As part of DownStreet Art, Ephraim & Sadie Hatfield will manufacture large quantities of small electronic art works that they will give away free of charge through their pop-up “store” at 24 Eagle Street in North Adams, MA. Each work of art will feature an object that has been gifted by the public to the Hatfields.

Give One, Get One Free: The Hatfields seek interesting items, curiosities, toys, trinkets, memorabilia, and other objects that can serve as a focal point for these works.

Before the opening and throughout the exhibit’s run, people are encouraged to bring in their small objects so that they may be incorporated into a future work of art. Gifted objects should be no more than a few inches in size, and light-weight items are preferred.

Objects can be delivered to MCLA Gallery 51 at 51 Main Street in North Adams daily from 10 am – 6 pm. Those who donate objects before the exhibit’s opening on Thursday June 23rd will receive a coupon which guarantees the holder a work of art at some point during the exhibit’s run.

DownStreet Art is a public art project designed to revitalize downtown North Adams. By harnessing existing arts organizations and events and transforming vacant and open spaces into arts destinations, DownStreet Art defines North Adams as a cultural haven, driving tourists and community members downtown.

Welcome to an early December and another debate! This month, empyre is dedicated to the general universe of Gaming Subcultures - the different forms of “playing outside the console,” titles that explore such dynamics and, especially, the social practices built around them.

In spite of the many stories they might tell, videogames are first and foremost narratives of mastery over the system. Their particular drama is not situated on whatever turning points are shown on the screen, but between the player and the controls. This is easier to perceive in highly technical genres such as platformers and rhythm games. To play a game is to learn how to perform within it – how to take things into effect.

In an article about game design, [1] Daniel Cook shows that the gameplay is meant to conform the user to its rules gradually, in a sort of smooth pedagogy of procedures. The extent to which this increasing reflexivity between man and machine can be tutorial is obvious from titles such as Mario Teaches Typing. [2] However, this tendency may not be collateral, at least according to German philosopher Claus Pias: in a thesis that is available online (but that I could never read), Pias finds the historical origins of videogames in military training. [3]

Could videogames be then reduced to a mere dressage medium? I believe not. To do so is to attribute an impossible self-sufficiency to them. On the one hand, the designers themselves are never completely free to set the conditions for training. They are also constrained by rules: those of the available frameworks, libraries and engines, whose total parameters often escape them. This is why bugs occur and, sometimes, the users get to find something that the designer did not put there. The same Daniel Cook, upon sharing a hint page of his Steambirds on Google Reader, confesses: “Now I finally know how to play my own game.” [4]

In that sense, one cannot ignore that every platform is contained within others, and therefore can be exploited, hacked and cheated (just like school). This means that the feedbacks between player and system can occur far beyond the individual and pre-planned hand-eye coordination, they can happen on a larger socio-cultural scale. Even if internal mastery cannot be achieved, the game can be beaten from the outside – or, better yet, circumvented into other uses.

I personally consider these activities a constitutive and inseparable part of ordinary gameplay. I take that from my personal memories of titles such as Stunts [5] and Street Fighter II, which I played during my early teens with the neighbourhood gang. Our main mode of interaction with the former was making and exchanging racetracks in which we never actually care to race on. With the later, it was watching friends fight each other in living room championships, while we waited for our turn to use the joystick (for barely three minutes).

Even so, there was a lot of engagement even when no playing seemed to be involved. It comes as no surprise that the off-game creation and trade of in-game content (from Chinese Gold Farming to Knytt Stories [6]), as well as the physical situation of the gaming platform (from the Pokéwalker [7] to Auntie Pixelante’s Chicanery [8]), are fast approaching the centre of the stage. Maybe this is a mark of the increasing complexity of the medium. Maybe it’s a sign of the colonization of these social fields by the system’s logic.

Finally, the debate means to focus on how videogames can be publicly appropriated through the invention and transmission of supplementary parameters, leading to activities that James Newman dubs as “superplay.” [9] These include but are not limited to their use as platforms of audiovisual creation and their employment in sport-like tournaments.

Our first guests are Joshua Diaz and Julian Kücklich. They will be addressing how the gaming practice often spills into the immediate surroundings and then back again, as playing becomes a subject of everyday conversation and players resort to each other to understand rules, optimize their skills, pass through a certain stage, etc. All this communication requires and generates its own channels, such as gamesforums and faqs. More often than not, these external channels are the only way to get into the system’s most internal rules - the ones that are never written on manuals and made explicit, such as hints (e.g. the order to fight megaman’s bosses) and exploits (e.g. konami code). Bios below (and links bellower).

Joshua Diaz is a game designer and researcher. Currently working in social games in the SF Bay area, he’s a graduate of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT and an alum of the GAMBIT Game Lab. His research focused on multiplayer game design and the impact of player communities, collaborative storytelling and procedural narratives, and game literacy research in education and development. He’s findable under the nick “dizzyjosh” most places, like http://twitter.com/dizzyjosh.

Julian Kücklich is an independent media researcher based in Berlin. More at http://playability.de.

[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1524/the_chemistry_of_game_design.php
[2] http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/987/Mario+Teaches+Typing.html
[3] http://e-pub.uni-weimar.de/volltexte/2004/37/
[4] http://hubpages.com/hub/Steambirds-Strategy-and-Hint-Guide
[5] http://stunts.hu/
[6] http://nifflas.ni2.se/?page=Knytt+Stories
[7] http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9walker
[8] http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=507
[9] http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415385237/

Julian Kücklich wrote: Hi all,

after Gabriel’s introduction, I would like to get the ball rolling by raising the question what we are actually talking about when we talk about gaming subcultures. While Gabriel has provided some fascinating examples, which demonstrate the breadth of the contemporary videogame landscape, I think it might be useful to delve into the history of games, and look at some crucial junctures which lead up to the current situation.

I think it’s useful to keep in mind that computer gaming itself was seen as a subculture until recently, and that some “hardcore gamers” are still holding on to this notion, despite the demographic changes ascribed to the Nintendo Wii, browser-based gaming, and “social games” such as FarmVille. In the light of this development, we might also ask when the notion of a gaming mainstream was first articulated, and in which relation it stands vis-a-vis its subcultures.

1. Cold War Games
Gabriel mentioned Claus Pias’ book “Computer Spiel Welten”, which traces the history of computer games to military-cybernetic experiments in behavioural control. In this context, it seems pertinent that early computer games such as William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two and Steve Russell et al.’s Space War were developed on computers paid for by the Pentagon and represent both an abuse of military technology for entertainment purposes and an extension of military logic into gamespace.

2. Subcultural Networks
Another mythological foundation of computer game culture can be found in the development of “Colossal Cave / Advent”, which was allegedly only possible because Don Woods got in touch with Will Crowther through the new medium of email, sending messages to every server on the net in the mid-1970s (see http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html). True or not, this story draws attention to the fact that computer gaming was relegated to an academic elite for a long time.

3. Bedroom Coders
In the 1980s, it was still feasible to make a game for individuals or small teams of two or three people. The “bedroom coders” of the 1980s were mostly in it for the money, yet they refused to work according to project plans and predefined milestones. And in games like “Manic Miner” they infused videogames with political messages for the first time. After all, it is hardly a coincidence that “Manic Miner” was released shortly before the UK miner’s strike of 1984-85.

4. Skins, Maps, and Mods
It seems almost ironic that early 3D games like Doom and Quake managed to start a revolution in fan-created game modifications, while at the same time sounding the death knell for bedroom coders. The complexity and size of 3D games required much larger teams, so it was no longer feasible to create games by yourself. At the same time, however, id’s laissez-faire approach allowed gamers to create their own maps, skins and mods for their games.

5. Independent Games
The return of “independent games” (often created by individual game designers such as Jason Rohrer or Jonathan Blow) is often attributed to the increasing viability of digital distribution (and a concomitant deacrease in the influence of publishers) but it also seems to betray a changing aesthetic sensibility. After two decades of higher and higher polygon counts, gamers seem to be quite comfortable with the simple graphics of Rohrer’s Passage, or Daniel Benmergui’s Today I Die.

That’s it for today, looking forward to the debate,

Julian

On the web, a new “Friend” may be just a click away, but true connection is harder to find and express. Ze Frank presents a medley of zany Internet toys that require deep participation — and reward it with something more nourishing. You’re invited, if you promise you’ll share.

Artists include Andrew Y Ames, Jim Babb of Socks Inc., April Banks, Brenda Brathwaite, Yunan Cao, Terry Cavanagh, Joe DeLappe, David Elliott, Jake Elliott, Mark Essen, Catherine Herdlick, Rod Humble, Molleindustria, Jason Rohrer, Susana Ruiz of Take Action Games, Adam Saltsman, Kelly Santiago and Jenova Chen of thatgamecompany, Jonatan Söderström, Superbrothers, La Mar Williams II, Robert Yang, the City of Cupertino, and more.

Curated by James Morgan and John Bruneau, with Jan Rindfleisch :: Partners: ZER01, CADRE Laboratory for New Media.

When life is a game, how do you learn to play?
Games, an expression of art and life, can bridge the gaps between cultures, and be a common language that brings communities together. Game makers tell compelling stories about their lives or the world. Learn to Play includes video, board and social games by indy game designers. The exhibition offers a selection of poetic, artistic, and artful games that embody the qualities of human existence, focusing on the experience of playing and learning to play. The characteristics of these games echo human nature, teaching us who and what we are, or can be, so we can explore life directions driven by our choice and conscience.

As conduits for bridging or separating cultures, games can be used to bring communities together for improvement of economic and social conditions, or to exploit communities through political maneuvering. The games selected span the range from quick play to epic games requiring many hours to complete; they range from personal growth to those used for socially conscious purposes.

Learn to Play is also a challenge. We invite people of all backgrounds to experience and create games that express social and emotional relevance. During the course of the exhibition, workshops will be held to teach basic game design tools. At the end of the workshops we will have game challenges from which work may be curated into the exhibition.

Come play some games and/or create your own! Below are some examples of games in the exhibition by some of the innovative artists in our show.

Want to try living your life in 5 minutes? Jason Rohrer’s Passage, a short lyrical game, gives you that chance. And then you can repeat and do it again differently. The retro, pixelated 8-bit graphics abstract us from the experience, but also allow us to see ourselves and our lives through our participation in the game. Passage has emotional impact and simplicity. Rohrer is an independent game artist and critic whose games and his work as a whole have bolstered the acceptance of games as a serious art form. For more information, visit his game page.

Start with little yellow game pieces and some boxcars. Brenda Brathwaite’s game, Train, is artful and powerful, drawing one in with its sculptural form, historical reference, and the function of its play. Brathwaite is a game designer, artist and writer who was named one of the top most influential women in the game industry by Gamasutra.com and Next Generation magazine. Her current work is a non-digital gaming collection known as “Mechanic is the Message.” Train won a Vanguard Award at IndieCade for “pushing the boundaries of game design and showing us what games can do.”

Dive deep. Adam Saltsman’s FATHOM explores the middle ground between life and death. Saltsman, known in the gaming community as Adam Atomic, is an indy game designer and programmer. Saltsman is co-organizer of the Indi Art Jam and responsible for flixel, a popular, open Actionscript library that aids other creators in the development of Flash games.

Catherine Herdlick is a cross-media artist making “game-like things”. Her work, such as Bike Friendly City, involves large-scale real world interaction with an emphasis on fun and community engagement. Herdlick is working with Learn to Play to create a new piece of location-based work for the exhibition.

Have fun and play. Yunan Cao’s Ping Pong Diplomacy has an actual fun-to-play ping-pong table painted with the words “trust” and “distrust” in English and Chinese. Cao updates the historical reference to opening up relations between the U.S. and China in the 1970s. “Friendship first, competition second.” Her ping pong paddles have faces of US/China diplomacy today. In the Euphrat we extend the invitation of diplomacy to open positive dialog between visitors from different countries, companies, political parties, and more. Also viewers may suggest high-profile match ups to play the game or come up with their own rules.

Check out You Meet The Nicest People Making Videogames, the start of an ongoing video project by La Mar Williams II. Williams captures the drive, creative energy, behind gamers, including Anna Anthropy, a woman in an indy games field heavily dominated by men. For more information, visit his Tumblr page. Williams will also run a related workshop for at-risk youth to let them experience the power of making their own game, telling their own story. For more information, visit the workshop’s webpage.

Contemplate the game piece. Milk Bath is a photograph from the provocative series We Love to Watch by conceptual artist April Banks with DeQawn Mobley, a former collegiate and NFL player. Mobley is shown putting on his gear amid stereotypic symbols of milk and watermelon. The photo calls attention to the commodified image of the hyper-masculine black athletic body as violent and sexual — a ubiquitous “game piece,” putting on his game face. Using the historically racially charged symbol of the watermelon, this work explores Mobley’s experience as a collegiate and NFL player and its well-debated parallels to the slave trade. Going beyond a first-person narrative, Banks and Mobley explore what it means to be reduced to a game time object on the field, watched and “loved” by millions. For more information, visit www.aprilbanks.com.

Photo by Christine A. Butler Joe DeLappe reminds us of the cost of our predilection for war with his ongoing memorial series Dead in Iraq. The exhibition features a scale model of a fallen soldier ripped from the video game America’s Army, which is also used as a recruitment tool. As viewers maneuver around the body, one is reminded of the real-life results of warring.

Help find Zoe. Susana Ruiz and Take Action Games (TAG) worked with Toronto’s METRAC (Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children) to create Finding Zoe. METRAC was interested in a game for youth, ages 8-14, addressing abusive dating relationships and gender stereotyping. The game can be played individually or in small groups, ideally facilitated. TAG specializes in casual games for change, addressing social/political content, traversing the intersections of computational art, narrative, journalism, activism, ethics, history and documentary. The core TAG team met while graduate students at the University of Southern California’s Interactive Media Division. For more information, visit www.takeactiongames.com.

Grab a flower petal and get to know thatgamecompany, founded by Kellee Santiago and Jenova Chen. Flower, a game for PlayStation3, explores emotional chords uncommon in video games. The surrounding environment is the primary “character,” posing challenges. Players accumulate flower petals as the onscreen world swings between the pastoral and the chaotic. Everything you pick up causes the environment to change. The player controls the lead petal and accumulates a swarm of flower petals as s/he moves. Thatgamecompany focuses on games that touch and inspire. Chen and Santiago are also graduates of the USC’s Interactive Media MFA program. For more information, visit the game page.

Superbrothers exhibit pixelated game-inspired film shorts. Children of the Clone (with Jim Guthrie). Design Reboot HD (with Jonathan Blow). Dot Matrix Revolution (with Jim Guthrie) has two computer engineers in a captivating dance-off that plays on the development of information technology and the Internet in the last 60 years. For more information, visit the game page.

Trouble with your job? Molleindustria’s Everyday the same dream, you are late for work is a “short existential about alienation and refusal of labor. Or if you prefer, a musical video.” Molleindutria, an Italian team of artists, designers, and programmers, likes to subvert the mainstream video gaming cliché and have fun in the process. For more information, visit www.molleindustria.org.

Forget the budget crisis? Balance or Bust Board Game. Your “City Council Team” must decrease spending (or increase revenue) by $2,000,000 by the end of the fiscal year (one trip around the board equals one fiscal year). Select a “Mayor” and “City Clerk.” Cards are for services to be cut. Landing on dark pink squares means a Grant Opportunity. Dark green squares are Economic Development Opps. Black squares are bad news… Developed by the City of Cupertino, this award winning game tackles the real thing.

Tell a story. Socks Incorporated by Jim Babb is about creating an avatar, a sock puppet, and telling a story together. The player follows the main character’s narrative while simultaneously participating in his/her own. The sock puppet avatar (a character brought to life by your hand) allows the player to experience real-world play without the fear of embarrassment or the limits of social conformities. Anyone who can upload images and videos can play. The potential for personal expression and creativity is sky-high (or knee-high in the case of socks). You can play it, and then tell all your friends to play it, too. This will create a huge sock-puppet community that will share and comment on stories. For more information, visit the game page.

For Corporate Ladder you stack blocks. The object of the board game, developed by David Elliott, UCLA Design Media Arts, is to take up the most space. Players can build up their territory or take over an opponent’s territory, but if you knock over a tower you loose the game. Tall towers become a liability to everyone. Building structures is fun. Deeper pleasure comes when two or more players construction plans intersect. The game transforms from individual expression to social interaction. With conflict and reconciliation, personalities become as much a deciding factor as building strategies. For more information, visit the game page.

Divorce drama? Robert Yang makes mods. Radiator 1-2, Handle With Care: You’re struggling to repress stressful memories while your worthless husband moans and whines to that equally worthless marriage counselor. (Issue 2, July 2009) A mod of Half-Life 2 to talk about gay marriage and divorce. For more information, visit www.radiator.debacle.us.

A chess mod to better reflect modern warfare? Andrew Y Ames’s Last Resort is modified chess: war to protect civilians and territory. The Bleached side with pawns, rooks, knights, bishops, and a nuke, fights to free a foreign people in another land; the Oiled side with pawns, fights to be a free people in their own land. Both sides seek to protect life and freedom. The asymmetry of war is encoded in movements. The game has brass civilian pieces that either player may move. Oiled pawns and the nuke may be detonated, removing adjacent pieces. The first player to move four civilians to the row closest to their side wins. The key to winning is through the people caught in the middle. Players can play justly and protect the citizens. Or manipulate civilian loses to gain support through deception. For more information, visit the game page.

Jake Elliott. Two grandmothers and two great-grandmothers enliven A House in California, a narrative game. Players engage with “environments and activities drawn from a combination of memory, research, poetry, and fantasy.” A House in California inverts the murder mystery game Mystery House (1980) into “a peaceful but surreal character study which draws the player into the inner lives of its characters through verbs like remember, learn and play.” View the early trailer.

Full Learn to Play Press Release

Global gaming networks are heterogenous collectives of localized practices, not unified commercial products. Shifting the analysis of digital games to local specificities that build and perform the global and general, Gaming Rhythms employs ethnographic work conducted in Venezuela and Australia to account for the material experiences of actual game players. This book explores the materiality of digital play across diverse locations and argues that the dynamic relation between the everyday life of the player and the experience of digital game play can only be understood by examining play-practices in their specific situations. Thomas Apperley is a Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of New England.

Colophon: Author: Tom Apperley, Design: Katja van Stiphout. Printer: ‘Print on Demand’. Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2010. ISBN: 978-90-816021-1-2.

This publication is available through various print on demand services.

A Trickster is the agent provocateur between different worlds. He, who is hardly ever a she, is a slick mediator that utilizes their considerable powers of persuasion to conjure great fortune and courage.

The most influential “Tricksters” are the ones in the highest echelons of power who influence political and technological machinations to make their world. Using the subtle methodologies of different media formats, from the news to advertisements to entertainment, they execute their soft powers to achieve their personal goals. Such ‘mystification’ is evident in all societies, but differs in affect, infiltrating everything from cultural representations to business decisions, celebrity culture, or broad political relations.

Connecting Nam June Paik, who was always interested in the tight links between media and power, with Lewis Hyde’s renowned book Trickster Makes This World, the exhibition looks at the different philosophies and strategies to negotiate different realities. It will playfully magnify aspects of these power relations by considering a range of mediative situations, from popular entertainment, to the enticement of ‘big’ names for a cultural event, and even the coercive ploys of immanent art institutions supported by governments. The exhibition will itself be loaded with a few tricks up its proverbial sleeve, attempting to persuade its audience into taking a step through and beyond the contemporary world.

Nam June Paik himself was similarly a playful trickster. From the early days he used paradoxes and ‘kōans’ in his writing and works, such as with the essay Afterlude (commenting on his Exposition of Television exhibition in 1964) or his re-definition of TV by inventing the Video Synthesizer. Paik’s multifaceted performances also had their final act when he was introduced to Bill & Hilary Clinton at a state gala and his trousers “accidently” fell down. If we define the Trickster as somebody who frequently uses magical, even controversial strategies to make real their ideas and ambitions, then Paik could certainly be considered as one of the most sophisticated artist tricksters of his generation.

Participating Artists: Nam June Paik and Heman Chong (Singapore), Ronny Heiremans & Katleen Vermeir (Belgium), Saskia Holmkvist (Sweden), Christian Jankowski (Germany), Ray Johnson (United States), Jaewhan Joo (Korea), Kesang Lamdark (Switzerland/Tibet), Lim Tzay Chuen (Singapore), George Maciunas (United States), Gianni Motti (Italy), Ahmet Ogut (Turkey), Beom Kim(Korea),

Curated by Tobias Berger, Nav Haq and Young Chul Lee with assistance of Sooyoung Lee and Yujean Rhee.

The Nam June Paik Art Center is supported by Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation and Gyeonggi province.



“Let me jump right into the heart of my topic, by presenting two examples. The first, Image Fugurator, a project by Julius von Bismarck which won the Prize Ars Electronica 2008 in the category Interactive Art at the Cyberarts Festival in Linz, Austria, inverts the functioning of a regular camera…”

My second example is Grafik Dynamo, a mock graphic novel by the Canadian Web artists Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett. True to its title, Grafik Dynamo is a constantly changing work. It loads narrative fragments presumably written by one of the authors into speech bubbles or text frames, and combines them in real time with images randomly captured from the Internet… Every few seconds - barely long enough to read the text - a new image-text combination appears in one of the frames. Sometimes image and text come into view simultaneously and all at once, sometimes the text appears first on a black background and the image reveals itself slowly from top to bottom, one line of pixels at a time…”

Mixed Reality performances have highlighted our ability to: exist, understand and concurrently engage with both virtual and real worlds in a performative way. The development of the technologies under-pinning such Mixed Reality systems have afforded performers, directors and developers the chance to create experiences that can both spatially and temporally explore the boundaries of performance and understand where and why performance occurs in everyday life. These experiences can exist in a multitude of realities, that not only blur the boundary between the real and the virtual, but also re-define the distinction between the roles of audience and performer, creating new audience/ performer-based paradigms.

Although new technologies have furthered these possibilities, there are low-tech approaches that have explored the orchestration and directions of performance and used these mechanisms to convey experience, imbue presence and a sense of place.

Contributions may consider any of the following topics (although these are not prescriptive):

• Exploring temporality and spatiality
• Understanding new audience/performer-based paradigms
• Directing and orchestrating mixed reality experiences
• Mixing realities
• Presence and place
• Content creation and development for mixed reality experiences
• Case studies
• Archival representation and re-play

Deadlines for the issue are as follows:

- Submission Deadline 1st June 2010

Submissions should be emailed to: azc [at] cs.nott.ac.uk

Dr Alan Chamberlain
Mixed Reality Lab
University of Nottingham
Jubilee Campus
Wollaton Road
Nottingham
NG8 1BB

All articles should be formatted in relation to this Style Guide, articles not following this standard may be rejected.

Trampoline is inviting submissions for the platform event, Territorial Play, part of Radiator Festival’s forthcoming project Tracing Mobility, a pan-European programme launching in Nottingham mid May 2010 and travelling to Warsaw (June/July 2010), Amsterdam (2011) and Berlin (2011).

Territorial Play aims to illustrate, annotate and animate discourse around the current trend towards a ‘mobilised city’. With the emergence of location aware mobile devices and near ubiquitous access to electronic networks in urban and rural areas, a new city is emerging beneath our feet. This dynamic ‘hybrid-city’ is a city in flux, where ideas of authorship and ownership are left at the door. It is information-rich and increasingly populated by not just local inhabitants but visitors from other communities. What are the cultural implications of this emergent public domain and what possibilities do the architecture and protocol of networked space present to affect change in real space?

We are inviting artists, performers, visualists, filmmakers, designers, game-players, writers and others to stake claims, occupy space, command territory, re-imagine the public domain, uncover hidden spaces and return to our day jobs the next day leaving no trace.

The event will take place over one day, using Nottingham’s Digital Media Centre Broadway as the base of operations however we welcome submissions that engage with the public and spaces in and around the city.

Recent exhibitions, festivals and conferences across the US and in Europe have taken wireless networks, public space, locative media and urban environments as sites of intervention, creativity, and critique. Formulated within the emerging context of networked urbanism and mobile media, City Centered: A Festival of Locative Media and Urban Community will focus upon dynamics of the shifting, locative, cartographic and social space of the city. It is organized by educational, arts, community-based and civic organizations and asks how locative media can act as a platform and venue for community-led expression.

From within San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, this festival will celebrate the rich possibilities that art and technology offer for urban communication of place and place-based media. City Centered focuses on the use of locative media and wireless technologies for site-specific and neighborhood-based interventions. Artists, designers, architects, community and cultural workers — people, places, and devices — will meet for four days of street-side celebration, public exhibitions, a symposium, and workshops. The festival seeks new work aligned with the themes of creative mapping, urban storytelling, sentient space, body awareness, local history, contested spaces and gaming.

The festival’s main goals are:

• to promote creative public use of free wi fi and open networks in the city of San Francisco
• to encourage meaningful collaboration between artists and local organizations in connection with wireless networks
• to introduce site-specific locative media art to urban places

Logistics and creative goals

Proposals are invited around projects involving creative mapping, urban storytelling, body awareness, local history, contested spaces and gaming. We seek projects of the greatest interest and highest quality. That said, proposals should be created for or be highly relevant to urban communities such as those found in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Neighborhood, mapping or community-based projects adaptable to the district are desirable. All proposed projects should address the theme of ‘urban community’ and utilize wireless technologies in some relation to ‘location’ and ‘place.’ Imaginative responses to the district and critical interpretations of place are strongly desired. Proposals which include or seek to include collaboration with Tenderloin/Civic Center organizations will receive greater consideration than projects which do not.

Projects using locative media to explore unique histories in the Tenderloin and/or address the festival’s aims of fostering creative civic engagement are also sought. Members of local community-based organizations will review all submissions and identify proposals that they wish to support.

In addition, creative work is encouraged to engage with the following questions:

• What does neighborhood mean?
• How might urban communities speak effectively about their cities through use of wireless networks?
• Where do wireless creative practices intersect with and/or enhance citizen roles in civic engagement?

Themes

Creative mapping

Location based media has so far involved much discussion of the role of maps, both their local and geopolitical importance, their history within political structures and the potentials of self-made or self-informed maps in terms of the production of and shaping of urban space. GPS and other applications enable the making of highly personal and information laden online spaces. What is cartography? What is mapped identity? How can groups and populations better see themselves, their history and their futures in the realm of maps?

Urban storytelling

Stories of the distant past or recent memory help hold groups together. Community groups and cultural critiques often address whose stories are told, and how. In San Francisco, the mural is a traditional form of commemorative media, making communities’ histories and concerns visible on the walls of their buildings. What remains invisible? Can wireless technologies enable understandings of the past — both accepted and controversial?

Sentient space

Surveillance cameras, motion sensors, and electronic forms of payment have moved substantially into public space. Computational means of tracking and responding to human actions increasingly pervade the urban infrastructure. San Francisco has recently deployed a test run of networked, sensor-based parking meters. Other cities have introduced wireless, networked monitoring of water systems, electrical grids and so forth. Is this the emergence of new ’sentient cities’ or an extension of automated modernity started a century ago? How might we imagine and make debatable the ways in which networked information processing animates, invades, enables or undermines urban places?

Body awareness

Often seen as places of strangers and strangeness, modern cities are places where, unlike villages, one can find both welcome anonymity and undesirable alienation. Ambivalence about relations between self and others experience has been a feature of urban life since the 19th century: we want to fade into the crowd, but also feel connected. What kinds of awareness of other humans — or non-humans such as animals, plants and trees — remind us of liminal and subliminal arenas of urban growth and transformation?  How do embodied experiences — of crowds and solitude, of comfort and anxiety — relate to awareness of self and others?

Local history

Locative media can be used to express specific attributes of place through local history, connecting us to and with histories of architecture, urban space, the changing city and the combinations of news, folklore, and data flows which allow us to interpret and understand where we live. How can local history be mapped? Is it collaborative or authorial? What kinds of stories constitute the history of a place? What kinds of data are place-based?

Contested spaces

Art projects are never neutral. Even in evading explicit discussion of politics or controversies they take a stand with respect to a community of makers and audience of participants, listeners, or seers. In particular, projects of civic engagement rely upon (often unstated) aspirations about urban life. This is so especially when situated within specific communities and drawing upon their hopes, desires and dreams. We invite projects framed as interventions in contested spaces; that work with intervention as an art practice and that introduce new forms or contestation or expand upon the already established path of community-based art in San Francisco.

Gaming

Gaming takes on many unusual forms in today’s media-saturated culture. Moreover, young people constitute one of the most prolific and literate groups of wireless users—and many enjoy gaming. Implementing simple urban games can sometimes tell participants much about themselves and their awareness of and connection to fictional and emotional aspects of place. What kinds of narratives are appropriate in challenging neighborhoods? How can games be used to deal with social ills or help inhabitants navigate through periods of urban change?

Technical forms

Locative media involves an emerging cluster of technologies that include mobile phones, Global positioning satellite systems (GPS), geospatial databases and wireless networks. These technologies enable inter-connectivity between locations, determine locations and mapping and enable participation in storytelling and games. They have become increasingly ubiquitous in our daily lives and public spaces, and are radically changing how people work and live. In addition, these technologies raise complex questions about public/private rights, laws and responsibilities. The festival encourages submissions in four areas of creative technical practice:

Data visualizations

What data is relevant to Tenderloin inhabitants? How can visualization expose previously unrecognized patterns of exchange and which change the experience of familiar locations?

Mapping and cartography

Maps produce and represent information about the meaning of place. Locative practices often engage the location-aware/context aware aspects of tools/networks, pinpointing and demarcating places according to creative interpretation.

Participatory media

How can projects weave diverse groups and foster conditions for increased civic engagement, learning, and questioning? What barriers to civic engagement and participation are there and how might they be overcome?

Location tracking

Tracking the movement of people and objects can also record and augment experiences often unrecognized or culturally invisible. What kinds of movements of people and goods combine to form the economies and exchanges of a neighborhood? What kinds of human movement alters the way we might think or conceive of a place and its changing milieus?

Games and playful interventions Introducing ideas of competition, speed, and fantasy into city streets may help engage local inhabitants, young people, kids and onlookers in experiences they see as new, surprising or special.

Project criteria

Proposed art must have some place-based and/or locative aspect such as utilizing GPS or GPS and the web; utilizing cellphones or other mobile media and address site specifics or place-making. Projects which address sites or cultures of the Tenderloin and/or collaborate with Tenderloin based constituents, populations or organizations are encouraged. The festival seeks project proposals which specifically contend with and/or engage with the multiple languages, communities, and interests of the Tenderloin, and which utilize the variety of public urban sites available in some meaningful and site specific form. Playgrounds, schools, public lobbies, gallery space, community centers, sidewalk areas, the street, parking lots, rooftops, and open plazas all provide excellent inspiration for wireless public projects and locative media works.

Other criteria and creative/artistic priorities:

Projects must be designed for or adapted to locations in or in close proximity to the Tenderloin. Existing projects that can be adapted to the Tenderloin are welcomed. Priority will be given to submissions by those who have community art experience or have worked with populations in urban neighborhoods.

About the Tenderloin and Civic Center

San Francisco’s Tenderloin district is a densely populated, rapidly changing, loosely defined district with apartment buildings, single- room occupancy hotels, nightclubs, bars, galleries and restaurants. Located near San Francisco’s cable car tourist attractions, downtown convention center hotel district and Union Square, it is a flourishing, multilingual and multiethnic neighborhood home to many artists and galleries. Yet the Tenderloin is also notorious as a concentrated site of misery, known for violent crime, prostitution, drug addiction, and homelessness. Recently, the city has devoted considerable attention and resources to redevelopment in the Tenderloin, making engagement with locally led organizations a priority. There are numerous multilingual, multicultural organizations with substantial art programs –Glide Memorial Church, Hospitality House, the YMCA and The Boys and Girls Club. It is also site of the Main Library, the center of San Francisco’s public library system. The festival’s close proximity to San Francisco’s administrative buildings and historic Market Street make it an especially intriguing arena for urban artmaking and location based creative practice.

Free wi fi exists in the library system and wireless is found throughout the Tenderloin. More specific technical questions can be addressed once proposals are selected.

The Gray Area Foundation for the Arts at 55 Taylor Street in the Tenderloin and will operate as base for the festival and will assist artists to work with the neighborhood in the installation of their projects. In addition Gray Area has a window installation venue Tendorama to which proposals can be specifically made, and will offer information about organizations with which to partner. The Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (http://www.gaffta.org/) is a San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to building social consciousness through digital culture. Guided by the principles of openness, collaboration, and resource sharing, our programs promote creativity at the intersection of art, design, sound, and technology. Its goal is to make digital culture accessible, substantive and inspiring from the physical neighborhood of the Tenderloin to extended digital communities. GAFFTA is committed to outreach both online and in the city.

Selection process

Proposals will be reviewed and selected by a panel of artists, curators, arts and community organizations.

Timeline
Proposals due: March 1, 2010
Participants notified: on or before April 1, 2010
June 11–12: Opening and art exhibition
June 13: Symposium
Community Workshops: June 19
Friday, June 11: Art opening and introduction to the symposium at GAFFTA
Saturday, June 12: All-day art festival of interactive, locative works in the Tenderloin sponsored by Gray Area.

Sunday, June 13: City-Centered Symposium at KQED, hosted by KQED and SFSU.

Saturday, June 20: Community education workshops at KQED in the Mission District

Please direct questions and other correspondence to citycentered [at] gaffta.org

Invitation to submit proposals : APPLICATION PDF
Submission deadline: March 1, 2010

Participating Organizations
KQED: http://www.kqed.org/
Gray Area Foundation for the Arts: http://www.gaffta.org/
Center for Locative Media: http://www.locative-media.org/
Conceptual Information Arts/Art Department/SFSU: http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~infoarts/
The Berkeley Center for New Media: http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/