[…] To begin the present discussion, I re-purpose the term “telepathic communication” as a rhetorical tool. By telepathic communication I mean the current and future set of personal mobile communications devices, services and infrastructure – from simple mobile phones to immersive, shared augmented reality.7 As one of the leading legitimate scientific investigators of psychic phenomena described it:

We venture to introduce the words Telesthesia and Telepathy to cover all cases of impression received at a distance without the normal operation of the recognised sense organs. These general terms may, we think, be found of permanent service.

“Of permanent service”, indeed. The adoption of this term is intended to focus our attention on the cognitive and sensory nature of mobile communications over the purely functional, social aspects. That is, by employing this term, I seek to emphasize the nature of mobile communications as an extension of the self, rather than exclusively a media for social communication…” — Thinking in Telepathic Cities [PDF] by Anthony Townsend.

An art project by Andre Lemos, Mari Fiorelli and Rob Shields to “write” on Google maps…

[From the website: GPS Writing, SUR-VIV-ALL - The idea came from the crossing of my reading of the book by Margaret Atwood, “Survival,” with my research on locative media, city, mobility and new technologies. In the book “Survival”, the author defends the thesis that the relationship with the survival is a pattern in the imagination of Canadian literature, both of prose and poetry: fighting the forces of nature, the natives, and the animals. . So, from my research on locative media, I plan to “write” the city of Edmonton (on 40 km) with a GPS Tracker, and mapping some hotspots along the way (using iStumbler, Loki, Google Maps, Google Earth…). What I was looking for here, in addition to entertainment, was a way to get closer to the city, to understand and feel their spaces, their dynamics. But, basically, a way to see my “survival” here.

The word “SURVIVAL” has been changed to “SUR-VIV-ALL,” trying to create different meanings in English and French, the official languages Canada, and in Portuguese, my mother language. In French we can see or inferred “SUR VIV (R) E / VIE …”, something like an excess and a lack of life, just when survival is the least and last resort of existence. In Portuguese, “VIVA”, claiming to live, an imperative. In English “survival”, has its original meaning, plus the “ALL” that calls for a social dimension, the public and community.

What is at stake here is the imagination of the city, the relationship with extreme temperatures, the use of cars as standard displacement, the empty spaces, the invisibility of electronic processes (written by the GPS is invisible as well the hotspots Wi - Fi) on the actual structures in the midst of public space. We have photos, videos that attempt to capture this relationship, but with the thread to link with the outside world, the nature. The “Waypoints” on the map will show (as soon as we fished the data transfer) this multimedia content, as well as Wi-Fi hotspots open (we’ve accessed some networks on the street) or closed. - André Lemos]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhMl7_HiuKo

[blogged by Rob Shields on Space and Culture]

In recent years, commentators on game culture and ludology have undertaken the task of analyzing and structuring play. Such work has been strongly influenced by the Dutch researcher Johan Huizinga’s 1938 study of play, Homo Ludens and Roger Callois’s later structuralist elaborations of Huizinga’s research. In this article I want to draw upon a different stream of thought from the mid twentieth century, also informed by Huizinga but not exclusively, that of the Paris Situationist artists and architects, including Guy Debord and Gilles Ivian (also known as [Ivan Chtcheglov). A number of important engagements with play and games by the Situationists are newly relevant today. Rather than offer a historical assessment of Situationism’s theories, I will take cues from their writings to reconsider the potential of games in art. I find useful their critique of play within but nevertheless resistant to capitalism (and by extension imperialism and militarism), their architectural proposals for “player” navigation and transformation of urban “psychogeographic” zones (what we might call “ludic architecture”), their analysis of leisure and non-leisure activities, and their repurposing of Dadaist negativity. These proposals all have direct relevance to what MacKenzie Wark calls our contemporary condition of “Gamespace.” (MacKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory, Harvard University Press, 2007)

Lesson 1: Freeing play

A promising tactic for the early Situationists was the unpredictable yet forceful potential of play — what anthropologist Victor Turner termed the “liminoid,” or the freeing and transformational, moments of play when the normal roles and rules of a community or society are relaxed (via Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, Game Cultures, Open University Press, 2006). After these temporary (TAZ like) situations “players” settle once more into fixed roles. The Situationists proposed to adopt this liminoid “subjunctive mood”, when anything can happen, the carnival, Anarchy Online the RPG, the Society of Creative Anachronisms, into a more general approach, a way of doing and being in the everyday, in order to transform material life with ludic actions.

“We must develop a systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the behaviors which it gives rise to and which radically transform it. Our action on behavior, linked with other desirable aspects of a revolution in mores, can be briefly defined as the invention of games of an essentially new type.” Guy Debord, (Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action, June 1957)

Situationist games do not respect the boundary between play and work, leisure and non-leisure, between “real life” and Huizinga’s “magic circle”, the separation from “normal space” that facilitates immersion in games and play (Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play). Situationist games are not sports and are not relegated to sports stadiums, arcades, or Playstation home entertainment set-ups. Situationist games bleed into the city, the workplace, the buyplace, the personal computer, the mobile phone, public and private transportation and communication, and into and inside escapist rule-based game environments themselves. In transgressing the “magic circle,” a Situationist gaming tactic attempts to give transformative potential not just to play but to “normal” life.

Lesson 2: Wretched winnings, or challenging competition

“The feeling of the importance of winning in the game, that it is about concrete satisfactions — or, more often than not, illusions — is the wretched product of a wretched society.” Guy Debord (Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play)

The Situationists were critical of the competitive aspects of play, Callois’ “agon”. For them, competition was complicit with capitalism, with the British working class fan’s mindless absorption in football, with the struggle to obtain material goods, investing in lucrative defense stocks, doing whatever it takes to be the last Survivor on the island, playing to get the biggest family home in the Sims neighborhood. The Situationists, like avid gamers, rejected the capitalist derived division between production and consumption, active work vs. passive leisure. Nevertheless, they did acknowledge that an element of competition might be necessary in their games:

“The only success that can be conceived in play is the immediate success of its ambiance, and the constant augmentation of its powers..[ ]..play cannot be completely emancipated from a competitive aspect.“ Guy Debord (Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play)

In our adaptation of Situationist games, perhaps we allow for a degree of competition, among other motivating playful components. Moreover, for the Situationists, ludic actions were also ethical navigations, and therefore the goal of a competition should always be questioned. (Guy Debord, Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play)

Lesson 3: Virtual game worlds: Toward a ludic architecture

“The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action.” Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov] (Formulary for a New Urbanism, October 1953 printed in Internationale Situationniste #1)

Situationist Russian architect Gilles Ivain imagined a “playful-constructive” movement through a city’s “psychogeographic” zones, urban zones defined not only by streets, buildings and businesses but also by how people inhabit the city and the collective psychic ambiances they project. Or as Guy Debord later wrote, while describing the now famous Situationist notion of derive, or drifting through a city: from a derive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. High speed surveillance cameras tracking shopping patterns in stores like the Gap map these hidden currents, a time based techno-capatilist development of the study of psychogeographic zoning the Situationists did not forecast for their fledgling “science.”

“With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental derives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the first navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.” Guy Debord (Theory of the Derive, Les Levres Nues #9, November 1956, reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #2, December 1958)

Beyond the remapping of existing cities as psychogeographic zones, new city forms were imagined. In “Formulary for a New Urbanism”, from the first edition of Situationist, Gilles Ivain describes a futuristic situationist city’s quarters, and public and private architecture that would be in continuous flux and modifiable according to the whims of the inhabitants, including zones such as a Bizarre Quarter — a Happy Quarter (specially reserved for habitation) — Noble and Tragic Quarter (for good children) — and a Sinister Zone. It is this last example that games have provided countless imaginings, and Ivain described the Sinister Quarter in a way that predicts the contours of many video game worlds:

“The Sinister Quarter, for example, would be a good replacement for those hellholes, those ill-reputed neighborhoods full of sordid dives and unsavory characters, that many peoples once possessed in their capitals: they symbolized all the evil forces of life. The Sinister Quarter would have no need to harbor real dangers, such as traps, dungeons or mines.” Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov, (Formulary for a New Urbanism)

In contrast to a current rule-based “algorithmic” emphasis in academic ludology publications, some game researchers such as Chaim Gingold and Henry Jenkins have made convincing arguments for the importance of spatial poetics in structuring game play. (Chaim Gingold, Miniature Gardens and Magic Crayons, Master’s thesis at Georgia Tech, 2003, and Henry Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture in the anthology First Person, MIT Press, 2002) This latter approach can be informed by the psychogeographic characterization of the city provided by the Situationists. Rather than seeing games as solely algorithmic rule machines, there is a significant attraction in players’ exploration of virtual game spaces provided by games like Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, and the classic exploratory Myst.

Activities within these games incorporate spatial puzzles and goals tied to specific psychogeographic locations within the virtual game environment or city. For level design of more action based shooter games like Halo and Quake, ludic architectural design of multiplayer fighting terrains, (for hiding, for sniping, for jumping, for flying), and the placement of enemies and obstacles are a significant portion of game level design. The avid gamer’s extensive time involvement in level modification, as was once common with PC games like Doom, Quake and Unreal, is motivated by a desire to focus on and transform not the telic aims of the game but the paratelic space of the game world itself, invoking the Situationist’s call for modifiable, changeable architecture.

“Architectural complexes will be modifiable. Their aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of their inhabitants.” Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov] (Formulary for a New Urbanism)

Lesson 4: Situationist games beyond the virtual: intervening in real cities

Situationist games are not necessarily confined to virtual digital game space. Guy Debord describes the original Situationists playful exploits into Parisian cityspace:

“Our loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage — slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. — are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the derive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.” Guy Debord (Theory of the Derive)

This description, like much of the Situationists’ practice, anticipates the emergence of new forms of game play as art practice today, most clearly in the example of the London-based artist collective Blast Theory. Blast Theory projects Can You See Me Now? and Uncle Roy All Around You reinscribe urban space with the rules and scenarios of their games. Can You See Me Now? players carry GPS modified devices which contain a simple graphical Pacman style game interface displaying the location of other players in the city. Running panicked through the city streets of Rotterdam in the first performance of Can You See Me Now?, players tried to escape these non-corporeal pursuers who were less restricted by the actual geographic and urban obstacles such as traffic and traffic lights, pedestrians and hills. Similarly, Uncle Roy All Around You repurposed existing city infrastructure like pay phones and car rides to play a mysterious detective style game on the streets of London. Clues and game play advance through text instructions to players’ mobile computers and planted “actors” (who seem like artificial intelligence players in a computer game played by humans). Blast Theory explained:

“The city is an arena where the unfamiliar flourishes, where the disjointed and the disrupted are constantly threatening to overwhelm us. It is also a zone of possibility; new encounters.” Blast Theory

Converging ludic activities and “real” cityspace are not the exclusive domain of Situationist inspired artists. The Situationists did not foresee that mega-players within the “superstructures” would also engage in playing their games. For instance, during the annual E3 game industry conference in 2003 in Los Angeles, the United States Army staged a “playful” publicity stunt for their free recruitment shooter game America’s Army. They catapulted soldiers from a helicopter into downtown Hollywood. Passersby on the street were confused and frightened, and civilian city space became militarized through an intervention blurring the distinction between a soldier’s job and playing soldier in a game. The use of game tactics and play to equivocate and familiarize urban warfare has become increasingly common. In one of the most extreme examples of the post-9/11 military shooter games, KumaWar presented gaming as analogous to soldiering.

This episodic game enterprise released shooter game missions based on current American military events in Iraq. In KumaWar, whose designers regularly solicit advise from a retired United States general, the player always is an American soldier battling “insurgents” in Iraqi cities. Distinguishing civilians from insurgents becomes an important skill for success in the “game”. Again city space (civilian space), military space and game space are conflated.

A Situationist-style game more covertly complicit with militarization of civilian space through ludological means was the innovative I love Bees designed by Jane McGonigal. Microsoft hired McGonigal, then a doctoral candidate in ludology at the University of California at Berkeley, to design a viral marketing campaign and Alternate Reality Game (ARG) for their upcoming X-box release of Halo2. In public places like pay phones, players of I love Bees retrieved information and advances in the game story (a sci-fi “War of the Worlds”-like scenario leading into the storyline of Halo2). When they received game information players would make an ironic military salute (echoing the gestures of futuristic American style soldiers in Halo) and were thus able to identify other I love Bees players in public places like concerts and streets. ILB players posted many photos of this military salute on the web. Overall, the civic space of the city became militarized — even if for a fictional conflict.

Lesson 5: A dash of Dadaist negativity: illegality as play

“The dadaist spirit has nevertheless influenced all the movements that have come after it; and any future constructive position must include a dadaist-type negative aspect, as long as the social conditions that impose the repetition of rotten superstructures [..] have not been wiped out by force.” Guy Debord (Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action, June 1957)

Debord, after describing the role of Dadaism in combating “stale bourgeois culture” and fascism in post-WWI Europe, postulated that a dadaist-type negative aspect would be a necessary component of Situationism as long as undesired social structures were still in existence. These conditions continue today — rapidly globalizing capitalism, imperialist exploitation and increasing militarization, border closures and increasingly hedged in civil liberties in the post-9/11 War on Terror are some powerful present day “rotten superstructures”. Beyond the apolitical or complicit works described above, Situationist tactics have also been adopted as tools in activism.

One artist group who have been playing some urban interventionist, Situationist-like games with a dose of Dadaist negativity is Yo Mango, an Italian/Spanish art collective based in Barcelona. Yo Mango, slang in Spain for “I steal”, regularly stage playful actions such as potlucks where every dish must contain an element of stolen food, Tango dancing in a chain supermarket while stealing, and distributing stylish Yo Mango patches to cover the holes left in stolen clothes by cutting out the plastic security clip. (They recommend stealing only top designer brand name fashions.) Some members of Yo Mango are also loosely connected with the European Squatter Movement, an organized youth movement in opposition to private property who also participate in other activist activities like protesting against gentrification.

Mexican Artist Rene Hiyashi is another artist creating ludic interventions in public space. In India and Argentina he has realized playful architectural structures for street children. In 2006, in collaboration with Mexico City based artist Eder Castillo, Rene Hiyashi created Guatamex, an imaginatively constructed island with computers with Internet access for illegal immigrants, floating on the river dividing Mexico from Guatemala. (His own laptop keyboard was water-damaged during this project.) Like the anti-corporate antics and publicity stunts of the Yes Men and Rtmark, the older public interventions of Critical Art Ensemble, and many of the political art actions that took place during the 2004 New York Republican National Convention, Yo Mango’s and Rene Hiyashi’s artwork can be described as ludic activism in which societal rules (the laws) are willfully broken. Within activist culture itself, maybe since the anti WTO demonstrations in Seattle of 1999, Dadaist humor and ludic activities are more prevalent. (Brian Holmes, The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges and Networked Resistance, Nettime 2003)<

Lesson 6: Games inside games: Interventionist tactics in virtual spaces

In their handbook for game designers, Salen and Zimmerman repeatedly emphasize the importance of the “magic circle” and the investment of the player in a separate, pretend space of play (whether abstract or photorealistic, virtual or non-digital). They stress the pleasure in following the rules of games within the clear-cut boundaries of this magic circle. Situationist gamers, however, are more akin to the creative cheater, the game “griefer” or the hacker. They blur the peripheries of the magic circle, taking pleasure in changing the rules of the existing gamespace, which they see as problematic in a fixed state. Situationist mods and hacks intervening inside preexisting games can be more entertaining than the original game.

For instance, the popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) Second Life has been playfully manipulated by the avatar Gazira Babeli, one of the members of the Second Front collective of Second Life artistic hackers. Her Gray Goo hack was an infestation of Second Life space with out-of-control repetitive self-replicating objects, inspired by nanotechnological disaster scenarios. Grey Goo took various forms, from endless Mario character replications to rampant Velvet Underground bananas. It was so effective it slowed down Linden Lab’s game servers, interfering with game play system-wide.

Babeli’s COME.TO.HEAVEN similarly exploited a loophole in Second Life which allows players to create gigantic avatars in proportion to the Second Life world, resulting in unexpected interesting glitches. While the identity (identities) behind the Babeli avatar are kept secret, the code for her Second Life interventions are always made public by posting it online so others can learn from it and reuse it.

A similar, Situationist-themed interventionist game strategy is offered by Pierre Rahola, a French gamer and DJ. During the early phase of the US war on Iraq, Rahola and his collaborators would spray anti-war graffiti inside online shooter games. When I interviewed him in Paris in 2005, he admitted that “intervening in games is more fun than playing the game.” Around the same time Pierre and his friends were playing online shooter games with an activist edge I began a body of work I would describe as situationist gaming. In collaboration with the artists Brody Condon and Joan Leandre, we initiated Velvet-Strike, tagging the then-popular online soldier shooter game Counter-Strike with anti-war graffiti. Velvet-Strike was not only visual modification but also included “recipes” for disruptive actions designed to interfere with regular Counter-Strike gameplay, like one for making friends with your enemy. Recipe for Friendship:

1. Find a Counter-Strike server with 0 or 1 other player on line. (If you go to an empty one most likely someone will show up to see who you are.)
2. Shoot a few times at your enemy.
3. Tell them you are newbie and ask them to show you how to plant the bomb.
4. Ask them which country they are from.
5. Ask them all about themselves.
6. Arrange to meet another time.

Operation Urban Terrain (OUT) was another project I initiated to warp an existing gamespace — the free US army propaganda game America’s Army. With OUT, I wanted to counter the convergence of military and civilian space with a kind of activism that merged virtual urban game space wirelessly with cityspace. I invited many people whom I had met online through Velvet-Strike to participate, including Chris Birke, one of the original Counter-Strike game texturers, Mexico City architect Luis Hernandez and Pierre Rahola. We projected our live performances onto the walls and surfaces of Manhattan and Brooklyn, connected wirelessly to five players around the world during the NYC Republican National Convention of 2004. I matched virtual locations within the America’s Army game servers with physical New York City sites, projecting a live performance of a virtual sit-in inside a tunnel with yellow taxis onto a building in midtown Manhattan, where there were many yellow taxis, and pairing a red brick warehouse in the game with a brick building in Harlem. For the last location I merged a live soldier dancing performance in the popular America’s Army map “Bridge” with projection onto the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn.

Riot Gear for Rollartista, another game inside a game, was a series of machinima performances calling attention to European and British police abuse of Islamic and African immigrants, with players wearing padded “riot gear” costumes designed in collaboration with artist Talice Lee. In the first performance of the project, two player/performers roller-skated around the small Spanish city of Castellon projecting the Playstation2 games Narc and Mechwarrior from an ultra light projector attached to one of the player’s helmets, (technology had developed since the heavy battery and projector of OUT). At each projection location in the city, one player “roller-danced” and handed out flyers with stories of immigrant abuse to interested passers-by while the second player performed with a portable Playstation, controlling a dancing policeman character who violently beats up on civilian city dwellers.

Conclusion

The Situationists predicted an age of expanded ludic possibilities for artists and for anyone. Paraphrasing and remixing both gamer Rebecca Cannon and Situationist architect Gilles Ivain, we are bored with shooter games. We are bored with the suburbs, the stale imperialist sexist engineering biased corporate game industry, and with new academic ludology that reifies existing superstructures. We are ready to play reality TV off camera. We are frustrated with our governments and the military superstructures that control gamespace. We don’t want to play by rules we never agreed upon in the first place. Anyways, even if we had fun playing those games to begin with, it is now more entertaining to mess them up, or to invent new unsanctioned games inside gamespace. If big players are intervening in gamespace, then it is time for Situationist gaming.

Anne-Marie Schleiner

Dissolving the Magic Circle of Play: Lessons from Situationist Gaming will be resented next week at Homo Ludens Ludens in Gijon, Spain. [via nettime]

The ‘psychogeographical’ has had a pervasive if somewhat amorphous role in contemporary art and culture. As a creative, social and political tactic, wandering through psychogeographic spaces is pertinent to a diverse range of practices including the use of GPS systems, Internet art, photography as well as sound and performance art.

This issue of Drain attempts to gather a series of essays, artworks and creative writings that reflect on the current state of psychogeography. How have contemporary artists, writers and thinkers interpreted, or been influenced by, the legacy of psychogeography?

Abstract deadline: April 1, 2008
Submission deadline: June 1, 2008
Launch: August 1, 2008

Please send written submissions to: Celina Jeffery and Frederick Gross.

I Love Livin’ in the City by Daniel Makagon :: Places and Stages: Narrating and Performing the City in Milan, Italy by Cristina Moretti :: Finders Keepers: Performing the Street, the Gallery and the Spaces In-between by Luke Dickens :: Making Sense of the City: Place, Space, and Rhetoric in Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square by erin daina mcclellan :: Unsafe Houses: The Narrative Inversion of Suburban Morality in Popular Film by Joan Faber McAlister :: Space Wars & Walking through a Liquid Forest of Symbols by Anders Lund Hansen :: Staging and Enforcing Consumerism in the City: The Performance of Othering on the 16th Street Mall by Richard G. Jones, Jr. & Christina R. Foust :: Full of Proud Memories of the Past, on which Irishmen Love to Dwell: Irish Nationalist Performance and the Orange Riots of 1871 by Stephen Rohs :: A Taste of Buffalo: Staging the Lives of U.S. Cities by David J. Eshelman :: Flowing Through the City: An Urban Ethnography by Renee Human.

Liminalities is a peer-reviewed journal for performance studies, theory and praxis. Our goal is to embrace the possibilities for presenting performance studies work by exploring and exploiting the “staging” potential of digital media. We publish essays, aesthetic works, digital media projects, documentaries, book reviews, interviews, and works about pedagogy & performance.

In Modernity, the Flaneur, while strolling around his streets, participated in the depiction of the changing city, playing a simultaneously active and detached role. The Flaneur and his city maintained a symbiotic relationship, where one helped (re) define the other. In view of current trends in globalization, immigration and technology (i.e., Web 2.0), one’s positioning to one location is more fluid than ever before. With such mobility, one must experience any given place as both a tourist and potential resident. With all this in mind, what role do the contemporary Flaneur and Flaneuse play? How do they reconfigure / reinscribe their urban experiences? How does flanerie in art relate to GPS systems, virtual reality, surveillance, mapping, MMPORGs, and social networking? This exhibition seeks works in all media (traditional and new), with special focus on video and computer-based art.

Contemporary Flanerie: Reconfiguring Cities will take place from March 7 - April 12, 2009. A full color catalogue and website, featuring all participating artists, will accompany this event. Pending funding, artists’ presentations will be schedule during the run of this exhibition. The Oakland University Art Gallery will insure all works exhibited and pay for return shipping (we are in the process of procuring funds for having all shipping costs covered by the gallery).

Please send:
- Current resume
- Artist statement/project description (two pages maximum)*
- CD/DVD with work samples (previous and/or proposed for show)*
- Work sample description list (title, dimensions, media, year, equipment provided/needed for pieces to be shown)
- Estimate of shipping costs
- SASE if you wish to have your materials returned
*preference will be given to works already completed, or close to completion. Proposed projects must be finished by September 2008.

Mail above items to:

Oakland University
Department of Art and Art History
Att: Vagner M. Whitehead (Flanerie exhibition)
307 Wilson Hall
Rochester, MI 48309-4401

About the curator: Brazilian artist, educator and curator Vagner Mendonca Whitehead works with time-based media. His work employs original and researched texts that reframe trans-cultural experiences and their connections to mass media and communications technology. Vagner has exhibited his work throughout the United States, abroad and online, in solo and group exhibitions and in video and film festivals. In addition to teaching and exhibiting his work, Vagner is also a contributor for the Barcelona-based magazine Art Signal.

The Solent Centre for Architecture + Design, in partnership with London based media art innovators Hive Networks and artist Armin Medosch, have been working with Southampton City Council’s Oral History Unit on Hidden Histories, a unique project that turns the city itself into a giant outdoor gallery.

Hidden Histories makes accessible some of the highs and lows of Southampton’s 20th Century history, the glory of great ships and journeys as well as the disasters and long forgotten tales. Hidden Histories will uncover those treasures through a revolutionary new concept of Street Radio. This is a totally new way of experiencing the city. The system utilises wireless communication technologies such as WIFI and Bluetooth in combination with FM radio to create a public interface to the city’s heritage. A selection of stories from the Oral History Unit will be broadcast from 10 nodal points linked together to form a media rich walk that transports people through the changing life of the city. Following the success of the pilot scheme it is hoped that the project can be extended further not only in Southampton but to other towns and cities as well.

Read more research notes by Armin Medosch.

Press contact: Rosie Danby 023 8028 3053 rosie [at] solentcentre.org.uk
The Solent Centre for Architecture and Design, 30a High Street, Lyndhurst Hampshire SO43 7BG

As I’ve said many times, Graham’s work on networked urbanism is superb, and Crang’s work on space, culture and ethnography is also exemplary. Compared to American accounts that draw on cybernetics and systems-thinking in architecture and urban planning (think Bill Mitchell, Malcolm McCullough, etc.) I find the British cultural geography approach (following Nigel Thrift, Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge) far better attuned to the variety and complexity of everyday lived experience, and the connections between place and identity (i.e. power) over time. Perhaps most importantly, I think this focus on spatialisation, temporalisation and embodiment leads to a critical approach that isn’t undermined by the persistent techno-determinism and lack of socio-cultural nuance that tend to characterise the former.

I’ve argued before that ubicomp is both imaginary and concrete, and Crang and Graham also distinguish between various manifestations of ubiquitous computing:

“[There are] three key contemporary domains within which the reconfiguration of cities and their politics are being actively imagined and enacted through the imagination and deployment of ubiquitous computing (or ‘ubicomp’). This is going on, we suggest, through the production and dissemination of technological fantasies, the more practical processes of technological development, and the actual deployment of, and contestation over, operational ubicomp systems. These three vignettes address: commercial fantasies of ‘friction-free’ urban consumption; military and security industry attempts to mobilize ubiquitous computing for the ‘war on terror’; and attempts by artists to interrupt fantasies of perfect urban control through artistic use of new ubicomp technologies to try and re-enchant urban space and urban life” (791-792).

In my mind, the commercial promise (or threat) of ubicomp pales in comparison to military and government interventions in this domain. For example, in 2004 the US Defense Science Board:

“saw possibilities to exploit ubiquitous computing technologies in developing a massive, integrated system of surveillance, spanning the world, and tailored specifically to penetrating the increasing complexity of urban life. Such a system, it argued, would once again render the US military’s targets trackable, locatable – and destroyable. The purpose of the New ‘Manhattan project’, then, was seen to be to ‘locate, identify, and track, people, things and activities – in an environment of one in a million – to give the United States the same advantages in asymmetric warfare [as] it has today in conventional warfare’” (800).

This plan is connected to broader trends in post 9/11 surveillance and has been integrated into the Pentagon’s “Long War” strategy, which raises critical issues about who has access to citizen’s ever-increasing digital traces. But access isn’t even the primary issue–it’s the government’s desire to correlate and “backtrack” data so that potential behaviours and situations can be anticipated and controlled. This is what Felix Stalder is describing when he says that data traces don’t just follow us, they precede us: “Before we arrive somewhere, we have already been measured and classified. Thus, upon arrival, we’re treated according to whatever criteria have been connected to the profile that represents us.”

This kind of seeing is anticipatory, and while it may have its origins in commercial marketing practice, this kind of social sorting has far more harmful implications than RFID tracking and Minority Report-style tailored advertising. The biggest issue, as Crang and Graham put it, is that “such a technological politics, of course, risks delegating whole sets of decisions and, along with that, the ethics and politics of those decisions, to invisible and sentient systems” (811).

In an early 2007 interview with Adam Greenfield, Régine Debatty asked why there was no mention of art practice in his popular book, Everyware, and he responded:

“Not referring to art projects was an explicit decision, based in part on my desire to limit the discussion to ways in which information processing would be showing up in everyday life. And almost by definition, however trenchant or clever the point of view embedded in them may be, art objects are simply not going to be relevant to that consideration.”

I strongly disagree with that assessment of artistic relevance, and Crang and Graham’s final section on artistic interventions that seek to “challenge or subvert (some aspects of) the dominant commercial and military visions” (805) successfully makes the point that locative media and art projects tend to inscribe memories rather than anticipate actions, and this tendency to look backward instead of projecting forward is important.

Rather than making us passive or controlling our actions in particular places, locative media and art “allow us to claim and mark our territory” (807) in multiple ways: as publics, as individuals, as citizens. While many projects can be seen to romanticise a renewed public sphere, the collaborative nature of most projects is still distinct from the one-way, top-down models offered by commercial and military players. They also tend to make socio-spatial relations visible, rather than rendering them invisible. The primary drawback here is that “these moves risk making what was formerly protected by its opacity and transitoriness, visible and recordable” (812). But as Crang and Graham also put it, “these artistic media are trying to densify the liquid – not solidify places” (810) and “the effect of memory is not the creation of perfectly known environments. Rather, it involves a destabilization of spaces, a haunting of place with absent others” (812).

However, it’s in their conclusions that I find the necessary pragmatism and the most hope:

“Urban ubicomp clearly has a fetishistic power in appearing to finally offer solutions by rendering place and space utterly transparent in some simple, deterministic way. Indeed, we would argue that there is a danger that locative media are equally seen as a technical fix for oppositional voices and alternative histories in art projects. In this sense the myths matter and have effects. But they are only mythologies of a perfect, uniform informational landscape. In reality, the seamless and ubiquitous process of pure urban transparency that many accounts suggest will always be little but a fantasy. In practice, the linking of many layers of computerized technology is generally a ‘kludge’…

[…]

Far from the pure vision of what de Certeau calls the ‘concept city’, we may find the production of myriads of little stories – a messy infinity of ‘Little Brothers’ rather than one omniscient ‘Big’ Brother. Some of these may be commercial, some personal, maybe some militarized. There is a real issue about proliferating knowledges circulating routinely and more or less autonomously of people. But it would seem to us that the political options are not those of rejection or romanticizing notions of disconnection. Rather, it is to work through the inevitable granularity and gaps within these systems, to find the new shadows and opacities that they produce” (813-14).

For anyone who wants more, here are some notes on Stephen Graham’s keynote at the recent Mobile City Conference that cover some of the same material.

Photos, Naccarato & David Foster Nass

Update 01/03/08: Fabien Girardin adds some interesting links to this discussion, and reminds me how little time I have to keep up on others’ work right now. I can’t believe I missed Nicholas and Fabien’s recent pamphlet, Sliding Friction: The Harmonious Jungle of Contemporary Cities (pdf). The infrastructure section reminded me of Jeff Maki’s very cool Critical Infrastructure project. [blogged by Anne Galloway on Purse Lips Square Jaw]

Dislocate questions our notions of place and location in the face of perpetual motion through multifaceted environments. The velocity of this passage is accelerated through new technologies, but as a result how does this impact upon our encounter with place and our attempt to communicate this to elsewhere? Through an exhibition, symposium and workshop series Dislocate will examine this encounter and communication, taking a journey through surrounding spaces and exploring our transient connections.

Propelled through so many spaces with such momentum, mobility brings freedoms but also responsibilities. While in this state of passage how do we decide which spaces to engage with and what is our dialogue with them?

Considering the locations we constantly carry with us, the interaction between the internal / external, virtual / physical, real / imaginary, our locatedness is multiple, fragmentary and in constant flux. Nomadic in structure the festival will focus upon our kinetic force through these various intersecting sites. Employing transitions by foot, bike and public transportation Dislocate will form an expedition into the diverse routes of the city and its hidden spaces, while questioning our relation to the ground beneath our feet.

In this state of transit does our mode of transport isolate us from that which we travel through? Is there a destination? And how do we know when we have arrived?

Exhibition: Entering the current of the city, conducted through its circuits, in a constant state of disturbance, is it possible to configure with our environment? When shuttled at such velocities can we find any point of anchor? Roaming these streaming channels what do we transmit and what do we receive? What makes up our experience and expression of place? How do we scan, read and send the information before us? These will be particular areas of discussion which the Dislocate exhibition will contribute to. There will be an opportunity for work to be presented in selected exhibition spaces while connecting these sites with external sites. However the main strategy of the exhibition is to present itinerant works which investigate the surrounding environment, taking the viewer on a journey through the city, allowing a new experience of these immediate spaces and communicating this with other locations.

Symposium: Constructing Place - In our rapid trajectories, what is it that we are moving through? How do we locate ourselves? How do we position ourselves in relation to our surroundings? With reference to the impact of new media, we will examine how we formulate our notions of place and how we are tied to that which we inhabit. Does new technology strengthen our awareness of our surroundings or does it threaten this?

In this discourse the potential of technologies to release us from location, overcome our coordinates, will be debated, questioning whether place is really something which can be run from. It may be suggested that location can not be escaped but nor is it a single point which we are confined within. Place is something we can not separate ourselves from and while technology may be a medium for experience, it is also the material of place itself.

The symposium presentations will be encouraged to take a workshop/discussion format and speakers will be led to consider alternative locations specific to their presentations, which may also take the format of excursions through the city.

Workshop: Exploring the pathways of Yokohama - Yokohama is famous as a port of exchange, a gateway for international relations, a historical site of both commercial and cultural trade. With its various inlets and outlets, Yokohama is a buzzing network of transactions and communications. But with our rapid movement through fluctuating lines how can we take account of each footstep? Utilizing these networks, trains, subway, roads, alleys in a scrutinization of the moving city, workshops will set out an expedition in which we reflect upon our roaming through urban space and the fleeting exchanges which occur here.