two hours every evening during which anyone can approach a terminal outside the AEC and put their own content on the façade via several different modes: a bluetooth-based music visualiser, a live video camera, and a “pulse interface” which transfers the heartbeat of the visitor to the façade. Another layer is the support of public events and special uses: the façade may display a red ribbon for World AIDS day, a rainbow flag for the local youth cultural centre or a logo for a company's event held on the premises. The third layer is made up of curated special projects, ranging from resident artists' works to student projects. The façade has a large architectural presence, high visibility and low resolution – it is therefore best suited for more abstract works utilising subtle combinations of shapes and colours, or simple messages; it is most “readable” (due to its resolution) from the other side of the river, and is most immersive directly on the “main deck”, the public square next to the AEC.
Context
Next to the AEC is a public square with several cafes, in the warmer months this square is full of people sitting outside on wide concrete stairs that are part of the building. A few minutes' walk across the Danube bridge, is the entrance to the city's central square. To the left of it, a busy road with a park along the river.
Ars Electronica Center, Light Night (2010) by Ars Electronica Futurelab, Fassadenterminal, 2010 Š rubra
CONNECTING CITIES CHINA Guangzhou, China
Mission
Connecting Cities China (CCC) is a satellite of the international Connecting Cities Network. The goal is to create an intercultural exchange in the field of urban media art between Western and Chinese culture. It started in 2014 as an independent and projectbased platform articulated through a series of lectures and workshops. The project developed in 2015, through the realisation of bigger urban media art productions, like the Peoples Screen (2015) by Paul Sermon and Charlotte Gould: a real-time installation bringing audiences in Guangzhou and Perth, Australia together in a real-time scenario on the virtual space of two connected screens during the Guangzhou International Light Festival. The specificities of the Chinese urban context, characterised by metropolises of five to fifteen million inhabitants, generate an approach to the public space which significantly differs from the Western perspective. In the Chinese megacities, for instance, graffiti and street art are not tolerated, but the public infrastructure is decorated and extraordinarily well kept. The next step for CCC is to initiate a Chinese-European exchange programme for urban media artists.
474
Content
The programme focuses on developing new interactive works in cooperation between Chinese and international artists and designers. Therefore key elements are workshops, prototyping activities and the involvement of the fast-growing Chinese markerscene. Interaction, participation and the presence of contemporary artworks and events in the public space are still rare in China. Hence, CCC strives to introduce a new way of working in China, exploriing original avenues in the cultural sector, in collaboration with Chinese partners as well as with artists and designers from the global Connecting Cities Network. The variety of the themes proposed mainly depends on individual curatorial ideas, which interact with the manifold local situations, occasions and traditions addressed by artists and partners. Some examples from the lates workshops and exhibitions are Design Fiction, HyperCommune, Ambilight or Realtime Rituals. The CCC approach
aims to facilitate experimental, playful and participative works providing socio-cultural impacts and impulses to the audience in the public space.
Context
In China, cities are rapidly expanding and have completely changed their appearance within the last twenty years during China’s massive economic growth and urbanisation. The developmental pattern of the urban space is revealed by the height of residential buildings where forty floors is the average size of most newly constructed buildings, due to the migration pressure from the countryside. Buildings older than thirty years, unless of historical value, tend to be demolished and replaced by new ones. The urban environment is changing its face at a speed and a volume that is not comparable to other countries. Additionally, there is a proliferation of a particular kind of shopping mall (combined with restaurants, hotels and offices) establishing a new standard infrastructure in the public space, which is fully commercial. The government, as the owner of all real estate in China, is ultimately in charge of redesigning the city. The consequence is promotional governmental campaigns on the big urban screens, embedded in most recent buildings. The synthesis of contemporary Western cultural discourses and Chinese distinctive qualities generates a rather unusual setting for the artistic programme.
CC Network China, International Festival of Light, Guangzhou, 2015 Š Marc Piesbergen
New buildings and shopping centres in China are equipped with cutting-edge, big-scale and high-resolution screens as a part of their media architecture. In spite of that it is still common at cultural events to use projectors, advertisement-screens or DIY screens for media-installations. For instance, the Peoples Screen at the Children’s Palace Guangzhou consisted of a very large format high-resolution, curved, fourteen by sixteen metres LED screen, covering the whole façade of the Palace. Specific software adapts the incoming signal to the screen. For photography and video live-streaming, a standard HD video-camera is mounted halfway up the left frame of the screen. Because the screen is privately owned, but part of a public building, all arrangements have to be negotiated and confirmed twice. The biggest technical challenge for all projects in China is the so-called Great Chinese Firewall, that is the legislation main-taining Internet censorship in China. Since Google, Facebook, Youtube, Dropbox and Twitter are blocked, it is not possible to develop projects involving these social media and platforms. Even though the Chinese equivalents are very popular the challenges to link Eastern and Western cities are tough and the speed is often reduced.
476
Technology
CCN China, Control No Control (2012) by Daniel Iregui, International Festival of Light, Guangzhou, 2015 © Marc Piesbergen
Business Model
Connecting Cities China seeks to address the incongruity between the size and dynamism of one of the most important regions in the world, and the scarcity of contemporary media art and culture connecting it with other countries and supporting crosscultural projects. The cultural exchange with the rest of the world is still mainly a one-way road, limited to bringing artists from the West to China to present their work. At the same time, the development of the Chinese maker, designer, and hacker scenes has initiatives of project-spaces and communities springing up all over the country. Differently from Europe, public funding for contemporary culture is quite limited and therefore often replaced by local sponsors, such as real-estate developers, shopping malls or private investors, with significant impact on the kind of projects that obtain support. Indeed, Connecting Cities China does not rely on public funding but also depends on the acquisition of project-based budgets for every production. In order to achieve a sustainable business model, it is necessary to develop a project-pool, where productions are financed jointly by a member-network, which in return gets the license to show and market the artworks exclusively in China.
Urban Media Environments
One of the best showcases up to now is the Peoples Screen by Paul Sermon and Charlotte Gould, which was realised in November 2015. During the busiest days of the festival, the audience queued up for nearly two hours to get the chance to jump onto the sixty-four square metres, big blue-screen at the front of the Children’s Palace. Participants could see themselves from above, shifted in a magical virtual landscape, meeting and interacting with their counterparts more than 6,000 kilometres away on the blue-screen of the Northbridge Piazza Screen in Perth. The constantly changing backdrop combined elements of the cityscapes of both locations, which became popular icons to take a selfie with during the performance. The Peoples Screen introduced a new dimension of cross-cultural, cross-media and cross-spatial exchange within the metropolitan public space. At the same festival, Daniel Iregui and Studio Iregular contributed another showcase, Control No Control (2015): a three-metre tall cube, equipped with movement-sensors able to generate constant audio-visual content. The audience used it as a threedimensional touch-screen, producing visual patterns in combination with electronic sounds.
477
Best Showcase