Interactive Media in Urban Space

The current attitude of the communication system design shows how the various socio-technological development interweaves with the contemporary society. In this scenario, the growing number of information and the coexistence of multiple and different communication channels create the need of guidelines able to help us understanding and reading the surrounding complexity. The aim of this paper is to outline the current transmedia communication system focusing on contemporary media and languages, looking in particular way at the role of game experiences as an emerging attitude. First of all, we analyse the communication crucial point of the society. Then we identify the current media trend, highlighting the important role that narrative and space could play, perceiving the urban fabric as a space of possibilities. Therefore we consider the urban games and their actual function in the communication design contemporary research, dealing with the urban area as a playground. So, we focus on how the game experience in the urban scenario creates an atypical experience of the space, providing involvement and allowing an unexpected and transversal reading of the city. Establishing that the play activity is deeply ingrained in human nature, our final purpose is to point out how game can act as an important communication media.

What Urban Media Art Can Do - Why When Where & How, 2016

Urban media art is possibly one of the most momentous expansions within the field of contemporary public art. Referring to various forms of media-aesthetic, artistic engagement in urban environments and evolving from a mix of genealogies of media art, avant-garde, architecture, urban development, design and technology, and biology, urban media art creates a space in which artists make, utilize and critically explore innovations in software and technology to create artworks, installations and situations in response to the urban discourses and urgencies of our time. What Urban Media Art Can Do – Why When Where and How? engages leading thinkers, artists, curators, architects and designers in an exploration of the aesthetic, theoretical, technological and practical conditions of what urban media art can do. The publication considers artistic responses to current urban threats and discourses in a time characterised by specific technological literacies and constructions of meaning, contextualised within theoretical perspectives. The publication departs from the global, exploratory research undertaken by the Connecting Cities Network into media art’s contribution to urban culture and environments, architecture and co-creation of cities (2013-2016). It features a number of recent artworks and urban media environments from around the world, which critically engage with geospatial, (trans)local, hybrid, intelligent urban contexts and visions for digital placemaking. These artworks contribute to developing the still-emerging domain of urban media art. New and classic benchmark essays by Inke Arns, Josef Bares, Moritz Behrens, Maurice Benayoun, Claire Bishop, Martin Brynskov, Sandy Claes, Matthew Claudel, Marcus Foth, Eric Kluitenberg, Susa Pop, Carlo Ratti, Ava Fatah gen. Schieck, Mark Shepard, Henriette Steiner, Norbert Streitz, Tanya Toft, Martin Tomitsch, Andrew Vande Moere, Kazys Varnelis, Kristin Veel, Nanna Verhoeff, Martijn de Waal, Peter Weibel, Katharine Willis, Niels Wouters, Mark Wright, and Soenke Zehle outline major historical moments and critical concerns relating to the current transformation of society in our digital era, to which urban media art respond. Edited by Susa Pop, Tanya Toft, Nerea Calvillo and Mark Wright Published by av edition, 2016. ISBN: 978-3-89986-255-3

2019

In this collection of essays, we advance the notion of urban interfaces to explore how situated media, art, and performances (co-)constitute and (co-)construct the public spaces of our mediatized cities. Central is the question how urban interfaces may act as privileged sites to negotiate contemporary frictions in and about these spaces – frictions around such issues as digitization and datafication, privatization and commercialization, individualization, and immigration. This issue investigates how these negotiations take shape and contribute to understandings of the role of art and technology in public space.

2009

Cite as: Souliotou, A.Z. (2015) ICTs and Contemporary Art: a platform for the urban well-being, Proceedings of the 3rd International Biennial Conference Hybrid City 2015, Theona, I., and Charitos, D. (eds), University of Athens, pp. 339-344 Abstract. The objective of the present article is to show how ICTs can inspire or facilitate artistic creation and how art (inspired by ICTs or using ICTs) can contribute to the urban well-being. With the advent of the ICTs the boundaries between the makers and the users have considerably blurred in a way that the latter not only do they possess, but they also shape data. The users, thus, have become active participators and creators, so both technicians and users co-create and share information in virtual environments which can in turn influence the structure of urban physical space. This turn has led to a “Data to the people” tendency which empowers individuals and enables them to take initiatives in sharing information and in engaging with active citizenship. This new role of the user-creator has been already taken by artists who use ICTs in their artworks. All artists presented in this article have access and therefore use the ICTs within their cutting-edge art-and-technology practices which constitute a product of the information age in current post-industrial society. Whether they are telematic artists, Internet or post-Internet artists, GPS artists, GST artists or even artists making public art, their approaches show how the ICTs blaze new trails in contemporary art through a variety of projects and exhibitions using a lot of different media. As far as the telematic artists are concerned, their projects present a remarkable evolution thanks to new advances in data visualization and info-graphics which give them the opportunity to present the (flow of) telecommunications through images and maps by precisely locating and dating the communication processes. These new possibilities, thus, enable the visualization of the telecommunication networks which emerge from these processes, going beyond traditional telecommunication projects which just use telecommunication networks in installations or in collaborative projects without visualizing or mapping them. The Internet has given an unprecedented boost in communications and has notably given rise to Net Art (or Internet Art) which comprises a lot of Internet-based artistic projects presenting a high degree of heterogeneity. Especially the Web 2.0 social network platforms have led to an exponential increase of Internet Art projects. Post-Internet art has subsequently expanded the production of artworks inspired by the Internet by taking on-line data and translating them to material creations. GPS enables artists to draw by taking up physical activities like walking in cities or travelling between cities. GSTs are a considerable source of inspiration for contemporary artists, since they permit them to have a satisfactory –if not a complete– image of urban places and engage themselves with cyber-flânerie, ceaseless exploration of the urban space and interrogation about privacy and other social issues. As far as public art is concerned, ICTs can be integrated in urban public space or even translate existing public art installations from material to electronic, providing thus the participators with a new kind of experience. The material and the electronic, the physical and the virtual, intermingle forming thus hybrid urban environments and altering the urban physical context. Furthermore ICTs provide us with a clear urbi et orbi image of the world, since a lot of (collaborative) art projects which use ICTs extend not only in the urban, but also in the global scale. Thus, they give a comprehensive image of the 21st century global village which is characterized by the rapid growth of the urban phenomenon and the shift from the city to the metropolis and thereafter to the megapolis. (Perrault, 2011) Another important recent phenomenon, which relates to the ICTs use, is that although a lot of projects are a priori considered as technological or commercial, they also turn out to be artistic and we can particularly find them implanted in physical urban space. ICTs thus instigate an inquiry with regards to the (re)definition of the ‘artistic’ and render urban physical contexts platforms for the fusion of the technological, the commercial and the artistic. All the above approaches reflect different points of view with regards to ICTs and show that art (inspired by ICTs or using ICTs) can contribute to the urban well-being by: addressing current problems of the urban living, such as earthquakes, riots, social inequality; raising questions about privacy and voyeurism; proposing alternative ways for mapping or visualizing information, as well as for establishing communication and collaborations in urban, inter-urban and even global scale; bringing together people living in urban environments. In all the above ways art can give a more comprehensive image of the contemporary urban condition and (re)define the role of ICTs in society and human history by providing new insights into their potential uses.

2003

Among many other fields, recent advances in information technologies also affected the agenda of architecture. This paper discusses the transforming process of spatial experience in 20th century by the influence of multimedia, regarding the user and user experience, in context of multi-modal interaction. The purpose of this paper is to map certain continuities and discontinuities within the "information" and the "interface "frame, parallel to this transformation. First, we will talk about the transformation on the discourse in'90's. After, this transformation process, both in spatial formation and theory will be examined chronologically through the examples of 21st century's architecture. With an emphasis on multi-modal interaction in space, we will discuss the categories of "mediators" of space orientation, departing from three main intertwined architectural "traces." These mediators are categorized also into three stages according to the progressive immersion of media in to the space. Not only we will try to stress the continuity of the "information transfer" quality of the space vs. the discontinuity of the "mediators"; but also both the physical and the theoretical change of spatial enclosure.

[This is the online-first version of the essay that is part of the special issue on Urban Cartographies for the journal Television and New Media, edited by Heidi Rae Cooley, Nanna Verhoeff and Heather Zwicker (forthcoming 2017)] This article analyzes the way media technologies provide interfaces for the complexity of cities as historically layered, continuously changing, and intricately connected spaces. Following Branden Hookway and Alexander Galloway, I understand media interfaces as processes rather than objects. An interface is not something; it does something. I propose to focus on the way in which often temporary, mobile, and connected interfaces produce urban cartographies in the very act and process of navigation. This navigation constitutes a performative cartography of ambulant presence, fluid connectivity, and an inherent multiplicity of connections between locations and other subjects. In what follows, I examine a small collection of urban art projects that speak to this description and suggest that the interface's pursuits of connectivity, and the stakes and claims inseparable from these pursuits, produce and structure urban cartographies. The article then questions in what ways interfaces can create, not a threshold between two dimensions, but spatial transformations of a third kind.

CHANGING CITIES V: Spatial, Design, Landscape, Heritage and Socio-Economic dimensions: Making our Cities Resilient in times of Pandemics, 2023

Ιn our contemporary cultural environments, art holds a central role in creating and articulating values, moreover, in structuring and shaping everyday practices. Further to that, art can provide us with a conceptual framework to address contemporary ideas. The knowledge of the aesthetics and the artistic experimentation upon over-elaborated aesthetic principles can be challenged in the stimulating practice of working on the field of public spaces and the everydayness. If the common basis for experiencing any public space is defined by our necessity to communicate with different communities of people, then we could think of the ways in which the urban public space and the digital art-works could be designed to broaden the conceptual presence of one another. Creating a digital art-project for a public space asks for a thought in situ; that which is installed within it, it must somehow (conceptually, literally, functionally and sociologically) get included in it. Since a work of art can reveal how complex relationships between individuals and public spaces are interweaving, a digital audiovisual art-work apart from inspiring behaviors and places narratives, it asks for us to think about the coexistence of space and art as a unified, solid ground for creating meanings. Ideas about the physical, emotional and intellectual perception of space, the understanding of public space, the expression of an aesthetic and at the same time of a critical reason, the desire or intention for social interaction-which arises from the affinity of bodies and spaces-they all can be seen in the light of a new perspective: Based on the fact that the thought which generates digital art-works is revolutionary, because it provides us with new ideas, or even, some different points of view to think about our environments, our mode of inhabitant and our style of behavioral selves. Accordingly, if the creation of a digital art-work means that someone is engaged to the creation of the new, then we have a provocatively interesting perspective for the future, for "the world that comes". Digital art-works in public spaces look like a kind of a map leading us to understand what this world is not, but yet, what it could be about. However, designing and materializing a digital work of art for public spaces is not just a project to predict what-will-happen, or a project to understand the reality as-it-is-now. It also articulates the means for crossing a multitude other dynamics, such as the political, the economic, the social, the cultural and the institutional ones. For the time being, the text will retain the fact that a digital art-work, transitory among the places we inhabit, the time we spend, is not only a reminder of our pattern of perceiving our motif of living our lives but it is also an opportunity to realize the culture we create.

Today we are living in the midst of an emerging new iconographic paradigm, that of the digital image. On one hand all information media and cultural objects can be transferred and encoded in digital form while on the other hand the relation of spectator with the image is no longer that of contemplation but of interactivity and transformation. These conditions brought into being a new equation between space and image, between image and spectator. In the case of interactive environments and installations a dynamic architectonic space is combined with the kinesis of the viewers' bodies, with the use of new materials and interfaces and three-dimensional screen structures. Human body, architectural space and image fuse together in the course of interactive multimedia events. They are syncronized in a new way, treated as a dynamic field of variables

Modernity is characterized by the use of technological devices and its influence in the relationship between individuals and its contexts, since reality is experienced through a screen or a digital surface. Deeply rooted in media and digital culture, our society contrasts with the previous ways of living, where the physical presence was enough to meet, interact, and communicate. The rise of technology and its impact in individuals also enabled the adoption of different social roles. Today, human beings are encouraged to assume profiles that match their virtual presence, towards an increase of their popularity. Considering a post-medial condition, all the factors referred will interfere and determine the behaviour, personality, and status that each individual holds and adopts in its real life. At this regard, the public space started to host all these social dynamics, moving between real and virtual contexts. The city became, at first, a politicised space, and, then, a suitable one to convey personal beliefs, collective and symbolic narratives, and multiple discourses. Therefore, the urban landscape hosts layer after layer of meaning that, together, witness the memories and the history, following the artistic, cultural, social, and political issues that individuals imprinted in the medium: the urban fabric. Artists became aware of these symbolic exchanges and of the possibility of exploring cities as experimental artistic sites. As a result, they founded avant-garde movements combining different expertise (ex. architecture and arts), to achieve innovation and enhance the process as a key towards a more participatory framework. The digital culture and its features allowed the coexistence of these narratives, both physically and virtually, reaching a wider audience of admirers and active actors in the artistic practice.