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Giulio Lughi
Interactive Media in Urban Space
(2013)
published in:
Morreale D. (ed.), Transmedia e co-creazione, Aracne editrice, 2018
Introduction
The relationship between interactive media and urban space is a typical
example of convergence. In the field of media and cultural studies, the concept of
convergence is becoming increasingly broad and pervasive, moving away from
both the generic and essentially technological meaning of earliest formulations
(the "digital convergence"), both from the cultural meaning assumed in the
theory of Jenkins (2007) where the focus was on the social components of digital
experience and on the user generated contents. Today, the concept of
convergence presents its most interesting aspects for the way it approaches the
relationship between mediated and physical space, between conceptual
representation and real mapping: current newmediologic studies got rid of the
old negative interpretation of text/space relationship, which focused on the
concepts of de-localisation, de-territorialisation, de-spatialization, etc.,
(Meyrowitz 1985), in order to open the way for an integrated vision of cultural
and communicative processes that take place on both land: virtual and real. The
metaphor of the network, which represents a map full of texts and meanings,
brings symbolically together the development of digital media and the
articulation of territorial spaces, either functional networks on which human
actions are developed. In addition, the widespread use of mobile communication
devices has made a further step towards the deep connection between the
mediated space and the real one. Consequently, digital media can be taken today
as a key to approach the understanding of new urban landscape, as they introduce
a new vision of the text/space relationship: as a matter of fact, in digital media
"texts become spaces", as they become viable and practicable (eg in hypertexts
and video games); and - on the other side - "spaces become texts", as they become
readable and writable (eg in media walls and in geotagging) (Lughi 2013).
Labyrinth and Games
The relationship between text and space is very old. Probably the oldest
example of a space that becomes text, and vice versa, is the labyrinth (eg, the
labyrinth of Knossos, who gives life to the story of Ariadne and Theseus): the
labyrinth is a spatial network inside which a number of possible narratives is
developed, generated by the paths taken by the characters within a defined space.
It 's easy to see the labyrinth as a factor of junction between textual dimension
and spatial dimension. In the age of the industrial media, urban space is seen as
a physical and psychological maze, a place where the anxieties and concerns
related to the dimension of the sprawling metropolis come to life, and where the
media are born precisely as tools to face and manage the difficulties of
metropolitan life (Gamba 2009). Walter Benjamin (1982), in his labyrinthine
work on Passages in Paris, has seen - on the basis of the intuition of Baudelaire,
but from a sort of “pre-postmodern” point of view - the metropolitan space as a
place where the flâneur does, with his wanderings, a peculiar textual activity.
Later, in the age of digital media, the Network (a real labyrinth) becomes the
functional and cultural model underpinning the development and spread of game
culture, both in its initial forms, more related to pulp culture (video games), and
in the more mature forms where "serious games" become a real tool for
professional training, for business and economic simulation, for new ways of
learning and knowledge.
Interactive Media
The conceptual model of the labyrinth, and its variations related to the
technology of digital gaming, lead directly into the theme of interactivity, which
indicates the capacity of a medium to receive and reprocess an input coming from
a user. Inside the interactivity paradigm, the text is able to receive an input,
perform calculations, and return an output: in other words the text - which was
only visibile until the age of mass media - in the last quarter of the Twentieth
Century becomes practicable, accessible, reactive. This transformation of the
textual space from simply visible to viable and playable represents the decisive
turning for the birth of interactive media. Interactive media are closely linked to
the birth and development of ICT, as they require the existence of algorithms that
can interpret inputs of users and return a personalized answer. However, from
the point of view of the recent history of the communication processes, interactive
media have gradually freed from their close ties with professional computers,
with the consoles dedicated to video games: they got rid of the very idea of a
stand-alone activity linked to a specific location in a given space (the computer
on the desk), in order to reach instead the dimension of the agile and dynamic
paradigm what is known today as "mobile/locative".
The “Mobile/Locative” Paradigm
The "mobile/locative" paradigm represents in cultural and
communicational patterns a big change, due to the growing importance assumed
by the presence of the physical body (embodiment) in a defined space (location),
within a context characterized by a set of social practices and aims. In this
paradigm shift, the presence of the body and of the space is essential for several
reasons:
– it reconfigures the traditional patterns of human computer interaction,
which were based on static situations and on idealized users;
– it changes the concept of interface, carrying it out from the computer
screen in order to project it in the real world thanks to new miniaturized
sensor technologies (ubiquitous computing, tangible computing);
– finally, as a result, it states the importance of the social context and of the
mobility as regards the design and interaction projecting of techno-
mediatic artifacts.
Strongly influenced by the idea of space is also the so-called "internet of
things", the ubiquitous computing (Dourish, Bell, 2011) which results from a
progressive weakening of the idea, of the image, and even of the very substance
of the computer as a reference point for ICT: the computational and transmissive
capacity of new devices, thanks to the industrial miniaturization processes and
thanks to increased processing and memory power, is now transferred into
objects even smaller and aimed at specific tasks. In this sense we talk about a
"third wave" of ICT: after the age of the mainframe and that of desktop, is opened
now the season of ubicomp (ubiquitous computing), characterized by even
smaller, powerful and specialized computational gadgets, skilled to integrate into
our lives: mobile phones connected to the network, GPS devices, wireless,
widespread home automation. A transformation that is not only technological,
but requires a new economic, social, political and cultural approach, insofar as it
requires to rethink the relationship with the space and with the identity
construction itself. The embodiment and the mobile/locative paradigm are
leading towards a new hybrid aesthetics, which redefines human, cultural,
natural, technological environments, and proposes a deep reconfiguration of the
relationship between them in terms of complexity, interdependence,
contamination (Borries et al. 2007). This hybrid and unstable ground, somehow
disturbing but also fascinating, is the challenge to which mediology must now
answer, since it goes beyond the secular diarchy on which Western culture is
based, the opposition/alliance between writing and painting, between verbal and
iconic language.
Urban Space
The mediated spaces in the city become increasingly interactive, because
they contain media products which are able to react to the behavior of people:
more and more cities are filled of vision devices, establishing close relations
between media perception and territorial location (Gasparini 2012). The
phenomenon has one of his first demonstrations in the not so futuristic scenery
presented in Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002), where the main character was
recognized by some advertisement posters that automatically presented him with
personalised commercial offers; and again in 2003, when a billboard of Coca-Cola
installed in London, Piccadilly Circus, had inside a weather station, and emitted
different messages depending on the weather: on a windy day, the letters were
moving, on a rainy day, drops appeared on the board, etc. In the summer of 2013,
the Foursquare Social Network, in partnership with Samsung, has launched an
application called Time Machine, which allows the user to trace the visited places:
pubs, hotels, restaurants, train stations, shops etc., building a hybrid tool,
something between a map and a timeline, that detects and visually represents all
user navigation in the area. Communication technologies are changing the face
and the functional structure of the city, innovating in a disruptive way every
aspect of city life. Smart City is the umbrella-term that represents - often in a
confused way - the need to redefine the "citizenship" in urban environnments in
order to put the user at the center of the changing processes, in order to
understand the dynamics that arise from urban nomadism in the mediated cities
(Ratti 2013). Through the communication technologies and the proliferation of
miniaturized sensors, cities are becoming powerful data generators (about energy
consumption, mobility flows, waste management, health care, education
processes, etc..), but these data need to be interpreted, understood, shared,
metabolized in the social context. We need to understand what are the new forms
that characterize the public and private spaces under the pressure of the growing
presence of the media; it is necessary to understand whether these forms can give
some smart indications in order to transform the cities not only in an intelligent
way, but also in a human one. In this picture, the urban media system no longer
appear just as tools to visualize and interpret big data, but as a strong generator
for the new urban aesthetics.
Storytelling and Urban Art Games
Games, labyrinth, interactivity, mobile/locative media are the elements
that extend the cultural revolution of the network even into physical
environments, where they offer the possibility to reconfigure social relationships
through new practices of vision, perhaps even adventurous and unpredictable. An
entire territory to explore, where Digital Creativity can lead to forms of locative
art (Ekman 2012) that retrieves the so far disconnected experiences of pervasive
computing, sitespecific installations, place-based storytelling, geo-tagging and
interactions in urban areas. Urban culture and media are complementary, the
image of the network and the image of the city overlap, recovering the concept of
non-place out from its fenced size (airports, shopping malls, etc) in order to
amplify and extend it to every mediated urban experience. For this purpose,
contemporary art has set itself the task of recovering the social dimension of the
urban life, building a picture of the artist that fits perfectly with the psychological
and social skills required by postmodern condition: flexibility, anxiety,
uncertainty, nomadism. Carrying out the creative skills from the narrow field of
art, transporting them to the physical location in urban areas, extends the
possibilities of aesthetic experience in the same way that hypertext has widened
the field of narrative possibilities beyond the limitations of linear and sequential
writing. The typical features of hypertext - the granularity of the experience, that
is potentially re-aggregated in different shapes; the active role of the reader, who
determines the course of history; the birth of an open authorial model - are
characteristics that, if applied to the field of urban storytelling, expand the image
of the network from the exclusively mental or representational field, in order to
build a new hybrid experience, a sort of presence-navigation that explores the
social body of the living city. An example of this hybrid approach to urban
experience, characterized by a textual fragmentation seeking new forms of
aggregation, is Komplex.28 by Mariano Equizzi, an integrated project of
multimedia experience that mixes participatory technologies such as augmented
reality (Communication Strategies Lab 2012) with literary and filmic references
that constantly evoke the nomadic uncertain of the urban experience: “... it's also
a graphic novel, a digital graffiti operation, a radical story about occult powers
linked with advanced technology. The "pages" of this book are hidden in the
architecture of Turin through augmented reality; it's a cryptocasting. The reader-
gamer is like a Paul Auster character that will move like a nomad in Turin
searching for traces od this secret tell.” Tre real city and the imagined one overlap
into a synthetic experience, where the city itself with its mediated forms and
metascreens gives life to the emotional interface of the project. The nomadism
becomes the key for the interpretation of these forms of urban art games, where
the aesthetic experience merges with forms of gaming activities placed within an
urban space historically full of social, political, emotional significance.
Conclusions
These experiments represent aesthetic and experiential forms closely
related to the contemporary. Not only because they have a necessary
technological ground, which is closely linked to the development and diffusion of
mobile devices and with the forms of cross-media communication, but also - and
perhaps especially - because they recover the sense of social presence in urban
areas, face the theme of reuse of cultural heritage, promote vital forms of street
and public art, evoke the flow of smart mobs that run through the physical and
mental spaces of the young generation (Rheingold 2002): in their fragmentary
complexity, they are the global reinterpretation, in terms of fiction, of the contexts
in which everyday life takes usually place.
References
Benjamin, W., 1982, Das Passagenwerk, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Borries von, F., Walz, S.P., Böttger, M. (eds.), 2007, Space Time Play. Computer
Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level. Berlin: Birkhäuser.
Communication Strategies Lab, 2012, Realtà aumentate – Esperienze, strategie
e contenuti per l’Augmented Reality, Milano: Apogeo.
Dourish, P., Bell, G., 2011, Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in
Ubiquitous Computing, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Ekman, U. (ed.), 2012, Throughout. Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous
Computing, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Gamba, F., 2009, Leggere la città. Indizi di contaminazioni sociologiche,
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Gasparini, K., 2012, Schermi Urbani. Tecnologia e innovazione. Nuovi sistemi
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Lughi, G., 2013, Text-space Dynamics. The Digital Media in Defining New
Urban Languages, NUL - New Urban Languages, Milan 19-21 June 2013
Conference Proceedings, in “Planum. The Journal of Urbanism”, n.28,
vol.2.
Meyrowitz, J., 1985, No Sense of Place, Oxford - New York NY: Oxford
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Ratti, C., 2013, Smart City, Smart Citizens, Milano: Egea.
Rheingold, H., 2002, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, New York NY:
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