Imaging the City

Description

Imaging the City brings together the work of designers, artists, dancers and media specialists who cross the borders of design and artistic practices to investigate how we perceive the city; how we imagine it; how we experience it; and how we might better design it. Breaking disciplinary boundaries, editors Steve Hawley, Edward Clift and Kevin O’Brien provocatively open up the field of urban analysis and thought to the perspectives of creative professionals from non-urban disciplines. With a cast of contributors from across the globe, Imaging the City offers international insight for engaging with – and forecasting the future for – our cities.

Foreword

Graham Cairns

 

Introduction

Steve Hawley

 

Section One: Theories of Media, Memory and Imagination

Various

 

Chapter One: Territories of image: Disposition and disorientation in Google Earth

Lawrence Bird

 

Chapter Two: Manchester as a mythical city: Reflections in art and locative media

Steve Hawley

 

Chapter Three: From under your skin 

John Zissovici

 

Chapter Four: CitySpaceMindSpace

Terry Flaxton

 

Chapter Five: Mapping the city as remembered and the city as imaged

Jelena Stankovic

 

Intersection One: A city of grids and algorithms and soundtracks in cars and planes and glass

Joshua Singer

 

Section Two: Applications - Traditional Technologies of Perception an the Imagination

Various

 

Chapter Six: Sep Yama/Finding Country to Burning City Studios

Kevin O'Brien

 

Chapter Seven: Surface tension: Experimental dance films and the undoing of urban space 

Sylvie Vitaglione

 

Chapter Eight: Thresh, hold

Dirk de Bruyn

 

Chapter Nine: Qualities of lustrous gatherings

Reit Eeckhout and Ephraim Joris

 

Intersection Two: Sick city: An introduction

Heron-Mazy (Anon)

 

Section Three: Interventions in Design and Experience - New Media and Technologies in the City

Various

 

Chapter Ten: Belén's Social Repair Kit: Collective data visualization and participatory civic agency 

Ivan Chaparro

 

Chapter Eleven:Read or follow? Designing with mobile technologies and digital space

Natalie Rowland

 

Chapter Twelve: Musing publics: Arts and idea in motion

Michael Jemtrud

 

Epilogue

Edward M. Clift

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Architecture
• Internet
• Cultural Studies
• General
• Design
• Media studies
• Globalization
• General officer
• Index of urban studies articles
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Digital Media

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783205592
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2016 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2016 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy-editor: Emma Rhys
Cover designer: Gabriel Solomons
Front cover image © John Zissovici
Production managers: Gabriel Solomons and Jelena Stanovnik
Typesetting: John Teehan
ISBN 978-1-78320-557-8
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78320-558-5
ePub ISBN 978-1-78320-559-2
Produced in conjunction with AMPS (Architecture, Media, Politics, Society)
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Contents

Acknowledgements
Foreword
Graham Cairns
Introduction
Steve Hawley
Section One: Theories of Media, Memory and Imagination
Chapter 1 Territories of image: Disposition and disorientation in Google Earth
Lawrence Bird
Chapter 2 Manchester as a mythical city: Reflections in art and locative media
Steve Hawley
Chapter 3 From under your skin
John Zissovici
Chapter 4 City space mind space
Terry Flaxton
Chapter 5 Mapping the city as remembered and the city as imaged (Banja Luka)
Jelena Stankovic
Intersection 1 A city of grids and algorithms and soundtracks in cars and planes and glass
Joshua Singer
Section Two: Applications - Traditional Technologies of Perception and the Imagination
Chapter 6 Sep Yama/Finding Country to Burning City Studios
Kevin O’Brien
Chapter 7 Surface tension: Experimental dance films and the undoing of urban space
Sylvie Vitaglione
Chapter 8 Thresh, hold
Dirk de Bruyn
Chapter 9 Qualities of lustrous gatherings
Riet Eeckhout and Ephraim Joris
Intersection 2 Sick city: An introduction
Heron–Mazy (Anon)
Section Three: Interventions in Design and Experience – New Media and Technologies in the City
Chapter 10 Belén’s Social Repair Kit: Collective data visualization and participatory civic agency
Ivan Chaparro
Chapter 11 Read or follow? Designing with mobile technologies and digital space
Natalie Rowland
Chapter 12 Musing publics: Arts and ideas in motion
Michael Jemtrud
Epilogue
Edward M. Clift
Notes on Contributors
Index
Acknowledgements
The editorial team would like to thank the Brooks Institute for their support on this book series.
Foreword
Graham Cairns
A s Marshall McLuhan identified as far back as 1964, today’s global village is a place of simultaneous experience; a site for overlapping material and electronic effects; a place not so much altered by the content of a medium, but rather, a space transformed by the very nature of medias themselves. For some, this is little more than the inevitable evolution of urban space in the digital age. For others, it represents the city’s liberation from the condition of stasis. For scaremongers, it is a nightmare scenario in which the difference between the virtual and the real, the electronic and the material, the recorded and the lived, becomes impossible to identify. In every case, corporeal engagement is placed at one remove from the physical world.
In this context, Imaging the City: Art, Creative Practices and Media Speculations brings together the work of designers, artists, dancers and media specialists who cross the borders of design and artistic practices to investigate how we perceive the city; how we imagine it, experience it; and how we might design it. It breaks disciplinary boundaries to provocatively open the field of urban analysis and thought to the perspectives and approaches of creatives from non-urban disciplines.
The book is split into three sections that cover theoretical, research and practice-based approaches to documenting, recording and impacting upon the city through various media formats. It includes examinations of how our perception and engagement with urban environments are changed by interactions with new media, and actual case studies of art practices and projects that engage with the city.
Its authors are international and bring insights from art practices and their engagement with the city from Australasia, Northern Europe and South America. They offer an original mix of insights on the work of new digital artists and more traditional visual media creatives. The book thus reveals fascinating glimpses of practices that are frequently overlooked in academic publications. The result of this approach is that this book represents one of the first overviews of the role of artists, and in particular digital artists, in the domain of urban design and documentation that explicitly places them on a par with colleagues from standard architecture and urban fields.
Together with the two other books with which Intellect launches its Mediated Cities series, Digital Futures and the City of Today: New Technologies and Physical Spaces and Filming the City: Urban Documents, Design Practices and Social Criticism Through the Lens , this volume represents a major publication initiative in the field of interdisciplinary urban and media studies. All three of these books stem from an international programme run by the research group AMPS (Architecture, Media, Politics, Society) and its associated scholarly journal Architecture_MPS . The ‘Mediated City Research Programme’ is an ongoing international engagement of artists, designers, planners, architects, digital image makers, computer programmers, film-makers and photographers. Under its aegis, AMPS facilitates academic events, debate sessions, project collaborations and publications aimed at building up a major resource and network on the city and its relationship with medias and technologies.
As represented by the works collected in the Intellect book series, this underlying research programme operates internationally – drawing together researchers from several continents and over thirty countries. More specifically, it draws on work and ideas developed from AMPS events in Los Angles and London over the past two years and adds to that work with essays developed by other artists engaged in these themes. Both this book then, and the AMPS ‘Mediated City Research Programme’ more generally, are not only international in outlook, but also inherently and deliberately cross-disciplinary – calling on the views, expertise and working practices of multiple sectors.
Marking a unique cross-border, cross-sector contribution to the field of hybrid scholarly research in areas of architecture, urbanism, planning, media studies, communication and the digital arts, this expansive AMPS programme and its association with Intellect’s Mediated Cities series, is perfectly captured by the combination of works collected in this volume.

Introduction
Steve Hawley
O ur experience of the large and unknowable city has always been mediated to us through emergent technologies. The first century fresco at the Baths of Trajan in Rome depicts an impossible bird’s-eye view of the eternal city that must have been a revelation for the ancient Roman, and ever since, new devices and knowledge have enabled both the depiction of and encounter with the metropolis. The oil painting gave way to the photograph and then the city symphony films of the 1920s, as the city itself was galvanized first by gas lamps and then neon signs. But digital technologies and the Internet of things have widened immensely the possibilities for both design, and contemporary art and new media practice, and permeated the very ether of the city as once did gas pipes snake ubiquitously like a web beneath the city’s streets.
This volume brings together those artists, dancers, media agitators and speculators who cross the borders of design and art practice to interrogate how we experience the city: how we might design it, provoke it and dream of it. The chapters break disciplinary boundaries as the boroughs and suburbs shade one into another, and it opens the field of urban analysis and thought to the lens of creative practitioners and others largely outside the disciplines of architecture and urban design.
The digital city enables, in fact demands, a compendium of different forms to reflect the multiple ways it can be imagined and experienced. Swipe right, pinch and zoom into a map, or tap and drag to see the streets and buildings through a screen, overlaid with pictures from the past. And so this is mirrored by the texts in this book, where some are academic in form, while others are more speculative, using language itself as a malleable creative stuff to try and grasp the un-graspable in the contemporary city.
It was in 1838 that Louis Daguerre took a ten-minute exposure with his new Daguerreotype photographic process, of the Boulevard du Temple, part of a fashionable area in Paris, filled with cafes and theatres, and people. The street was thronged with traffic and pedestrians, but they all moved too quickly to register on the plate, except for one man and a shadow. In the foreground, a man having his boots shined, stays long enough to appear on the photograph, isolated in the seemingly empty streets; the first ever photograph of a recognizable person, with the faintest blur of the shoeshine boy.
What is depicted here is an imagined city, transformed through chemistry and the leisurely time taken to expose the plate after it had been sensitized by halogen fumes, rather than the here and now of the bustling streets. As the neutron bomb was apocryphally supposed to do, all the citizens (bar one) have been erased into invisibility by their very quickness during the exposure, leaving the buildings standing, and a reverie of Paris as an empty, even abandoned place. It is an imagined city with only one citizen – an implied ourselves – and the print pow