10 CONFERENCE PROCEEDING RE—NEW 2013
Radiant Copenhagen is a relatively low-tech project. Compared to contemporary smart devices and the app revolution they’ve sparked its use of a web site platform seems almost anachronistic. However, the significance of Radiant Copenhagen in this context is not the technology itself but the project’s conceptualisation of a feedback exchange between urban space, technology and the imagination. To understand the significance of this conceptualisation it’s useful to see Radiant Copenhagen as a peculiar expression of what Lev Manovich has called “the poetics of augmented space.” A brief definition of augmented space by Manovich is, “the physical space overlaid with dynamically charged information.” With the advent of this augmented space we are like modern day fighter pilots who experience and navigate physical space through a layer or an interface of digital data. Hence, the digital is no longer part of some other, detached virtual reality but is an integral part of the reality of non-digital bodies and objects. Moreover, in the augmented space the digital is not simply a flashy ornamentation of the physical but functions as an interpretation of the physical and as such fundamentally influences our perception of and engagement with the physical. While the augmented space of Radiant Copenhagen in it current form might not be as technological dyna+mic as the one Manovich envisions, it is every bit as imaginary dynamic as the examples he mentions. Modifying the photographic tool of the GoogleMap the project superimpose a digitally constructed fiction on a series of physical locations in Copenhagen thus enabling the experience and navigation of the actual Copenhagen through stories of an imaginary future Copenhagen. It augments the physical – AND temporal – space of Copenhagen not only with digital means but also with the means of the imagination. This might not be such a remarkable feat in relation to cities like New York and Los Angeles where the happy and not so happy future has been depicted over and over again by Hollywood to the degree that it has become inseparable from how we perceive these cities. However, in relation to Copenhagen where the future does
not exist – neither in movies nor on the streets – it is a rather radical proposition that – to use a notion introduced by Jacques Rancière – “redistributes the sensible”, in the sense that it challenges the established ways in which something common – here, the city of Copenhagen – lends itself to experience and participation. Without adhering to Rancière’s democratic politics or any political ideology for that matter, Radiant Copenhagen envisions the spaces, times and forms of activities of urban life anew according far beyond the consensual order, which Rancière sees as the epitome of contemporary society of control. The collective imagination that feeds Radiant Copenhagen is not orderly, it is rather full of contradictions and distortions. But it is also full of virtual possibilities that serve a critical and liberating function by offering an approach to Copenhagen that is unrestricted by contemporary circumstances and considerations. Continuing this line of thought, perhaps Radiant Copenhagen can be seen as a prototype of a new type of moving image which do not unfold on a static screen placed at one specific site but like Vertov’s “man with a moving camera” is constructed by the user’s moving through urban space with his or her smart device. A new practice of everyday life. This will allow for a new aesthetic exploration of the moving image as an open-ended montage structure and of public space itself as an expanded network of intersecting, diverting and open-ended narratives. Moreover, while LED screens are invading cities around the globe this form of the moving image does not have to fight with advertisements, news updates and pop cultural phenomenon for the precious and limited spaces of the existing screens in the city. Bypassing the hierarchies of access embodied in these screens it allows for more open conditions of production and distribution. As such, this type of moving image seems to be a format to explore in the future with all imaginary means possible, and not just in Copenhagen.