Inscribing a Square: Urban Data as Public Space (original) (raw)

Creative Urban Methods for the Datafied City

Amsterdam University Press eBooks, 2023

Datafied and smart cities produce some challenges for inclusive, resilient, and sustainable urban futures. How can creative methods contribute to thinking and designing ways to imagine and co-create datafied cities with and for participatory citizenship and values for inclusion and sustainability? This question is central to the agenda of the research group [urban interfaces] and their collaboration in interdicisplinary and transdisciplinary partnerships. Working with and around the concepts of participation, criticality and imagination, the group brings cultural inquiry into datafied cities together with a methodological inquiry into creative urban methods. In the following, we sketch this agenda and approach and some recent examples of what such creative methods may yield.

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

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

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.

Imaging and Imagining the City

2008

Our recent work has focused on the city as a site of interaction and, in particular, how emerging technological infrastructures provide an opportunity to re-encounter urban space. One of the starting points for this work has been a reconsideration of the forms of representation of urban space that typically support work in urban computing, what we might dub “cartographic realism”–a focus on traditional cartographic representations as a basis for mapping information resources, even when those extend beyond the visual.

Public data art's potential for digital placemaking

Tourism&Heritage Journal, 2019

Data-based public art is an innovating new form of digital art which presence is increasing in the cities datascape. Data as a medium provides a special relationship with time and space by connecting the context of data mining to the one of its exhibition. The virtual component of data art opens an augmented space, where the different dimensions of data are mediated. This essay analyses how this new art form can contribute to a creative and digital placemaking of a city by offering a special sensory experience as well as renewing the storytelling of its space. Three case studies support the analysis. "Living connections", projected on an emblematic bridge in Montreal, contributes to a spectacular placemaking. "Interconnected", a data sculpture in Charlotte airport, relates to infrastructure placemaking. Finally, "Herald/Harbinger" connects the industrialized society with nature in a global connection. The results participate to the reflection on the nature and specificity of data art as well as enhancing its potential of transforming public space by engaging a specific relation with time, place and people.

Interweaving the digital and analog lives of cities: urban sensing and user-generated cities

REAL CORP 2013 Proceedings

A research process lasting from 2009 to 2012 has conceptualized, designed and implemented multiple tools and strategies to experiment novel forms of technologically-supported urban interaction. The goal of this process has been to understand the rituals which have started to shape contemporary citizens' perception and performance of urban public and private spaces. An ethnographic approach has been used to gather insights about these emergent rituals, affecting the ways in which people have transformed the ways in which they work, learn, relate, consume, travel and entertain themselves in the city. With the active collaboration of public administrations, organizations, citizen groups, tourist operators and research teams these practices have been enacted in the cities of Rome, Turin, Trieste, Cosenza, London, Berlin and Hong Kong for variable amounts of time. Engagement and results have been formally gathered, observed, processed and measured, allowing the research team to both explore the current scenario and envision new ones. Real-time content harvesting from social networks, natural language analysis, geo-referencing/geo-coding/geo-parsing technologies, expert systems and ubiquitous technologies such as smartphones, custom electronic devices and conceptual consumer products have been employed to explore the ways in which people are and will be able to: perceive and understand their urban surroundings; access services and information; co-produce knowledge and distributed intelligence; collaborate in the creation of shared projects and city-governance practices; create and maintain peer-to-peer infrastructures for connectivity, commerce, services and culture. This paper will present the initial analysis – including previous research taken into account in the fields of urban sensing, citizen science, urban planning, urban infrastructure management, urban environment perception and more –; the methodologies, both shared and project-specific, used to conceive, design, implement the prototypes and to measure their effects; the reports about each project in the aforementioned cities, including their usage on-the-field as well as elements of urban and digital ethnographic observation and user experience analysis; a description of a scenario for further research and for the production of service and product concepts, some of which are already in-progress, in the areas of the arts, culture, tourism and city administration. What emerges is the opportunity to create multi-layered interactive landscapes in urban contexts which allow city dwellers to communicate, collaborate, govern their city, exchange knowledge and information, consume, entertain themselves, produce and distribute services.

Urban Interfaces: Between Object, Concepts, and Cultural Practice

In: Nanna Verhoeff, Michiel de Lange and Sigrid Merx (eds.), Urban Interfaces: Media, Art, and Performance in Public Spaces. Special Issue for Leonardo Electronic Almanac (MIT Press) 22, 4, 2019

In this collection of essays we wish to propose the notion of urban interfaces as a lens through which we can explore how situated media, art, and performances shape, critically reflect on, intervene in, and reimagine contemporary, urban public spaces. We focus on contemporary cities as complex, socially dynamic and increasingly performative and mediatized infrastructures and environments. Rapid and radical transformations of urban culture and urban publicness are spurred by intensified (global) mobilities, the ubiquity and proliferation of digital information and communication technologies, and the spread of datafication and platformization. On a discursive level, these transformations are heavily debated in connection to themes like, for instance, participatory culture and civic engagement, urban governance, processes of social-spatial inclusion and exclusion, changes in ownership, or their invasive influence on urban public space through a relentless push of commercialization and privatization, quantification and so on. On a ’street level,’ these issues take shape within the variety of cultural practices surrounding media, art, and performance. The contributions in this collection zoom in on the connection between these cultural realms. Media, art and performance in our view offer privileged sites for investigating the challenges, frictions and questions surrounding these urban transformations, as well as their own role in (re)shaping urban public spaces. Our primary focus is on the creative and artistic design and curation of urban interfaces as cultural practices–in particular on how technological, material, and socio-cultural processes shape intersections, interactions, and interventions of bodies, spaces, and technologies and produce meaning in urban spaces and situations. To analyze how urban interfaces work and reflect on their own working, this special issue examines a range of objects and practices, such as media architecture, urban screens, and interactive installations; location-based games, augmented reality, data visualizations, and mobile mapping; and other live urban interventions, events and performances, specifically in cities in Europe, Asia, and the United States. These, however different, all bring forth often fugitive yet meaningful instances of public interfacing in and with urban spaces. To investigate these disparate objects and practices from a more or less coherent and comparative perspective, we propose [urban interfaces] as a searchlight, its provisional character indicated by brackets. For this issue, we have invited contributing authors to analyze specific urban objects and practices as urban interfaces. In their contributions they explore how urban interfaces can function as a demarcation of a corpus and as a theoretical lens. As a heuristic tool it directs our view to specific objects and practices, and inquires how these shape today’s urban, public spaces. Between object and concept and cultural practice, then, this lens of [urban interfaces] is helpful for exploring the specificities of media, art, and performance in urban public spaces, in what they are, how they work and what they bring forth. This entails an analytical focus on the materiality, mediality, and performativity of interfaces as well as instances/situations of interfacing. To further develop this perspective, we discuss in more detail in the following sections of this introductory essay (1) how we approach the ’urban‘ in [urban interfaces]; (2) how we conceptualize ’interface‘ in [urban interfaces]; and (3) how instances of media, art, and performance situate and activate [urban interfaces]. We conclude with a short reflection on what it implies to think theory and cultural practice together.

Situated Installations for Urban Data Visualization: Interfacing the Archive-City

Visualizing the Street: New Practices of Documenting, Navigating and Imagining the City. Edited by Pedram Dibazar and Judith Naeff. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018

We propose a set of analytical concepts that help analyse how media/ interfaces situate us within our cities and in connection with the invisible digital data that surround us. We recognize a set of architectural, cartographic and archaeological principles that structure the way the interfaces allow us to navigate the city as an emergent and layered data archive. These concepts help us investigate how interfaces not only communicate data as information, but, more importantly, structure, if not control, our agency within the visual regime that they sustain. Moreover, they help to understand and articulate how creative and critical artistic practices in the spaces of our cities contribute to public debates about the significance of digital data in contemporary society. Keywords: data; visualization; archive; urban interfaces; installation; performative archaeology

Performing the City: Exploring the Bandwidth of Urban Place-Making through New-Media Tactics

Making Futures, 2014

Discourses on political participation, urban studies, innovation, and ICT development are becoming more and more entangled. Although social and cultural studies have recognized the importance of material entities in organizing and performing civic engagement for quite some time (see, for example, Marres 2011), we can also observe how the notion of publics is gaining more and more influence in the fields of design and technological development (see, for example, Le Dantec 2012). Within the context of urbanity, much falls into the realm of "smart cities," but the notion of "smart" is contested. We have heard about the number of people with Internet access, the number of devices talking to each other, and the potential revenue achievable for future service providers over and over again. It is not surprising that a transaction-based business rhetoric prevails, but we can also observe how the potential of networked communities, online or offline, is becoming an increasingly important factor in debating the concept of "smart cities." Halpern (2005), for example, understands the combination of ICTs and networked communities as a form of social capital, and his take on smartness, which is shared by many others, stresses the potential of local interaction: … ICT networks may have great potential to boost local social capital, provided they are geographically "intelligent," that is, are smart enough to connect you directly to your neighbors; are built around natural communities; and facilitate the collective knowledge. (ibid., 509-510). Performing the City 279 an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax." But those meat axes are no longer the only way to go. Instead, Paulos points to how "today's urban informatics effect change at the other end of the spectrum." "Instead of rewriting space with a few large-scale strokes," he continues, "they allow us to re-engineer an infinite number of small-scale relationships." In this re-engineering of small-scale relationships, new publics will arise, and they will overlap with processes and "things" of design. The use of quotation marks around "things" is deliberate. The etymology of the word, originating from the Nordic pre-Christian culture, can be traced back to the meaning of an assembly, which was decided on beforehand to take place at a certain time and at a certain place to deal with certain "matters of concern" to a specific community. In the book Design Things, we suggest that we revisit and partly revert to the etymological history of things (A. Telier 2011). A major challenge for design today has to do with what is being designed: it is not just an object or a product, but also a thing-that is, a socio-material assembly that deals with matters of concern-in the original meaning of the word. Things are, thus, not only the results of understanding human relations and then developing a product addressing the relations such as in user-centered design. Rather, they are performed by sociomaterial "collectives of humans and non-humans," including both designed artifacts and the places where they are used. At the same time, a designed artifact is potentially a thing made public, since once it is delivered to its users it becomes a matter of concern to them with its new possibilities of interaction. Consequently, in emerging publics, there is a complex entanglement taking place between citizens, public spaces, and things. Furthermore, if objects are seen as an effect of an array of relations, it follows that they do not exist in themselves; they are, rather, performed and emerging. They are also spatial, in that they establish the necessary conditions for creating and transforming space, which is also not given or fixed but, rather, performed. According to Bruno Latour (2004), we are accustomed to smooth and risk-free objects that are characterized by having clear boundaries with a welldefined essence, in which the producer becomes invisible when, for example, a product is released. In contrast, Latour puts forth the concept of tangled objects, or risky attachments, with no clear boundaries to the environment and where the producers are part of the definition. "Mad cow disease" and contaminated blood may be two examples of such tangled, complex, hard to manage objects. They are subject to constant translation and re-definition and are not detached from the consequences they trigger. In many cases, the triggered consequences take the form of revealed issues and controversies in relation to how public spaces are planned and used. Carl DiSalvo elaborates another reference to Latour, developed in cooperation with Weibel, while considering their question "How things are made public?"-a question that addresses how complex situations of present-day society are made visible in a way that permits people to take actions on the situations at hand. DiSalvo (2009)