Curating the City: Urban Interfaces and Locative Media as Experimental Platforms for Cultural Data. (original) (raw)

2016, 116-129 in: Rob Kitchin and Sung-Yueh Perng (eds.) Code & The City.

This article establishes three main arguments centred on these themes. First, we propose that the analysis of media artworks, installations and other locative-based media projects bring different conceptual and theoretical tools to the already growing fields of software studies (Manovich, 2013) and the relationship of code and algorithms to cities and the built environment (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011). As multi- screen, site-specific, social and participatory ecosystems, which work according to the dual principles of physical touch and, what Verhoeff and Cooley (2014) have called elsewhere, haptic, gestural “looking”, Saving Face specifically and other artworks more generally offer a context for reflecting on the movements of people and the circulation of data and images across platforms, the urban context as living and layered archive, and the activity and gestures that are elicited by a variety of screen-based, cultural interfaces. Because it allows the mobile subject in public space to engage in the process of creation and dissemination of images, the artwork enables us to consider the specificities of current uses of mobile, interactive, and networked media. It presents these as a process, an operation, and a working-with technology on the one hand, and as a communal, collaborative, and public engagement on the other. As such, the work is what it does, or, if you prefer, it does what it is. Second, the concerns of software studies and the programmable city are reflected back into media artworks themselves, as they offer potential to test the limitations of affordances, play with possibilities and engage embodiment and performativity at a stage of temporary reflexive impasse – wherein the artwork occupies a theoretical as well as material space. In this way, as a theoretical object – or object to “think with”, Saving Face can be used to interrogate how urban projects can be understood as (curatorial) laboratories for embodied criticality. It is an allegorical example of design, and an example of theoretical analysis. Indeed, the work is reflexive. It proposes itself as embodied thought, not only on interactive screen media, but also on a cultural understanding of the physical or material, as well as networked connectivity. It experiments with its technological affordances (Gibson 1979). It conducts such an experiment in that it works to critically expose how these affordances operate in the act of working with them. At the same time Saving Face experiments with ways of addressing the social questions about subjectivity and visibility within a connected and participatory framework raised by the potential of its individual affordances. Thus, Saving Face can also be considered as performative and experimental, in the sense that it makes that which it analyzes. This performative potential is the “message”, one could say, in McLuhan’s terms – or, arguably: the medium is the method (Verhoeff, 2013).1 Thirdly, this article addresses some theoretical underpinnings of an analytical approach to understanding how location-based media, or urban interfaces, layer urban spaces. It sketches some thoughts about a potentially critical-analytical approach to the "cultural interfaces" (Manovich, 2001) of current urban projects that use location-based media, and it offers an approach to understanding these projects as curatorial machines for cultural data. To do this, we zoom in on efforts such as Saving Face to provide access to data and their collections – whether or not instigated by museal and archival institutions or whether more bottom-up, civic collaborative projects. These works, as theoretical objects allow us to investigate layering as a design-principle for urban interfaces as navigational laboratories.