Urban and Locative Art

Singapore.
The post-lunch session on this fourth day of ISEA 2008 starts with Daniel Sauter. He begins by noting the interdependent relationship between architects, artists and designers which has emerged in recent years - a media architecture or mediatecture driven by a number of significant practitioners. Daniel's focus here is especially on the model of site-specificity in this context.

New York's Times Square or Tokyo's Shibuya are important sites for such work, but there are also other venues which function differently and move beyond anthropomorphic dimensions. One such venue is the Victory Media Network in Dallas with several large movable video screens; another is Federation Square in Melbourne, which hosts the third Urban Screens Conference this year; Kunsthaus Graz is an art space which works in a similar space - a vaguely zeppelin-shaped building clothed in a skin of several hundred lightbulbs which can be manipulated. Chicago's Hyde Park Art Center has a digital facade, and something similar has been designed for the Beijing Olympics multifunction arena and the CCTV Broadcast Headquarters in the same city. Further, in Dubai the Dubai Pearl will be developed - a glowing pearl-shaped space suspended above Dubai.

These sites can be understood in a number of ways. There is a phenomenological dimension here - site, scale, lighting, etc., serve to highlight the architectural structure and create new perspectives on the architectural space; there is a dimension of social/cultural/institutional critique - where works critique the role of art itself, the spaces in which such art is installed, and the political contexts within which exists; and there are discursive approaches which aim for a discourse between artists and the wider population.

Another way of engaging with sites is Daniel's own project Light Attack, where a ghostly white figure is projected onto walls by the side of a road from a passing car. This, too, explores public urban spaces - and it is important in this context to consider the role of the artist as ethnographer, and to critique the aesthetic evangelism of some artists who position themselves as vehicles for the apparently unmediated expression of otherwise excluded local communities.

Next up is Dimitris Charitos. He begins by pointing to Tokyo as probably the most visually complex and technologically mediated space in the world - such technology mediates our experience of the urban space, in other words. This is further enhanced by technologies which detect the position of people (i.e. users, citizens) in the space - both though stationary sensors and though mobile devices carried by a person.

Presence in such experiences may combine presence in the physical world, presence in an electronically mediated 'virtual' environment, and presence in an imaginary environment created in the mind of the user. Dimitris is currently working on the LOCUNET project, which aims to investigate the use of locative technology from a communicational perspective. This draws on a number of models of communication: transmission, ritual, publicity, and reception models. Locative media fit in one form or another into each of these models - there is a transmission of information, but this is also a game-like (ritualistic) process, based on a competition for publicity, and subject to interpretation at the point of reception. Additionally, time, place, choice of subject, and the information flow may be controlled at various points by central points of control or by individual participants.

Dimitris suggests that a co-orientation approach which focusses on interpersonal or intergroup communication in the context of social environments may be most appropriate to describe locative media. Communication here is viewed as the attempt to restore equilibrium in the face of discrepancies in information of participants A and B towards X (this is based on Newcombe's ABX model). We move physically while staying connected to electronic networks; we carry flows while moving around physical places.

In the present model, user A and B both have their own objectives and goals and use locative media to communicate with one another, while being influenced by the physical and virtual environments of which they form a part. The project will examine the activities of users within this locative media environment - actions, motivations, dynamics, and strategies for operating within this environment. In the game, users were able to move about the project space in the centre of Athens, pick up 'information packs' and move them about the space. The analysis of this experience will combine qualitative and quantitative forms of research.

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