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.”

Paul Klotz is an applied art engineer and light designer who specializes in interactive light installations for public spaces. By means of light and sound installations which create a feedback loops between the passerby and the installation upon physical interaction with the artwork, he attempts to set up in public spaces artistic zones which captivate, entertain and enrich human experience.  The Tunnel Vision installation for example is a light and sound installation which responds to the individual’s hand movements within it by sound and light alterations.

Besides a couple of more politically determined projects such as the as the EL-37 (Eco-Line 37), the primary function of Paul Klotz’s creative lighting installations is aesthetic and stems from his fascination with light as artistic medium. EL-37 (Eco-Line 37) was installated in the urban space of Almelo. The installation consists of a six meter modular lightline, something like a thermometer which represents in colours the temperature at the place of the installation. The displayed temperature fluctuates according to the different types of transportation in transit by the place of installation as a modality of creating awareness of environmental issues, climate change and the role of pollution in the process. In absence of traffic the installation acts as a blow-up thermometer.

The sense of individual engagement is determined in Klotz’s installations by the responsiveness of the installation to the movements of the passerby, enabled by the data gathered by sensors at the location of the installation. This much praised feature of interactivity emphasized by many of the media installations and projects presented today at the conference deserves more interrogation. Individual engagement and agency are not to be made the primary goal of such projects and admired as accomplishments in themselves but further interrogated in terms of their meaningfulness. Interactivity in itself can enable both responsible and irresponsible engagement with the artwork/ installation. In order to make the interactive features of an artwork meaningful the attention of the artist should go towards enabling responsible interaction and empathy through conceptual choices. Kristine Stiles and Edward Shanken, art theorists and historians, provide a list of questions useful in reflecting upon whether the interactive features of multimedia artworks truly enable responsible and meaningful agency in relation to social change, agency which would activate complex emotional and decision-making responses and which would contribute to the meaningfulness of the overall artwork, defined as “the ability to change (or affirm) the way viewers see, understand, and act upon the world” (Stiles and Shanken, forthcoming: 86).

In what ways does their [contemporary artists’] use of interactive media: a) challenge or change the creative process and the ways in which artistic meaning is constructed and received? b) enable alternative or expanded roles for the viewer as a producer of meaning? c) enhance individual and collective agency as a vehicle for social change? How are the intentions of the artist and the participant related to the events that result from encounters with interactive art? Do participants have the freedom to influence real-world events or assume interconnected responsibility? (Stiles and Shanken, forthcoming: 91) 

This set of questions brings me to another question which I would have liked to be addressed in the presentation of each art project namely, beyond their obvious spectacularity and the ‘coolness’ factor, what is the ‘added-value’ in terms social capital/change/ efficacy, of these sometimes very expensive thereby largely inaccessible forms of expression in urban space interventions, in comparison with older forms of artistic/ tactical/ subversive/ socially-oriented interventions in urban space?

Notes:

Kristine Stiles and Edward A. Shanken, Missing in Action: Agency and Meaning in Interactive Art, forthcoming in Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, Victoria Vesna, eds., Context Providers: Context and Meaning in Digital Art (University of Minnesota Press).

Urban Screens 09: The City as Interface
4 December 09 at Trouw | De Verdieping Amsterdam
Program is online here
Registration: register@networkcultures.org
Tickets: € 12, students: € 10,- (bring your student card/ op vertoon van studentenpas). N.B. Fee includes lunch and a copy of the Urban Screens Reader!

Urban Screens is a series of events and seminars that has been organized around the theme of outdoor display screens (LED signs, plasma screens, projection boards, information terminals as well as intelligent architectural surfaces) in urban areas. It supports the idea of using public space as a platform 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 taken place in Manchester in 2007 and Melbourne in 2008. The INC and the MediaLAB are proud to present a day-long program dedicated to current Urban Screens research and practice, in Trouw Amsterdam on 4 December 2009. The event will include a seminar with lectures by Urban Screens researchers and professionals, followed by the launch of the Urban Screens Reader, which is produced by the INC and the University of Melbourne.

Topics:
Urban Screens as Architecture, with Matthijs ten Berge (Illuminate), Mettina Veenstra (Novay Research), and more. Moderator: Merijn Oudenampsen (Mute, Flexmens).
The Mobile Screen, with Martijn de Waal (The Mobile City), Nanna Verhoeff (Utrecht University), Annet Dekker (Goldsmiths and Virtual Platform), Auke Touwslager & Ursula Lavrencic (Cell Phone Disco). Moderator: Jan Simons (UvA).
The Mediatized City, with Theodore Watson (Graffiti Research Lab), Juha Van ‘t Zelfde (VURB) , Gijs Gootjes (MediaLAB Amsterdam), Visual Foreign Correspondents. Moderator: Shirley Niemans (HvA).
Urban Screens Reader Launch, with Sabine Niederer.

The Urban Screens reader draws together theories, technologies, histories and artistic deployments of urban screens in public spaces. Edited by Meredith Martin, Scott McQuire and Sabine Niederer. Contributions by Giselle Beiguelman, Andreas Broeckmann, Uta Caspary, Sean Cubitt, Annet Dekker, Erkki Huhtamo, Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat, Nikos Papastergiadis, Scott McQuire, Saskia Sassen and more.

Urban Screens 09 is organized by the Institute of Network Cultures, in collaboration with MediaLAB Amsterdam, Trouw| de Verdieping and the Urban Screens Association (Melbourne).
At the venue: installations by MediaLab Amsterdam, visuals by Visual Foreign Correspondents