How can architects relate to digital media?

The Mobile City keynote at the ‘Day of the Young Architect’: outcomes and further thoughts

written by Michiel de Lange & Martijn de Waal

Introducing the main questions

What do developments in digital media have to do with architecture? And how should architects and urbanists relate to developments in new media? The Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) and Royal Institute of Dutch Architects (BNA) invited The Mobile City to address that question for the yearly ‘Day of the Young Architect’, on November 7th 2009 in the NAi in Rotterdam. This day was themed ‘the virtual’, and was organized as part of the overarching ‘connectivity’ cluster during the 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR).

We gladly accepted this challenge, since this very issue was one of the main reasons we founded The Mobile City two years ago. After all, as the boundaries between physical and digital spaces blur, this should have profound consequences not only for new media developers but also for those professionals who traditionally deal with physical spaces. We surely did not expect this to be already obvious for most architects. But the fact that only half of the audience raised their hands when asked by moderator JaapJan Berg whether architects should deal with digital media in their profession showed there is still some way to go.

This report contains the main argument of our talk. But it also presents some additional reflections, and is an attempt to take our argument further than we did at the NAi/BNA day. We address the following questions: what position can architects, planners and urbanists take in their design profession vis-a-vis new media? Why should they bother with new media in the first place? What are the challenges they face? And what are future directions and chances for these professions?

In answering these questions, we make a strong plea for an attitude of ‘critical engagement’. This posits architects should neither ignore nor completely embrace digital media. Rather we would urge them to think of themselves as designers who primarily shape social processes, and only second as designers who shape spatial forms. Which social processes underly new commissions? What kind of activities, social interactions or exclusions should a new project encourage or discourage? How can these be shaped through spatial forms? And what roles do digital media play in this? We think architects shouldn’t just build an urban screen just because you can, or the Kunsthaus in Graz has one too. Rather they should start by asking: what kind of social processes do we want to provoke or hope to avoid? Can an urban screen indeed contribute to these processes or will it disturb them? What other disciplines do we need to invite to the table to meaningfully program an urban screen so that it goes beyond mere window dressing and indeed enhances the project?

Read more at The Mobile City weblog >>

On December 14th 2009 De Balie – an Amsterdam-based center for culture and politics – organized an evening about old and new cartographies. Participants were Ferjan Ormeling (Emeritus Professor Cartography, Faculty of Geographical Sciences, Utrecht University), Henk van Houtum (Associate Professor of Geopolitics and Political Geography, Head of the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research), Maarten Keulemans (science journalist), Jelle Reumer (director Natural Museum Rotterdam, Special Professor at Utrecht University), Lucas Keijning (NEMO science center), and me. The evening was lead by Volkskrant journalist Martijn van Calmthout. The evening was set up as a prelude to the presentation of a new world map the day after in The Hague. From the announcement:

We have been making maps for centuries, to establish territorial borders or mark safe routes. A map is a model of reality, and the terrain of a fascinating branch of science: cartography. Maps represent social and political choices, which start forming their own truths. For example the Persian Gulf is not the Persian Gulf everywhere, the world on its head or with China in the middle all of a sudden looks very different, and maps today seem less complete because of an increasing number of ‘white spots’…

Some of the issues addressed this evening concerned the relation between model and reality, the consequences of new map-making media technologies for society and politics, and – unavoidably it seems in such popularizing science discussions – the question whether new developments are good or bad? I was invited to talk about the influence of mobile and locative media and cartographic representations.

Cartographer Ferjan Ormeling started the evening with an overview of cartography as a professional scientific discipline. He defined cartography as “the transmission of spatial information for decision-making”. In a few slides he walked through cartographic history, mainly from a western perspective as the attempt to explore and chart unknown territories, with ensuing overseas trade and later colonization in its wake. Some of the interesting topics he touched upon included the fact that cartography is always subjective and culturally determined. Dutch maps for instance often leave out ditches because they are everywhere, whereas in Belgium they are included on maps. The world maps we know today are clearly Euro-centric, placing other territories in the periphery of Europe. Maps were hugely important for an upcoming sense of nationalism (a point made by Benedict Anderson in his well-known work “Imagined Communities” 1991). Nation-states were now drawn in monochrome colors, clearly separating them from their neighbors. Further, names on maps are often surrounded by controversy. For example in the 1970s attempts were made to modernize the spelling of Dutch town and city names. This met with fierce opposition from local government, because this meant some places would lose their name-based exclusivity (Veghel sounds more chic than Veggel, ditto for Wijchen – Wijgen). Map-making therefore always involves selection, manipulation, and generalization. What is displayed? What is left out? Where are borders drawn? What is on the map and what lies outside of the map? Ormeling closed his talk by assessing the relevance of new technologies like Google Maps. Here it became interesting, since Ormeling tenaciously clung to the idea of the unique professional expertise of cartographers. While digital technologies certainly are useful, Ormeling argued, the role of cartographers remains important because they are the ones who “fill in” these satellite images, and “give meaning” to those satellite views. Sure, there are interesting attempts by amateurs to engage map-making (such as Openstreetmap). But there are lots of things professionals can and amateurs can’t do, like accurately mapping a rugged coastline.

Then Henk van Houtum and I joined the discussion. Van Houtum argued new geographic technologies like TomTom and Google Maps turn all of us into geographers. But very uncritical geographers. We unwittingly feed all kinds of information to search engines. Van Houtum worries about the loss of personal autonomy as we are surrender ourselves to various digital search and control systems. But on the more positive side, new technologies enable far more people to engage in place-making and representing spatial knowledge. The old monopoly of mapmaking by geographers under the auspice of the nation-state is crumbling, and that is a good thing.

I argued that under the influence of mobile and locative media, cartography has changed from being a predominantly geographical medium in which the representation of space and place is central, to a social medium in which online social networking acquires a cartographic element. Our mediated social relations are now being ‘rooted’ in physical places. A good example of such a locative social network is Bliin, a project by Selene Kolman, who was in the audience, and Stef Kolman.

This has in part been a response to our perception of the internet as placeless, and broader social and spatial shifts often grouped under the name ‘globalization’. Further, New technologies offer people the opportunity to write space and place with their own experiences (e.g. by ‘geotagging’ places), rather than just reading the maps made by others (see e.g. Greenfield & Shepard about “read/write urbanism” p. 12-13). This means cartography is no longer the prerogative of professionals but indeed, as Henk van Houtum said, we have all become geographers. Already in 1946 geographer J.K. Wright proposed in front of the Association of American Geographers that the earth had been largely mapped by conventional geographical method. The time had come to map our earth all over again. Wright called upon geographers to map folk knowledge of places, and more aesthetic experiences of our environments. This would vastly expand the terrain of classic geography to include what Wright called ‘geosophical’ knowledge. Wright would probably have been thrilled to see how his plea is being realized today… A third change is that maps now consist not only of mostly spatial information but also temporal information. The historicity of place as a process is made visible by the range of micro-narratives that are attached to places through locative media. Maps become far more dynamic representations of spatial and temporal knowledge. A nice example is the project Droombeek, by Edward Mac Gillavry, who was also present this evening, and Peter Dubois.

In this project inhabitants of Roombeek, an area of the city Enschede which was destroyed in 2000 by a huge fireworks disaster, recount their memories and stories of their neighborhood. These stories are made available to others by taking a GPS-walk. A fourth change is the database structure of geographical knowledge captured in maps. We can now query items through maps. Most of these searches are about simple properties like categories of places and proximity, such as finding restaurants nearby. However while we still can’t search for sadness in New York (PDF 2,4 MB; Russell – Headmap Manifesto – p. 31), we are already awfully close.. Fifth, new cartographies alter our subjective experiences of space and place. For instance, locative media can inform a more aesthetic experience of space and mobility. Someone who is working on GPS-based cartography as a new form of landscape painting is Esther Polak, who also joined this evening – just back from a trip to Nigeria. And what about the fact that in many locative media views the ego is the center of the map? You no longer have to first find your position on the map. Rather, the environment revolves around you. Does this literally lead to a more ‘ego-centric’ worldview? Finally, maps are increasingly often used as a way to visualize and transfer increasingly complex datasets. Maps are becoming metaphors to represent information, and for thinking. An organization that has been doing this for while is Informationlab by ‘information architect’ Auke Touwslager, who also attended the evening (yes, good crowd present..). To summarize, under the influence of locative media mapping tends to shift from mostly objectifying representations to highly subjective, from general to thematic representations, and from visualizing topological rather than topographical information. I wanted to raise some more ‘political’ issues of these developments but – alas – time was running short… (I couldn’t even bring in half of the above).

It was interesting to see how the audience, and ‘old school geographer’ Ormeling, reacted to this new media story. Ormeling himself did not feel these developments had much to do with his profession as a cartographer, apart from being handy new instruments. This strikingly parallels the dominant reaction of another professional audience: architects and planners. New media technologies as instruments yes, but investigating the consequences of these technologies for the professional practice itself… no. In the audience, meanwhile, someone wondered in exasperation “this is al very nice but who actually wants to know all the time where their friends are?”. Indeed only one or two people raised their hands. Although the predominantly white middle-aged male audience perhaps might not exactly be representative of very active mobile media users, this question of course is a legitimate one. All talks about new representations of knowledge and new ‘participant audiences’ or ‘networked publics’ in spite, who are “we” (we – the people more or less professionally dealing with geo-locative media) actually representing in our talks and thoughts? The majority of people, at least during this evening, seem very skeptical about these developments. The discussion immediately turned to the pervasive influence of mobile media themselves in everyday life and all sorts of ethical discussions, rather than pausing for a moment to look at media developments and their influence on cartography. Too bad this somewhat fell of radar at the end of the evening. Luckily, columnist Jelle Reumer restored this by evoking the poetics of maps. Looking at maps above all brings up half-forgotten memories of the places one once was and where beautiful or sad things happened. Maps also stir the imagination about places one would perhaps never go. I thought Reumer’s short talk was a nice closure of the evening, which put matters in a broader perspective. Aside from their obvious differences (differences that do matter, as I’ve tried to show here), to what extend does it matter whether such imaginations occur by holding a map made of paper or by looking at a handheld screen?

Maandag 14 december om 20:00 in De Balie is er een kenniscafé over “Hogere kaartenkunde”. Ik zit in het panel en zal het hebben over de invloed van locatieve media op cartografische representaties.

We maken al eeuwenlang kaarten, om landsgrenzen vast te leggen of veilige routes aan te geven. Een kaart is een model van de werkelijkheid, en het terrein van een fascinerende tak van wetenschap: Cartografie.

Kaarten vormen de weerslag van sociale en politieke keuzes, die vervolgens hun eigen waarheid gaan vormen. Zo is de Perzische Golf niet overal in de wereld de Perzische Golf, ziet de wereld er op z’n kop of met China als middelpunt opeens heel anders uit en lijken kaarten tegenwoordig minder compleet te worden door een toenemend aantal ‘witte vlekken’…

Martijn van Calmthout gaat in gesprek met cartograaf Ferjan Ormeling, met Henk van Houtum, hoofd van het Nijmegen Centre for Border Research, Radboud Universiteit en met Michiel de Lange, promovendus aan de faculteit van Wijsbegeerte in Rotterdam.

Zoals elk KennisCafé zijn ook columnisten Maarten Keulemans en Jelle Reumer van de partij.

Het KennisCafé is een coproductie van De Balie, De Volkskrant, KNAW en Science Center NEMO.

Meer info: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?podiumid=politiek&articleid=327853

This is what we’re doing:

• November 5th 20:00-22:00 Keynote with Mark Shepard
  
  location: NAi Auditorium Rotterdam
• November 6th 12:00-17:00 Sentient Rotterdam Workshop with Mark Shepard & The Mobile City. Participation is restricted to registered participants. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to register.
  location: IABR Forum, NAi Rotterdam
• November 6th 17:00-19:00 Opening of the Exhibition The Sentient City Survival Kit. The opening events includes a public presentation of the workshop results.
  
  location: IABR Open Podium, NAi Rotterdam. The Exhibition will last until November 12th. This event is followed by a Pecha Kucha Program at 20:20.
• November 7th 10:00-20:00 Day of the Young Architect with keynote lecture by The Mobile City. Accessible to members of the Bond Nederlandse Architecten (Royal Institute of Dutch Architects).
  location: NAi Auditorium Rotterdam
  

For more information, see The Mobile City website >>.

http://www.themobilecity.nl/2009/10/02/picnic-09-report-1-augmented-reality/

As MoMo is a kind of trend-watching event, the main emphasis of this MoMo#11 was on the emerging field of augmented reality. Of course this vision has been around for a long time. Yet prototypes have mostly been very clunky head-mounted displays, or relied on some flat surface to project things on. As our mobile devices have by now arguably become the most ubiquitous technology humans ever carried with them (becoming a third skin, like our clothes are a second skin), they appear the ideal platform for all kinds of new forms of augmented reality in new and unexpected ways. This arguments of course echoes the argument made by Bell and Dourish (“Yesterday’s tomorrows”, PDF) that the vision of ubicomp has in actual practise taken shape in a different way on the mobile phone. Below some of my notes and impressions of MoMo#11.

Continue reading at The Mobile City weblog >>

090319_filmacademie-S.pdf (PDF 1MB).

what: Studium Generale symposium “De popcultuur ontgonnen”

where: Zaal B-3, Woudestein, Rotterdam

time: 11 november 2008 15:30 – 17:30

who: dr. Stef Aupers (socioloog FSW), dr. Tonny Krijnen (communicatiewetenschapper FHKW), drs. Michiel de Lange (cultureel antropoloog FW) en dr. Bart Barendrecht (cultureel antropoloog Universiteit Leiden). Prof. dr. Ton Bevers (socioloog FHKW) fungeert als co-referent en stelt kritische vragen. Moderatie: prof.dr. Dick Houtman (bijzonder hoogleraar cultuursociologie FSW). Organized by Niels van Poecke.

The film is a mixture of documentary following a number of ‘Rotterdammers’ an their mobile cam use as well and interviewing the, as well as a showcase of the mobile phone movies and photographs itself that are made by them. This is done quite ingeniously, by blending the two together in such a way that you get a good view both from the ‘real life’ perspective and the ‘virtual media-perspective.

So what kind of people are portrayed in the film? The first are Thom and Osama, two young guys (both 16) who film their daily movements in the city, go to weird places and shoot themselves fooling around a bit, and upload their material to Youtube. See the following Youtube accounts: Osama (osama015); Thom (jump266) ; and together they operate under the nick osamathom1991.

Then there is a young mother Annemarie (24 years old) and her daughter. The mother makes little clips of for instance her daughter and her singing and dancing together, and shares these with friends and family online.

There is Hans, a guy of about 30 years old who mainly takes photos of things he sees in the city in an artistic fashion.

And finally an older man, Cor Been, age 75, who has filmed the entire process of the construction of his new apartment building to which he is moving.

There are a couple of things I found really interesting about this film:

Different age, different use
First of all, the film shows how people from different ages do very different things with their mobile phone camera. Osama and Tom went for the kicks and sought out the ‘dangerous’ and exiting urban places they normally wouldn’t go or weren’t suppose to be. The young mother did it in a very social way to share her life with her daughter with other; the 30 year old guy made all kinds of photographs of the city in a very aesthetic way; the old man used film to get accustomed to his new habitat, as a kind of narrative medium to incorporate the new into his life.

Mobile film as an emerging genre
What kind of new pictorial language is emerging through the use of the mobile phone for photo and film? It is a radical first person perspective; a 3D view of the world, the camera does not only pan from left to right but also up and down (one’s feet!); movement while shooting instead of stills; no cuts; position of the filmer in his own film; enactment in front of camera: it’s is not acting as if it is real but made absolutely clear that it is acting in full awareness of the presence of a camera.

Experience of multiple places at the same time (moving in hybrid space)
The two young guys were making a film while sneaking into a building (hotel?) they clearly weren’t supposed to be. While prowling through the corridors and pushing elevator buttons in a seemingly spontaneous way, all of a sudden one of them yelled: “This is certainly going to be on Youtube!”. This seems to indicate that these kids are adding an extra dimension to their physical world, namely concurrently imagining a digital world. They interweave their here and now experience of what they are doing in physical space with an added dimension of presenting it later elsewhere on a digital platform.

Social aspects of sharing: niche vs. platform
The young mother was sharing films and photos of her and her daughter with friends via online platforms (Youtube, Hyves). There is something very social about creating content. A new sociality? Or sharing as age-old ritual (gifting)? Only within small circle? But interestingly she chooses a platform that is accesible to everyone. This raises questions about how people want to express themselves, either to small niches vs. sharing broadly.

Experiencing city space through the mobile phone camera
Filming the city while being on the move adds an extra reflexive dimension to this mobility. First it adds another lense in front of you, a layer of mediatrion in a (new) visual movie language. And second it enables you to look back almost immediately on what you have just experienced and how you have captured this. The experience of a city may change through this additional reflexive layer. It enables you to distrance yourself from your own immediate experience by viewing it again through the eyes of a bystander, like an being an audience to your own captured experience.

(thanks Bieke for the pictures, additional info, and small corrections!)

[...continued from last post]

Thursday May 22 2008 I visited the CHI conference The Web and Beyond: Mobility in Amsterdam. Keynote speakers were: Adam Greenfield (Everyware); Jyri Engeström (Jaiku); Ben Cerveny (Playground foundation, Flickr); Christian Lindholm (Fjord, Nokia).

Jyri Engeström talked about how mobile technologies have become social objects. Social network theory is good in representing links between people, but not in the nature of these links, what their content is, or through what media these links are actually established. Jyri used the term “social peripheral vision” to describe how we are co-present with others through our mobile media that enable us to be aware of what’s going on elsewhere. Jyri sees games, such as World of Warcraft, as playgrounds to experiment with the use of media for social ends.

(From left to right: Ben Cerveny, Jyri Engeström, and Christian Lindholm. Photo by Kaeru)

Ben Cerveny talked about “Geomorphic organisms”: how networks of people/users together come to function as an organism. He used lot of biological metaphors, but frankly I kept wondering what insights do we gain by this paralel? There was one interesting thing I picked up from his talk. Similar to a flock of birds or a school of fish, in such a collective it isn’t necessary to have a total overview of all that is happening. A little local trigger can be enough to get people moving in a certain direction. This point by Cerveny challenges the dominant idea of rational total control over technologies and puts in place a more instinctive micro-view. It shows how often we are reacting to technological triggers without fully understanding what is going on. This observation seems particularly applicable to the field of “background computing” in which the computer doesn’t take up all our attention but really only works on an ambient level, or – using Greenfields’ talk – its workings dissolve into everyday behavior. Cerveny ended by saying something interesting to my own research project about “Playful Identities‘: “We are constantly at play within the stream of possibilities in the city”. We are “playing the model”. According to Cerveny, these mobile technologies afford a certain playfulness in the way people reappropriate their environment, their lived space. Unfortunately Cerveny did not give much attention to the other side of this: the fact that often we are ‘being played’ by those same technologies.. It is not all about playful mastery of city-space through media.

The last keynote speaker, Christian Lindholm, gave a very entertaining speech that however didn’t really transcend the kind of well-informed techno-babble you encounter on websites such as Engadget, Appleinsider, Digg, and what have you. He talks a bit about handphones, why the Apple iPhone has become so successful, and the race between who puts the biggest screen in a phone. Lindholm sees a big future for the Asus Eee, the very small UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) weighing under 1 kg and costing less than $300. This device is especially attractive to women and children, he says, groups that have largely been ignored by the nerdy hardware marketing bizz. Lindholm’s most interesting point in my view was the term “casual computing”. By this he meant the types of devices that can be used ‘casually’ without disturbing a particular social situation. E.g. in a restaurant you don’t flip open your laptop. But a device the size of a handset you can use there to look something up or check your email.

I would say that theme of casualness, backgrounding, and technologies becoming part of everyday behavior was the overlapping theme of all four speakers. Thus, perhaps, the ‘mobile’ aspect of these technologies is not so much their portability, or the physical mobility they enable, but their integration into everyday life and ongoing social processes.

Oh, and for more pics, see Flickr (tag: twab08).

Thursday May 22 2008 I visited the CHI conference The Web and Beyond: Mobility in Amsterdam. Keynote speakers were: Adam Greenfield (Everyware); Jyri Engeström (Jaiku); Ben Cerveny (Playground foundation, Flickr); Christian Lindholm (Fjord, Nokia).

I was particularly impressed with Adam Greenfield’s presentation. He had a very rich and dense talk based on the material of the book he is currently working on called “the city is here for you to use”. Below some notes about his talk.

Greenfield starts by stating his affiliation with the urbanist tradition of Jane Jacobs and others, who see the city made up of bottom-up processes by ‘ordinary people’. He then described the current state of the city. The (American) city nowadays is characterized by repetition, deliberate attempts to make certain public spaces less attractive to dwell in, and a lot of junk space and privatized commons [although Martijns' recent post shows how these kind of spaces are re-appropriated by kids].

(photo made by Antje Roestenburg)

The result, Greenfield says, is a withdrawal of people into mobile phone’s private spaces. The challenge is to overcome these threats to urban life – “the crisis of the American city” – by refinding what constitutes the city in Jacobs’ tradition. Greenfield tries to find that answer in ubiquitous computing. Networked processors are already showing up in new places, on the level of bodies and on the level of the streets. These become social objects. They help create an “ambient informatics”: delivering information locally upon which you can act. This really becomes ambient when information processing dissolves into behavior. Greenfield gives an example of a woman he saw using her transit card in public transport by swinging her handbag in full speed in front of the reader, almost becoming a choreography.

Architecture and building is becoming increasingly shaped by computation. It changes the city-scape. It changes mobility too. Objects become accessible, scriptable, queryable, and connected. All this changes the way we use cities from browsing to searching. We can now directly look for something and this search can be customized by recombining elements.

Greenfield is somewhat critical of all kinds of informational mapping projects such as the Oakland crime map. People have started to how up at the precinct with such maps demanding more police presence! So are these maps really representing actual risks on the streets, or are they misleading? There are other things more likely to kill you than street crime.

Greenfield goes on to talk about “the big now” and “the long here”. He talks about Twitter, and how it is used to become immersed in other places at the same time. This changes city life. Greenfield calls this “The Big Now”. But places are also accessible from multiple other places. Greenfield calls this “The Long Here”: you don’t enter a place, you enter a time.

Another thing we should be critical of is “differential permissioning”, the way technologies are used to differentiate people into allowed access or denied access to certain places based on predefined characteristics (this is what Graham calls “the software sorted city”). What is happening to public space? Formerly, everyone had the right to use pavements, parks, etc. We’re moving away from guaranteed availability and access, to differential access. [But hasn’t urban space always been differentiated? For example the ghetto vs. the theater, each barring off groups of people that 'do not belong there'.]

We have to keep in mind that cities are not all the same, but all have their own particularity. We also have to take into account unexpected emerging behavior. These “ambient informatics” objects may be hackable and even used for dangerous/bad ends.

Greenfield ends with some “proposals for the real time city” that urban/media designers should leep in mind:

1. Create beautiful seams: read/write access to city

2. Underspecify: do not too much closure to space.

3. Understand changing city life: from flaneur to consumer to user.

The Mobile City conference 27 & 28 February 2008

NAi (Netherlands Architecture Institute) Rotterdam, The Netherlands

“The Mobile City” is a two-day conference about locative & mobile technologies, urban culture and identity. The Mobile City brings academics, architects, urban professionals and media designers together to address the question: what happens to urban culture when physical and digital spaces merge? Keynote speakers are Stephen Graham, Tim Cresswell, Malcolm McCullough and Christian Nold.

Background

The physical, geographical city with its piazza’s, its neighbourhoods and crossings intersects with the ‘virtual space’ of electronic communication-, information- and observation-networks of GSM, GPS, CCTV, UMTS, WIFI, RFID, etc. At the same time, the domain of digital space is increasingly becoming physical, an “internet of things” is emerging. Another example is the rise of ‘pervasive games’, digital games with a physical component in urban space. Is it still useful or even possible to talk about the city as being only physical? Or about the digital world as purely ‘virtual’ (in the sense of ‘not real’ or immaterial)? The physical city and the spaces of digital technologies merge into a new “hybrid space”. Hybrid spaces are shaped by the social processes that concurrently take place in digital and physical spaces. What is the influence of these developments on the ideas we have of time, space and place, citizenship and identity?

Conference questions

Locative and mobile media can be understood as interfaces between the digital domain and the city, as bridges between the social processes that formerly took place in more separated domains (digital or physical) but now are spilling over into each other. The Mobile City will ask the following questions:

• From a theoretical point of view, what are useful concepts to talk about the blurring/merging of physical and digital spaces?

• From a critical perspective, what does the emergence of locative and mobile media mean for urban culture, citizenship, and identities?

• From a professional point of view, what does all this mean for the work of urban professionals (architects, designers, planners), media designers, and academics?

The full program text is available at our website, www.themobilecity.nl/background

Weblog

The conference organizers have set up a special weblog devoted to the themes of the conference at www.themobilecity.nl. Relevant contributions are welcome.

Call for Participation – Workshops

On February 27th two small scale intensive workshops will be held. The first session is about Urban Culture and locative media (with Stephen Graham and Christian Nold), the second session about mobility and new technologies (with Tim Cresswell and Malcolm McCullough). Please send a very brief bio with relevant current and past activities, and short motivation to info@themobilecity.nl. Indicate what you would like to contribute to, and get from the session(s). Only a limited number of places is available. When interest supersedes availability, the organizing committee will select participants. Registration closes at January 31st.

Call for Participation – Project Presentations

During the main conference on February 28th, Keynote speeches will be alternated with short project presentations about locative and/or mobile technologies for artistic purposes, business, research, etc. We are thinking of: locative media art, commercial locative services, pervasive gaming, mobile marketing campaigns, geo-tagging or geo-storytelling, research projects etc. etc. Your presentation will have to fit in 10 minutes, and be as concrete as possible. Your project will also be featured on our website. If you wish to present, please send us an email about your project at info@themobilecity.nl. Please do so before january 31st.

February 27th: Small scale in-depth workshops

February 28th: Main conference with:

* Stephen Graham – Professor of Human Geography, Durham University

* Tim Cresswell – Professor of Geography, University of London

* Malcolm McCullough – Associate Professor University of Michigan

* Christian Nold – Independent artist and lecturer based in London

From the Netherlands, experts such as Rob van Kranenburg (Waag Society), Nanna Verhoeff (University of Utrecht) and Marc Schuilenburg (Free University Amsterdam, Studio Popcorn) will also participate.

Practical

The Mobile City takes place 27 and 28 February 2008 in the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

More info, call for participants, and registration: www.themobilecity.nl.

The conference fee is € 25,-
Organization

The Mobile City is organized by:

* ‘New Media, Public Sphere, Urban Culture’ project at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RUG).

* ‘Playful Identities’ project at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) and University Utrecht (UU).

* Netherlands Architecture Institute Rotterdam (NAi).

Contact

Conference organizers: Martijn de Waal (RUG), Michiel de Lange (EUR), Oene Dijk (NAi). Email: info@themobilecity.nl

Sponsors

The conference is sponsored by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research through the NWO-research program Transformations in Art and Culture.

The Mobile City is kindly sponsored by Dienst Kunst en Cultuur, gemeente Rotterdam.

The conference organization wishes to thank the Vereniging Trustfonds Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam for their kind financial guarantee.

From Always-On to Always-There (PDF – 412 KB).

A wide range of papers were presented. Most of them empirical, focussing mostly on the modern Asian countries (China, Japan, Korea) and Australia. Also quite some theoretical work, e.g. about changes in time and place, locative media, mobile phone anxieties. Almost all empirical work was about teenagers. Most papers were also at the level of devices, not infrastructure.

I presented a paper about the mobile phone and changes in identity. You can download it here. That session was one of the few with enough time for some substantial debate after the presentation (someone had cancelled) Got some useful feedback on it.

I’ll try and write some more substantial things about the conference soon.

Some pics:

The first day of his visit, Tuesday June 12, he will give a public lecture called:

Playland – Transformations in Technology, Identity and Culture

Kenneth Gergen will speak about the influence of modern communication technologies on human identities. He will specifically focus on the rise of play elements in digital culture en the transition in thinking about identity as monolithic entities

After the lecture there will be time for questions from the audience.

The lecture is in English.

Date: June 12 juni 2007

Time: 15:15 – 17:00.

Location: Room B2, Campus Woudestein, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Directions: http://www.eur.nl/adressen/plattegronden/

More information about Kenneth Gergen: http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/kgergen1

Entrance is free.

Symposium Playing the Urban @Balie 31 maart 2007

http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?podiumid=media&articleid=102445

PROGRAM

13-14h Mobile Learning Game Kit

Speaker: Jan Simons (Associate Professor New Media Studies, University of Amsterdam)

14-15h PlastiCity: A Game for Urban Planning

Speakers: Mathias Fuchs (Senior Lecturer, Programme Leader in Creative Technology, University of Salford) and Steve Manthorp (Special Project Manager, Bradford)

15h30-16u30 Logo Parc (Jan van Eyck Academy)

Speakers: Logo Parc (Daniël van der Velden, Katja Gretzinger, Matthijs van Leeuwen, Matteo Poli, Gon Zifroni)

This symposium was organized by fellow TKCers from Maastricht & Amsterdam “Transformations in Perception and Participation: Digital Games”.

———————– 

legenda: 

> = my remarks, thoughts, etc.

[Skipped presentation1]

PlastiCity is a game based on the Unreal Tournament engine (which is a first person shooter) and aims to be an aid in reconstructing/replan the awfully ugly city center of Bradford, UK. It is still in conceptual phase (read: no money yet). The aim is to put the game in public places like libraries, schools, etc.

Interesting quote: “the game is not designed to function as a designer tool for architects, but as a way of bringing planners, architects, local government officials and citizens together and be silly about redesigning the city.”

> Games may serve to bring people together in complex multi-party projects: games as a new kind of public sphere?

Another quote: “Every game has at some point a stage of chaos”.

> The rules are stretched, things are tried out, often deconstructed or even destroyed. Like identities that are being tried out and parts of it destroyed again.

Game should have ‘real life’ characters in it: not the usual beautiful yuppies you see in most architecture presentations. It should be more realistic. Also with rubbish and so on.

> Games as more realistic than other media in presenting or representing the world? What is realistic about programmed garbage?

One member of the audience experiences a kind of motion sickness while watching the demonstration of the game. She asks: what is the value of this game-speed to represent life-speed? The speakers explain the speed of the demo is set to slow: normal gamers would use at least 3x normal walking speed to move around… (which they briefly demonstrate). 

I brought up: this phenomenon is just like what the first train travelers experienced at 20 or 30 miles/hour: disorienting the senses. Every new technology brings its own experience of space & place & mobility. The train (and car) created a speeding up of travel, which made possible suburbs and the separation of home and work. The city was adapted to this new sense of the city. 

I asked: what then may be the influence of using games as tools for creating new cities for the way cities are actually build and experienced?

Answer: first person perspective of game may be an influence on perceiving the city; as well as the feeling of being in power, in control over your environment.

Another audience Q: what is actually game-like about this? There is no winning this game? There are few rules? Why play?

A: the attraction is the sense of empowerment & creativity players experience in playing the game, both in destroying and rebuilding the city.

> Could it be differentiated according to involvement? Game produces Erlebnissen, while (prolonged) play may produce Erfahrung.?

Game offers the idea of “unbuilding” the city, creating green environments again out of built space (land is cheap in Bradford, so not unrealistic).

> I like that idea of “unbuilding”, can it be applied to identity? “Unbuilding identity” as a way of undoing previous steps, deleting memories of these events in photos, video, text messages, phone numbers, etc. It is maybe a way of “unactualizing” identity, again extracting potentiality out of previous closures and actualizations.

> Such games are also used strategically and politically as part of ideas about the “creative city”. Games have become entangled in a larger discourse, they are being ’socially produced’ as young, modern, trendy, serious yet playful, appealing to people previously difficult to reach (young). If you want to be ‘now’ you have to do something with games.

Presentation 3 – LogoParc – was about the Amsterdam Zuidas and the way a kind of superficial ‘global architecture’ is created which is not related to the local (at least, that’s what I understood of the 2 very abstract talks). Designers at Jan van Eyk, Rietveld created a visual game-like critique on this environment. All facades of building and public space signage was removed, which created a sense of barren desolate landscape. Added were a number of large above-ground ’sewers’ connecting the Zuidas to other global places’ like Singapore, HongKong, Tokyo, New York, Paris, etc.

> I was a little annoyed by this whole talk: very highbrow theoretical critique on so-called placelessness of Zuidas, yet these offices and public spaces are filled with real people that drive their bikes back home at the end of a working day, people who make it a place, even if architecture has done little to embed it in local Amsterdam. 

060925_mobile_phone_ethnography.pdf (2.5 MB)

Last Friday, October 27, I did a talk for the Transito Festival 2006 at the Melkweg in Amsterdam. It was an evening about identity and technology.

Here’s the PDF of the presentation Mobile phone as gift culture (Dutch).

Thursday, June 29 Esther Polak in cooperation with Virtueel platform has organized the workshop Mobile Habits about mapping and mobility in the Balie in Amsterdam. Since I work together with Esther and Ab in the Fulani project, I attended.
About 25 artists, designers and scientists showed up, which turned out to be a very inspiring mix of people. Overall the most surprising and stimulating of the whole day in my opinion was that all more or less spoke the same language.

Apart from a couple of interesting talks by Esther Polak and Christian Nold, Hanne Kirstine Adriansen and Ab Drent, there were also session were the audience had to ‘work’.

Read Auke on Informationlab.org

Click the link below to read some notes I scribbled down during the day. The sign > means a personal thought that occurred to me while listening.

interview Christian Nold by Esther Polak
Mapping mobility is about turning the 3D world into an intelligible 2D representation, adding layer(s) of extra information to geographical maps, depicting e.g. movement, habitual patterns, opinion. It is often impelled by a specific need, like the project Geoskating.org.
> How does the mobile phone lead to a specific view of spatial environment? E.g. a mental mapping of space according to reception levels, being monitored (by teachers, parents, your lover, etc.), being able to call privately, being on display, etc.
So the conclusion is that mobile technollogies are attached to place, they are not turning space into a non-issue, or ‘free’.
> Locative media are about translating spatial experiences into maps.
Charles Booth made the poverty map (booth.lse.ac.uk) which is actually a crime map of London in the late 19th century.
Amsterdam Real Time (Esther’s project) with its routes fading over time challenges space as something that never fades, is always there, permanent. .
> This brings in a temporal aspect to space: space is something that one must move in in order to keep it alive (just like old anthropological literature writing about Australian Aboriginal ‘Songlines’: routes that must be walked in order to keep them alive.)
> Just like addresses in your mobile phone: you must maintain them, else the fade away.

Hanne Kirstine Adriansen
Space > place: inhabiting space by material objects you carry along, making the space private, create a sense of belonging to that place.
- Belonging to place
- Connecting with others
- Materializing
> How is the mobile phone used to turn space into place?

Ab Drent
Nomads live closer together, more intense, which leads Esther to say she got the impression Fulani live in a soap opera, which Ab doesn’t like, but I think is an apt description.
> The mobile phone intensifies interactions: meeting/interacting more often. The limiting of setting and time, mediated by the mobile phone, is like a soap opera: playful interactions all the time, not time for self, being alone.
Rationale for mobility is not always conscious, to be on the move is an aim in itself. Who decides? It is a complex of factors, whence the use of Actot Network Theory (ANT).

Workshop afternoon
- Maps & surveillance: visualizing for instance poverty or criminality quickly leads to stereotyping.
- Cattle is the real estate of nomadic people
- There are connections between mobility of products and global networks (e.g. milk) and local poverty and economic malaise.
- Cultural education is needed for understanding maps. People are not born with the ability to read a 2D birds-eye representation of the real 3D world.
- Mobility is not always spatial movement. Take for example the Fulani who often stay in one place but are nomadic people. Mobility is more a lifestyle, an attitude, a strategy (..if necessary, we move on..)
- Hybridizing space in project ‘Roam is my home’ in central museum Utrecht last year” web technology & museum as setting.
- Between different worlds we need translators. Just like the guy who successfully explained GPS to the Fulani by saying it orients itself using invisible stars the Americans shoot up in heaven, so you cannot use the device under a tree or in a building, because then it doesn’t see the stars..
- Data and visualization are the same, says Christian Nold, they are both about materializing space.
- Birds eye view of earth: what is the influence of depicting earth like this on our perceptions of space? E.g. the ecological view that came into being with the photo’s shot from space shuttles.
- Crowd and mobs are a threat to those in power.

Ideas by other groups
- Visual representation & science are not on friendly foot. Make science too colorful and understandable, then the mystery of science gets lost, it becomes too profane and obvious.
- Visualization: reflections on spatial use, turning space into place.

This Friday, Mylene and I did a bit of a crazy thing and drove over 200 kilometers east to Essen and back again at the same evening to see the Visual Power Show. It was held in a former industrial complex called Zollverein, in the cole-washer to be exactly. They are transforming many old factories in the Ruhr-area into ‘creative zones’ now as a way to preserve them. It was tamed wildness: you couldn’t wander around and explore the building or the terrain. Finding the venue turned out to be a real pain: first we drove the wrong way to Essen, then we arrived on the terrain but had to find out where it was, together with some indignified Germans.
Although the show sometimes leaned toward platitudes about modern day consumerism, I thought it was really fun to watch. A lot of speed, rapid changes between speakers, who held their presentations very brief (10 min max). Unfortunately we didn’t stay to see the whole show because we didn’t want to get back too late.