Do you know that annoying buzzing sound that comes from stereo speakers when a cellphone rings? That noise in the speakers is interference, and it is audible evidence of the electronic field that emanates from your cell phone. Cell Phone Disco, a project by Auke Touwslager and Ursula Lavrencic, visualizes this electromagnetic interference. The installation itself is a large surface that covers a wall with several thousand red lights, when you make or receive a phone call in the vicinity of the installation the lights react. “It’s not about what you can do with your phone, but what your phone can do with you,” suggested Lavrencic.

“The first reaction to Cell Phone Disco is usually, ‘Wow my phone does this? I can do this with my phone?’ Then a moment later the reaction changes to, ‘Well, I guess my phone does this all the time? My phone does this to me!’ Which I think is the interesting duality of how this works”, explains Lavrencic.

She continued, “What is interesting about the project is that we never tried to place it in a certain context, it just sort of happened because we were interested in it.” Since the project began in 2006 it has traveled from it’s humble beginnings to art and science galleries around the world including: The Contemporary Museum of Art in Baltimore, Wired Next Fest, The Science Gallery in Dublin, and The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

Touwslager commented on Cell Phone Disco’s recent interest from architects, “They like this idea of wrapping their buildings with media, but often they worry about what content to add. That’s what I think attracts them to Cell Phone Disco: it’s a public screen without content.”

As a project-manager of MediaLAB Amsterdam, Gijs Gootjes works with students from various institutes of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam. He began his presentation with a video example from earlier this year that he worked on with his students.

“We were very proud of this project because it was the first urban projection that we did. It’s remarkable because it shows what a group of students can do in one semester”, added Gootjes

The next project that Gootjes and his students worked on was an interactive projection for MuseumNacht (Amsterdam’s museum night) on the Trouw building in Amsterdam (the building we are in today for the Urban Screens conference). As a part of this project, Gootjes and his students designed an interactive music application where, via a touchscreen,the participants of MuseumNacht were invited to mix together a 10-second music loop filled with various sounds and beats. As the music loops played, visuals were projected on the outside of the Trouw building that reacted in-time and to the beat.

In the final session of the Urban Screens conference which took place in Amsterdam last Friday, Sabine Niederer announced the launch of the first book dedicated entirely to the urban screens theme, Urban Screens Reader. The book was edited by Scott McQuire and Meredith Martin from the University of Melbourne and Sabine Niederer from the Institute of Network Cultures. The Urban Screens Reader contains three sections: ‘Urban Screens: History, Technology, Politics’, ‘Sites’, and ‘Publics and Participation: Interactivity, Sociability and Strategies in Locative Media,’  which cover diverse approaches to the pre-history, contemporary contexts and future directions of urban screens, in seeking “the conditions for establishing a better balance between the contest of civic, commercial and artistic values in urban space.” (McQuire, Martin, Niederer: 10). The book in .pdf will be soon available for free download on the INC website.

The book was launched as a result of the series of events and seminars which took place throughout the four years since the first urban screens event organized by the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam in 2005 in collaboration with Mirjam Struppek, Gerrit Rietveld Academy and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. This series of events encouraged the exploration of opportunities to employ the growing infrastructure of  displays in public space (LED signs, plasma screens, projection boards, intelligent architectural surfaces, etc.), currently used mainly as a tool to influence consumer behavior through advertising, and to repurpose them as platforms for creation and cultural exchange, strengthening the local economy and encouraging public discussion. Since the first Urban Screens event in 2005 in Amsterdam, related international conferences have been organized in Manchester in 2007 and Melbourne in 2008.

This year the International Urban Screens Association (IUSA) was also created. The organization takes on the mission ’to inform and support the ‘worldwide Urban Screens movement’: the expanding use of dynamic digital displays in public spaces; their considerate and sustainable integration in the urban landscape; and the ability for screen communities to collaborate in the digital space to share content, experience, ideas, innovations and emerging possibilities.’

Notes:

Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin and Sabine Niederer eds. Urban Screens Reader. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009

In 2005 Nanette Hoogslag developed the idea for Oog, inviting artists to react to current affairs in an online environment. This became ‘Oog’, a weekly online page in one of the largest Dutch national newspapers the ‘Volkskrant’. At Urban Screens Hoogslag’s presented a few projects from the Visual Correspondents Foundation, illustrated with various examples of the screen-based art works commissioned over the last 5 years. “The news medium continues to develop away from print and toward the digital, yet there is one aspect of this media evolution that hasn’t evolved: editorial imagery (the illustrations, and cartoons are which are part of them),” began Hoogslag.

Visual Correspondents: Artists as opinion makers, individual expressions on a public platform

Hoogslag, along with member of the Visual Correspondent Foundation and VFC-Berlin, commissioned seven artists to make screen-based works looking at specific border-related issues in their home country.

'Editorial Imagery' in U-Bahn Station Kochstrasse in Berlin

The work traveled to a few locations in Europe, eventually making its way to the historic U-Bahn Station Kochstrasse in Berlin, Germany (also referred to as Checkpoint Charlie). Hoogslag added, “This project is saying that walls are not just from Berlin, walls are everywhere: not only physical, but internalized as well as virtual. She was impressed that the piece was stirring up conversation amongst onlookers,

“The men that ran the kiosks, working on the platform, had to explain the work to the commuters – and it created a nice surrounding dialogue. It was a nice to think that the men selling the news, became a part of the news [or an extension of] the magazine.”

In addition, Hoogslag added her hope that we can “challenge media, challenge people and challenge assumptions with creative and powerful visuals.”

She left us with three examples, that she felt, helped evolve editorial imagery, Motomichi Nakamura’s The Levee (a visual commentary about the Hurricane Katrina disaster), Samiha, and an interactive work about the world’s news by Lust.

Theo Watson is one of the members of Graffiti Research Lab, an art group which brings together hacking and graffiti writing into digital graffiti as a form of communication in urban spaces. The organization is based in New York and now has other nodes Mexico, Vienna, and Amsterdam, where Theo is located.

The group experiments with digital technologies, L.E.D. lights, software, projectors and magnets as tools for artistic expression at urban level. Their projects, which were exhibited at several modern art festivals, are detailed by videos on their website. The L.A.S.E.R. Tag project  for example enables writing on urban surfaces such as building facades or walls by means of computer vision technology, projectors and a laser pointer:

But what makes the group’s activity truly valuable is the fact that the artist – engineers develop free tools with open-source technologies which can be used by graffiti writers. Their website documents all their projects and offers the tools for free download. The group has even posted tutorials on the DIY website instructables.com on

This does not make digital graffiti accessible to anyone however because a certain level of practical understanding of the technology is necessary to operate and adapt the tools. The pratice is more of a ‘geek’ – oriented graffiti, to use the words of one of the founders of the group, Evan Roth. Moreover, the high prices of acquisition for some of the equipment, such as the projectors, which can get to 7000 euros, make them still inaccessible to many.

Nanna Verhoeff, associate professor in the department of Media and Culture studies at Utrecht University, had one of the very few yet very welcomed theoretical presentations in relation to the theme of the conference, urban screens.

Her contribution focused in particular on mobile screens (such as mobile phones, PDA’s and GPS devices), and their role in urban screen culture. She discussed the specificity of these screens in relation to the concept of mobility, an often encountered trope in the history of screen media.

The first question which the speaker addressed was: how are these mobile screens different from the large digital displays in urban space? And, in relation to a broader range of screen media, how do mobile screens influence the relationship between the user, the screen and the space outside the screen?

As Nanna Verhoeff points out, one of the differences between mobile screens and traditional static screens is the fact that mobile screens are ‘application based.’ The mobile screen serves as an interface for the convergence of various technologies and software applications: they can act as cameras, interfaces for online communication or surfing the web, as well as GPS devices. While the relationship between user and screen as material object may remain ‘static’ and unchanged in the context of the mobility afforded by the use of mobile digital screens, what changes and deserves attention according to the speaker is “the relationship to the off-screen space, the world surrounding the screen, [which] is perhaps becoming at once more intimate, more flexible, and more mobile”:

Because of these characteristics (application-based hybridity + “intimate” closeness) mobile screens put forward practices of a mobile and haptic engagement with the screen that fundamentally revise the spatial coordinates of large, fixed and (paradoxically) distancing televisual, cinematic, and architectural screen-dispositifs. When the screen is becoming an interactive map, camera, and a networked communication device all-in-one, these mobile (touch)screens and practices of mobile screening problematize set boundaries of agency, between making, transmitting, and receiving images (who “makes”, “programs” and watches them). Moreover, these devices turn the “classical” screen as flat and distanced window on the world, into an interactive, hybrid navigation device that repositions the viewer central within that world.

Equipped with mobile screens we therefore become a sort of ‘postmodern’ cartographers: we produce space by navigating through and interacting with an augmented space. But unlike traditional cartography which is concerned with the systematic and objective rendering of space and space relations at different scales, creative cartography in 4D enabled by mobile screens is a subjective, flexible and open-ended practice of personalized space mapping.

What are some of the applications which enable this practice? GPS navigation, for example, in which the movement produces the map, is one of them. Another example of subjective/ creative production of space is geo tagging, through which geographical identification data is added to media such as photos. In mobile augmented reality, reality browsers or ‘layar’ applications, the information enhanced map fluctuates according to our position.

In conclusion, Nanna Verhoeff points out to a new notion of cartography which is being revealed by the use of these applications, by means of which we are not only navigating space but also constructing space. According to her cartography:

it is not a precondition only, but a product of navigation, and as such, cartography is becoming more than a systematic representation of space: it is a performance of space in a true sense: a making and expressing of space.

With this notion the media theorist emphasizes the necessity of a shift in discussing some of the contemporary media practices from the notion of representation, which received criticism in modernity for its potential to produce alienation and engender passive consummation, to the notion of process, performance, performativity, more specifically “the process in which representation comes into being” through the embodied experiencing of space.

Martijn de Waal is a writer and researcher, who has specialized in the relation between technology, media and (public) culture. Together with Michiel de Lange he founded The Mobile City, a think tank and knowledge network on digital media and urban culture.

“What is Urban Culture?”, asks Martijn, “The city is a place full of strangers. How do we shape and express our own identify? How do we relate to others?” He reminds the audience that the people we live with in our cities are not only strangers, but that we live side-by-side with these people that have different lifestyles, religions and cultures. For Martijn a public space is a place where people assemble, it refers to an audience, but doesn’t assume that everyone has access to this space: there are always power limits and preconditions for how we can react in these spaces.

A cultural public space could be thought of as an experience where there are collective rhythms and performances as we pass by and interact with each other. Martijn explains, “Not only that you have interactions with others in a public space, but that you have this experience of seeing other people walk by. Just by being in these spaces, even if you don’t interact with them, it builds up a sort of trust – a collective rhythm. It’s more an unconscious process than an active deliberation.”

He went on to present a few examples of these cultural public spaces:

Climate on the Wall (Aarhus, Denmark)
Climate on the Wall is a media installation where people can move around the digitally projected words on the wall to make statements about climate – similar to the magnetic poetry tiles that are on many people’s refrigerators.

Martijn added,

When this began, they hoped it would be a rational debate about climate (because all the words are about climate). They hoped to remediate the public facade with this type of dialogue. So did it work? Not really. No one was too interested in making comments on climate. And in that sense the project was a bit naive, but what the creators did notice: the people standing in front of the screen were having a dialogue about the climate. So the screen inspired and led to discussion – i think that’s an interesting design concept. Maybe we shouldn’t always try to think of the content itself as the conversation, but the project can be used as a conversation piece.

Textales (Amsterdam)
“Textales takes an editorial approach to the public sphere”, Martijn explained. In Textales members of urban and rural communities took photographs addressing housing inequities, anti-smoking legislation and political influences on daily life. They selected and arranged images for large-scale projection in public arenas. Passersby could then use mobile phones to augment the displays by sending text messages that appeared as captions.

SENSEable City Lab Wiki Rome
This was done on the museum night in Rome (it is also called the White Night) what you see (the blue cloud) is where people are in the city. The yellow lines then show where the buses are in the city. So it’s a projection of certain rhythms in the city.

CoCollage
CoCollage broadcasts pictures from your online social network onto a screen in your local cafe (at the moment they are available in twenty cafes in the Seattle area). If you have a loyalty card the system registers that you have arrived, and it begins projecting your photos.

Martijn commented,

If you are a regular at that coffee place, then you can get an idea of who else is a regular. Essentially, CoCollage is reinventing the ways that we can get familiar with people in the public space.

Considering the great percentage of the world living in urban areas – surrounded by, and intermingling with strangers everyday. Martijn’s examples illustrate a few innovate ways that we can become more concious our the people around us – and perhaps through that awareness we can transform everyday public spaces into better cultural public spaces.

Matthijs ten Berge is co-director of illuminate Outdoor Media. Berge was the first presenter this morning at the Institute of Network Culture’s Urban Screens conference. Before diving into this talk he began with a message, “I’d like to say that I’m not here just to present my work to you, but I’m here to meet you and learn from you. I’m looking for future inspiration and future people to team up with.”

Berge’s talk attempted to answer a few questions related to the creative use of technology. He presented four of his own projects with the hope of inspiring the audience to take initiative and get organized in order to upgrade the public domain.

Media architecture should not be thought of as being the biggest screen on the biggest square with the brightest and biggest audience. Rather, it is finding those applications that can truly engage us with our public space.

Berge went on to present a few of his projects:

Moodwall
Prior to the project’s conception, the Bijlmer Tunnel was a dark lit, graffiti ridden underpass. Over a five year period, Berge and his team worked to install the low-resolution Moodwall – the wall reacts and engages with pedestrians in real-time, displaying content based on human movement.

Cruquius’s LED Landmark
The  LED Landmark in Cruquius is a 30-meter LED tower located outside of a shopping mall near Schiphol, The Netherlands.

LedTex
“The goal of the Textile Museum project was to create a digital collection of the textiles that they have, and translate what is on the inside of the museum to the outside,” explained  Berge.

New Museumline at Museumplein, Amsterdam
At the moment Berge is working on an ambitious project that should be familiar to anyone who lives in Amsterdam: renovating the museumline that runs through the grounds at Museumplein in Amsterdam. Berge took the initiative to approach the Amsterdam municipality with his idea for the new museumline in 2005. His hope was that he could develop an innovative way for pedestrians to interact with their surroundings. “This is a very rudimentary example,” warns Berge , “but one idea that we are working on is something that we refer to as the ‘Amsterdam jump’. (see clip below).

In closing he urged everyone, “If you have something you want to do in the public domain, do something about it! Go to your municipality and make changes. If you have a good story they will probably want to be part of it.”

Juha Van ‘t Zelfde spoke today at the Urban Screens conference in behalf of VURB, a foundation located in Amsterdam which focuses on policy and design research concerning urban computational systems. His presentation focused on what might be called ‘urban informatics’. VURB endorses the development of ‘urban informatics’ as a potential discipline concerned with the issue of management of all the data related to urban environments generated by inhabitants and visitors of a city, now mobile technology users. This content generated by means of ubiquitous computing, sensor technologies and mobile media transforms the urban environment by adding another virtual layer to the urban space. The foundation is involved in investigating precisely how these networked digital resources are changing the way we understand, build and inhabit cities and attempts to find creative ways to manage and use all the user generated data related to urban sites and include it in the process of shaping future cities.

In investigating the role of all the user generated data adding another dimension to the city space in shaping the city of the future, VURB is attempting to create an interactive platform to accommodate, administer and make available and searchable all this data. Juha Van ‘t Zelfde mentioned something like an app store, a platform on top of which people can build other applications.

VURB does not only attempt to provide a framework for policy and design research but it envisions itself also as a connector linking municipalities and other actors interested in the theme of the city as interface. The foundation is also involved in promoting the theme by means of public events. One of these events will take place in 2010 and will be a one day marathon on the theme of the ‘cloud city’.

Annet Dekker has been active in the field of media art since the mid 90s. She worked eight years as curator, head of exhibitions and the artist in residence program at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam. At the moment she is an independent curator and programme manager at Virtueel Platform.

According to Dekker, the virtual and the real are currently in dialogue with each other. She began with a lengthy quote from Miriam Struppek,

‘Urban screens can be understood in the context of a reinvention of the public sphere and the urban character of cities, based on a well-balanced mix of functions and the idea of the inhabitant as active citizen instead of properly behaving consumer.’ (2006)

Urban screens focus on the public urban audience, on joint and widespread reception of media content. Levels of locality and globality vary, ranging from the local neighbourhood screens with symbols and signs on a city level to trans-urban networks of screens enabling new glocal interconnectivity.’ (2009)

Dekker believes that a “media space” can be defined with more than “urban screens”, and as one example she suggested the mobile phone. In addition, she highlighted four projects that she believes challenges common notions of what an urban screen can be: Esther Polak’s Nomatic Milk, the work of Yolande Harris, Blast Theory, and Ian bogost’s Persuasive Games.

In closing she added her concern for the future of urban screens, “A new hybrid space has formed, and we use technologies without really questioning them. It’s really problematic that you have very little control.”