IMPAKT ONLINE: The City as Interface
Friday October 15th, 2010.
19:00
Theater Kikker, Ganzenmarkt 14, 3512 GD Utrecht
Admission: €7, students: €6
The evening program includes the launch of three new art projects by Claudia Bernett, Christian Nold and Anders Weberg & Robert Willim, that were commissioned by Impakt Online.
Marc Tuters will give a talk on ‘Locative Media as Cosmopolitics,’ in which he highlights the work of artists, designers and creative technologists that literally give voice to the environment. Claudia Bernett will present her locative storytelling project Tall Tales, the new audiovisual work Elsewhereness: Utrecht by Anders Weberg and Robert Willim will be screened, and the audience will be among the first to start mapping with Christian Nold’s project ‘Control’.
More info: www.impakt.nl/online.
Impakt Online 2010: The City as Interface
Claudia Bernett (USA) Tall Tales is based on the notion that cities are multi-layered, dynamic, living things in which stories are told everyday literally and metaphorically through the daily interactions of the people living in them. Bernett extended the Surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse game model into a collaborative cross-platform, cross-media storytelling experience. “Tall Tales” merges people, locations, and technology to create a multi-faceted experience that adds a virtual layer of stories that live and breathe with the city itself. By submitting short text messages, city residents and visitors compose an online story, which is a continuously evolving reflection of the tone and times that we live in.
Another work that explores the city as an accumulation of experiences is Control by Christian Nold (UK). He sees control as an ambiguous concept that describes both a sense of empowerment (being in control) while on the other it refers to oppression (being controlled). Control can be just a personal experience or it can describe people’s relationship to others or towards the city. It can be a physical experience or an amorphous sensation. By letting people mark specific locations on Utrecht’s city map where they “Feel in Control”, “Feel out of control” or “Feel controlled” and assembling the data in an online database, Nold allows people to reflect and respond on the way they and others relate to the world and the build environment.
Anders Weberg & Robert Willim (Sweden) on the other hand take the possibilities of experiencing the city through digital media to an extreme level. Instead of focusing on the physical experience of the city, they focus the experience of the ephemeral, the urban alienation and non-presence. Their project Elsewhereness is made solely from audio and video materials found on the Web. The audiovisual pieces are manipulated and composed into a surreal journey through an estranged landscape, based entirely on the culturally bound and stereotypical preconceptions of the artists about the actual location. After the cities Yokohama, Cape Town and Manchester Utrecht will be the next to join Weberg and Willim’s collection of digital urban impressions.
The projects will be available on: www.impakt.nl/online starting Wednesday, October 13th 2010, accompanied by interviews with the artists.
‘The City as Interface’ is a follow-up of the Urban Screens research program of the Institute of Network Cultures, https://www.networkcultures.org/urbanscreens/.