What Urban Media Art Can Do by avedition gmbh, Stuttgart

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

Preface

by Tanya Toft & Susa Pop

Connecting Cities Network Urban Media Art Practices

by Susa Pop

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

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

Public Agency in Hybrid Space. In Search of Foundations for New Forms of Public Engagement

by Eric Kluitenberg

Urban Media Art Paradox: Critical Fusion vs. Urban Cosmetics

by Maurice Benayoun & Josef Bares

ART PROJECTS 91

WAR VETERAN VEHICLE

Krzysztof Wodiczko

GHANA THINKTANK

Ghana ThinkTank

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 Gómez

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 KÜNSTE 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

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:

Be Aware is an interactive installation that invites people to

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

Human Presence 259

322

323

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.

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.

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