The computer is moving out into physical and urban reality. Since Mark Weiser’s call for a ‘computer for the 21st century’ in 1991 a migration from the screen and the desktop towards integrating computers and networks into our surroundings has been a part of contemporary computer science research; for example, in augmented reality, ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), and pervasive computing. A number of technological developments (such as big screens, new smart materials, GPS, RFID tags, and ever faster and cheaper wireless networks) have helped carry the research agendas out into ordinary reality.

This article will discuss how we experience the urban space of ubicomp. It will do so by introducing the concept of ‘scripted space’ in order to discuss how ubicomp is related to new developments in public urban space. Focusing on the experience of the urban we will argue that scripted space is a concept that highlights the written, coded quality of ubicomp. As opposed to that suggested by such titles as ‘The Disappearing Computer’ (Streitz, Kameas and Mavrommati, 2007), we believe that embedding the computer into the environment will not render it transparent or invisible.

“Introduction: As I write this, at the end of 2010, it is sobering to reflect on the fact that over a couple of decades of explosive development in new media art (or ‘digital multimedia’ as it used to be called), in screen based as well as ‘embodied’ and gesture based interaction, the aesthetics of interaction doesn’t seem to have advanced much. At the same time, interaction schemes and dynamics which were once only known in obscure corners of the world of media art research/creation have found their way into commodities from 3D TV and game platforms (Wii, Kinect) to sophisticated phones (iPhone, Android). While increasingly sophisticated theoretical analyses (from Manovich, 2002 to Chun, 2008 to Hansen, 2006, more recently Stern, 2011 and others) have brought diverse perspectives to bear, I am troubled by the fact that we appear to have advanced little in our ability to qualitatively discuss the characteristics of aesthetically rich interaction and interactivity and the complexities of designing interaction as artistic practice; in ways which can function as a guide to production as well as theoretical discourse. This essay is an attempt at such a conversation…”

The convergence of mobile technologies and ubiquitous computing is creating a world where information-rich environments may be mapped directly onto urban topologies. This book tracks the history and genesis of locative and wearable media and the ground-breaking work of pioneer artists in the field. It examines changing concepts of space and place for a wide range of traditional disciplines ranging from Anthropology, Sociology, Fine Art and Architecture to Cultural and Media Studies, Fashion and Graphic design.

Mobile and Pervasive media are beginning to proliferate in the landscape of computer mediated interaction in public space through the emergence of smartphone technologies such as the iPhone, cloud computing extended wifi services and the semantic web in cities. These dispersed forms of interaction raise a whole series of questions on the nature of narrative and communication, particularly in relation to an audience’s new modes of mobile participation and reception.

These issues are explored through a series of focused essays by leading theorists, seminal case studies and practitioner interviews with artists at the cutting edge of these technologies, who are extending the potential of the medium to enhance and critique technological culture.

By emphasizing the role of the audience in this nomadic environment, the collection traces the history and development of ‘ambulant’ artistic practice in this new domain, creating an essential handbook for those wishing to understand the dominant global technology of the 21st Century and its implications for Art, Culture and Audience.

Contents

Howard Rheingold: Introduction
Martin Rieser: Overview

Section 1: Towards Hybridity.
A History of Audience Mobility

Erkki Huhtamo: Pockets of Plenty: An Archaeology of Mobile Media

Susanne Jaschko: The Temporal and Spatial Design of Video and Film-based Installation Art in the 60s and 70s: Their Inherent Perception Processes and Effects on the Perceivers’ Actions

Martin Rieser: Forgotten Histories of Interactive Space

Adriana de Souza e Silva: Art by Telephone: From Static to Mobile Interfaces

Section 2: Critical Issues in Mobile Art
Critical Contexts and Definitions

Mary Griffiths and Sean Cubitt: Mobile/Audience: Thinking the Contradictions

Jon Dovey and Constance Fleuriot: Towards a Language of Mobile Media

Beryl Graham: Snapshots from Curating Mobility

Understanding Public Spatialisation

Martin Rieser: Beyond Mapping: New Strategies for Meaning in Locative Artworks

Anke Jacob: Digital Media and Architecture—An Observation

Mirjam Struppek: Urban Screens as the Visualization Zone of the City‘s Invisible Communication Sphere

The Creative User

Debbi Lander: Future Physical: The Creative User and theme of response-ABILITY

Andrea Zapp: ‘A Fracture in Reality’: Networked Narratives as Imaginary Fields of Action and Dislocation

Section 3: Case Studies
Locative Art

Josephine Reid and Richard Hull: What Makes Mediascapes Compelling?

Valentina Nisi, Glorianna Davenport/Valentina Nisi, Mads Haahr and Glorianna Davenport: Hopstory/Media Tales of the Liberties

Drew Hemment, John Evans, Mika Raento and Theo Humphries: Loca: ‘Location Oriented Critical Arts’

Usman Haque: Invisible Topographies

Jonah Brucker-Cohen: Wifi-Hog: The Battle for Ownership in Public Wireless Space

The Creative User: The User as Co-creator

Paul Sermon: Puppeteers, Performers or Avatars: A Perceptual Difference in Telematic Space

Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau: Mobile Feelings: Wireless Communication of Heartbeat and Breath for Mobile Art

Victoria Fang: The Living Room

Arianna Bassoli: tunA and the Power of Proximity

Margot Jacobs: Engagement with the Everyday

Cati Vaucelle: Between Improvisation and Publication: Supporting the Creative Metamorphosis with Technology

Anthony Rowe: Developing Creative Audience Interaction: Four Projects by Squidsoup

Wearable Computing

Lisa Stead, Petar Goulev, Caroline Evans and Ebrahim Mamdani: The Emotional Wardrobe

Katherine Moriwaki: Social Fashioning and Active Conduits

Laura Beloff: Wunderkammer: Wearables as an Artistic Strategy

Section 4: Artist Interviews
Locative

Fiona Raby: Flirt and Mset

Teri Rueb: Trace, The Choreography of Everyday Movement and Drift

Matt Adams: Blast Theory

Steve Benford: Mixed Reality Lab

Drew Hemment: The Politics of Mobility

Wearables

Joey Berzowska: Memory-Rich Garments and Social Interaction

Annie Lovejoy: Heart on Your Sleeve

Contributor Biographies

Glossary

Selected Bibliography

Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York, NY 2011. XV, 481 pp. (Architecture – Technology – Culture 5)
ISBN: 978-90-420-3127-2 Bound
ISBN: 978-90-420-3128-9 E-Book
Online info here.

Utopian hopes for the ubiquity of digital and networked technologies leading to a more transparent and democratic society are being met by expressions of concern about their implications for art. Nicholas Bourriaud has observed that such technologies can bring about a “collective desire to create new areas of conviviality and introduce new types of transaction with regard to the cultural object”. However, others perceive an imminent threat, characterised by such terms as a digital ‘deluge’ or ‘oblivion’. CHArt is interested to examine critically both positive views and apocalyptic concerns about the implications of the widespread merger of telecommunications and computer technology in society for art, its history and practice.

We are looking for papers that engage with issues including, but not limited to:

• The implications of the ubiquity of digital and network technologies for evaluating what constitutes an original work of art and the originality of its creator(s).
• What effects have these technologies had on valuing art in terms of its aesthetic quality?
• What impact have real-time technologies had for the creation, ownership and distribution of culture?
• What are the impacts of the widespread proliferation and use of such technologies on curatorial practice and the processes of selecting, preserving and enabling access to art?
• How have they affected both the content and methods of teaching the history and practice of art?
• Are other disciplines and areas of society affected by art mediated by real-time technologies? How?

We are particularly interested in work that engages with such questions and extends beyond simply understanding digital and network technologies as transparent conduits of data and information. CHArt encourages proposals addressing complex artefacts that, in Friedrich Kittler’s words, “determine our situation”.

Contributions are welcomed from all sections of the CHArt community on the intersection between art and art history and semantic web developments; cloud computing; data mining; screen scraping; crowd sourcing; mashups; and freely available sites that enable data and images to be stored and accessed.

CHArt seeks papers from art historians, artists, architects and architectural theorists and historians, curators, conservators, computing scientists, scientists, cultural and media theorists, archivists, technologists, educationalists and philosophers.

Postgraduate students are encouraged to submit a proposal. CHArt is able to offer assistance with the conference fees for up to three student delegates. Priority will be given to students whose papers are accepted for presentation. An application form and proof of university enrolment will be required. For further details about the Helene Roberts Bursary please email anna.bentkowska [at] kcl.ac.uk.

Submissions should be in the form of a 300-400 word synopsis of the proposed paper with brief biographical information (no more than 200 words) of presenter/s, and should be emailed to chart [at] kcl.ac.uk by Friday July 1st 2011.

Notification of paper acceptance: 1 September 2011
Submission of papers: 17 October 2011

Please note that submissions exceeding the stated word count will not be considered.

CHArt
c/o Department of Digital Humanities
Kings College, University of London
26 – 29 Drury Lane
London
WC2B 5RL

The authors articulate the foundations of a future manifesto for an Internet of Things in the public interest. Nold and Kranenburg propose tangible design interventions that challenge an internet dominated by commercial tools and systems, emphasizing that people from all walks of life have to be at the table when we talk about alternate possibilities for ubiquitous computing. Through horizontally scaling grass roots efforts along with establishing social standards for governments and companies to allow cooperation, Nold and Kranenberg argue for transforming the Internet of Things into an Internet of People.

The Situated Technologies Pamphlets series explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism. How is our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, and other “situated” technologies? Each Situated Technologies Pamphlet is structured as a conversation between two leading researchers and practitioners from architecture, art, technology, and related disciplines.

Ubicity is a Telematic Art Project, proposed to stimulate conceptual, mediatic and aesthetic experimentation through streaming, videoconferencing and social media. Its main goal is to establish a structure that will enable artistic and cultural exchanges specially among research centers in Universities around the world. Ubicity, a word created through the conjunction of Ubiquity and City, is proposed to enhance Internet-based communication between artists and researchers of geographically distant places around the world.

Ubicity was initiated by COLABOR, a Research Center for Digital Languages, associated with the Interfaculty Graduate Program in Aesthetics and Art History [PGEHA] at the University of São Paulo [USP.], São Paulo, Brazil, coordinated by Professor Artur Matuck.

Ubicity will be a first event to inaugurate an ongoing telemedia research project entitled AMPLITERRA designed to investigate and to experiment with telemedia interconnections scheduled to occur between 2011 and 2014.

Teleactive research centers in different cities around the world are invited to introduce themselves to the AMPLITERRA network presenting their thematic proposals, their teams, available telemedia and Internet protocols. The São Paulo University Node [SPUN] is willing to be a first driving force for the constitution of this emerging network. Ideally however the AMPLITERRA network will be de-centered or multi-centered.

The Ubicity event will be held in four consecutive days, June 27th, 28th, 29th and 30th, 2011. Teletransmissions are now programmed to be exchanged specially between nodes in São Paulo (Brazil), Porto (Portugal) and Rijeka (Croatia). Further interconnections with other teleactive centers around the world will occur spontaneously as the event is publicized through social media and new connections are established.

UBICITY will consist of video-transmissions and interactive videoconferences scheduled along those four consecutive days. Both videoconferencing and streaming will be utilized to transmit and receive a series of performances, readings, texts, images and audio sequences. The content will be the result of performances, presentations and interactions produced by individuals or groups selected by curators in each node belonging to the network.

Interactions and videoconferences are scheduled to occur specially during the afternoons, from 01 to 04 pm (São Paulo time), every day from June 27 to 30. Morning’s sessions, scheduled to be held in the same days from 09 to 12 am, will be mainly devoted to testing connections, rehearsals and preparations.

We will be streaming some teleperformances but also operating thru videoconferencing with the Internet Protocol H323. Please consider to join us for an impromptu art conversation now or then. Let us know.

DATAPOLIS is one evening and three days of full-size experiment in art and technology. The exhibition addresses interactions of media technologies, novel visualization practices and urban realities. Exhibiting artists from all over the world discover moods and rhythms of our cities, bodies and planet. They innovatively mash both visible and invisible data that re-present individual and collective lives and actions. Keywords: data, city, communities, mapping, social, geographical, economical, political, sentient, ambient, mobile, ubiquitous, embedded intelligence, architecture, fashion, quantified selves, body & environment monitoring, robotic systems, trash, transport, pollution, open innovation & design.

Curator: Pavel Sedlák (CZ)
Co-curator: Andrej Boleslavský (SK/CZ)

With: Owen Mundy (USA/DE), Dušan Barok (SK/NL), Paolo Cirio (IT) & Alessandro Ludovico (IT), Secret Cooks Club Singapore (SG/INT), Josef Šlerka (CZ), Jaro Dufek (CZ), Barbara Dzierań (PL), MIT SENSEable City Lab (USA), Radka Peterová (CZ), Kristin O’Friel (USA), Vojtěch Kálecký (CZ), Achilleas Kentonis (CY), Timo Arnall (NO) & Jørn Knutsen (NO) & Einar Sneve Martinusse (NO), Jenny Chowdhury (USA), Caitlin Morris (USA) & Liza Stark (USA), Erik Conrad (USA), Mark Shepard (USA), Mark Shepard (USA), Teresa Almeida (PT/SG), Pavel Kopřiva (CZ), Anna Hrušková (CZ), Social Bits (INT), Mahir M. Yavuz (TU/AT), h.o (JP), Kristýna Lutzová (CZ), Ricardo O’Nascimento (BR) & Tiago Martins (PT/AT), Varvara Guljajeva (EST) & Mar Canet (ES), Prokop Bartoníček (CZ), Marie Poláková (CZ) & Jonathan Cremieux (FI/FR), Dardex Mort2Faim (FR), Lou Sanitráková (CZ), Saša Spačal (SLO), Niki Passath (AT), Open_Sailing community (INT) | Cesar Minoru Harada (FR/JP), Tomáš Rousek (CZ) & Katarina Eriksson (SE) & Ondřej Doule (CZ), Scott Hessels (USA/HK) & Gabriel Dunne (USA), Aaron Koblin (USA), Pedro Cruz (PT), Emrah Kavlak (TU), James George (USA) & Alexander Porter (USA), Pascal Silondi (FR/CZ), Javier Lloret (ES) & Daniel Artamendi (ES), Julian Oliver (NZ/DE), Inc. (CZ), Akitoshi Honda (JP/DE), Darina Alsrter (CZ) & Michael Markert (DE), Michal Pustějovský (CZ), Linda Čihařová (CZ), Klára Jakubová (CZ) & Anna Marešová (CZ) & Andrej Boleslavský (SK/CZ) & Lukáš Blažek (CZ)

Our cities are “smart” and getting smarter as information processing capability is embedded throughout more and more of our urban infrastructure. Few of us object to traffic light control systems that respond to the ebbs and flows of city traffic; but we might be taken aback when discount coupons for our favorite espresso drink are beamed to our mobile phones as we walk past a Starbucks. Sentient City explores the experience of living in a city that can remember, correlate, and anticipate. Five teams of architects, artists, and technologists imagine a variety of future interactions that take place as computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets, and public spaces of the city.

“Too Smart City” employs city furniture as enforcers: a bench ejects a sitter who sits too long, a sign displays the latest legal codes and warns passersby against transgression, and a trashcan throws back the wrong kind of trash. “Amphibious Architecture” uses underwater sensors and lights to create a human-fish-environment feedback loop; “Natural Fuse” uses a network of “electronically assisted” plants to encourage energy conservation; “Trash Track” follows smart-tagged garbage on its journey through the city’s waste-management system; and “Breakout” uses wireless technology and portable infrastructure to make the entire city a collaborative workplace.

These projects are described, documented, and illustrated by 100 images, most in color. Essays by prominent thinkers put the idea of the sentient city in theoretical context.

Copublication with the Architectural League of New York

Sentient City will also feature a special “heat sensitive” cover which will change color when exposed to sunlight or touch!

About the Editor

Mark Shepard is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Media Study at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and an editor of the Situated Technologies pamphlet series, published by the Architecture League of New York.

The interface as a cultural paradigm: In the case of computers, interfaces mediate between humans and machines, between machines and between humans. Interfaces thus involve an exchange between data and culture. In this sense, the computer interface can be described as a cultural interface combining cultural content (images, text, movies, sound) with machine/media control (buttons, menus, filters, etc.) and networks (World Wide Web). As such, the interface can be seen as a cultural paradigm affecting not only our creative production and presentation of the world but also our perception of the world.

From private to public:

In the past decade, interfaces have been expanding from the graphical user interface of a computer to meet the needs of different new technologies, uses, cultures and contexts: they are mobile, networked, ubiquitous, and embedded in the environment and architecture. The purpose of the conference and Ph.D. workshops is to investigate the aesthetic and cultural implications of a situation where interfaces not only appear in public space but are also platforms for both private activities in public spheres and offer public interference in the private sphere. In other words, we aim to investigate these new interfaces that affect relations between public and private realms, and generate new forms of civic communication and creative production.

Across disciplines:

The events aim to bring together researchers within diverse fields: across aesthetics, cultural theory, business, architecture and urban studies, united by the need to understand public interfaces and the possible paradigmatic changes they pose to these fields. The event stresses dialogue between fields of study, institutions and individual researchers who are engaged with common issues but not usually in a situation where they are able to openly discuss and reflect interdisciplinary concerns and approaches.

Although our starting point derives from a concept of the public informed by network theory and the social practices around computing, we aim to expand this view in recognition of the ways in which contemporary power and control are structured. The following statements operate as points of departure for the conference:

Research questions:

Whilst experimentation and developments in the culture of free software reflects emergent and self-organizing public actions, how does this modify our understanding of public interfaces? Can the public interface be used as a useful concept for understanding changing relations between public and private realms within other fields? Does the public interface offer a way of further examining relational aesthetics, the cultural regeneration agenda and public art? Does the public interface provide new understandings of the relationship between creative production and the free market sphere? How does the possible dissolution of the public and private spheres relate to bio politics and contemporary forms of power? Does the public interface suggest new borders or even the dissolution of borders between the public and private, humans and machines, the centre and periphery?

The conference and workshop are organised into three thematic strands:

- The public interface as art
- The public interfaces of urban space
- The public interface and capital.

The conference and Ph.D. workshop brings together researchers from Aarhus University, University of Plymouth, and guests to address the broad theme of Public Interfaces. It is organised by the Centre for Digital Urban Living (DUL), Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC), and Dept. of Aesthetic Studies, Aarhus University. Emerging from DUL and DARC’s ongoing research around interface criticism, the aim is to broaden issues to encompass the development of urban interfaces, and the changing concept of the ‘public’.

Speakers: Merete Carlson (DK), Phil Ellis (UK), Christian Rhein (DE), Nina Valkanova (BG/ES), Tobias Ebsen (DK), Kevin Carter (UK), Thomas Bjørnsten Kristensen (DK), Andrew Prior (UK), Morten Riis (DK), Nina Gram (DK), Lars Bo Løfgreen (DK), Robert Jackson (UK), Magda Tyzlik-Carver (UK/PL), Tatiana Bazzichielli (IT/DK), Jacob Lund (DK), Malcolm Miles (UK), Morten Breinbjerg (DK), Brett Bloom (US/DK), Rui Guerra (NL/PT), Jørgen Bang (DK), Martin Brynskov (DK), Robert Brown (UK/US), Lone Koefoed Hansen (DK), Zoran Poposki (Rep. of Macedonia), Christian Ulrik Andersen (DK), Søren Pold (DK), Joasia Krysa (PL/UK), Geoff Cox (UK/DK), Mikkel Bolt (DK)

Organizers:

- Geoff Cox, Post Doc, Digital Urban Living, Dept. of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University
- Jacob Lund, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Aesthetic Studies, Aarhus University
- Christian Ulrik Andersen, Associate Professor & Chair of DARC, Digital Urban Living, Dept. of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University.

This article examines the ‘digital city’ debate of the mid 1990s as a point of departure for a media-historical questioning of how technology and the discourse about technology were used as an experimental playground for new forms of knowledge that are fundamental for the understanding of today’s network society. This text has been presented as a conference paper at the ‘networks and sustainability‘ track of the ‘textiles’ conference in Riga in June 2010. The paper will also appear in a special edition of the Arts and Communications Journal edited by RIXC at the end of 2010.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the proclaimed crisis of the city marked a general crisis of governance: the discussion about the supposed “decline of cities” was characterized by a controversial debate about a possible loss of control.1 Paradoxically, all hopes have been pinned on those technologies that were held accountable for the dissolution of the urban space. That’s because, as in similar techno-utopias before,2 cyberspace was considered to be constructable and, therefore, controllable. At the “electronic frontier” (cf. Barlow 1996) science fiction and high-tech were linked with the old dream of the ideal community (cf. Morus 1992). For the so-called “net pioneers”, a new and promising land was spreading out behind the countless number of cables and server rooms, which “called for a series of new metaphors, new rules and patterns of behavior” (Bollmann 1995, p. 164). In the following, I would like to unveil some of the hidden layers of urban net cultures by tracing the tracks of this “technotopia” back to the early stage of network building.3 A media-historical perspective arises from the question of how technology and the discourse about technology were used to provide a social, epistemological and theoretical model. Excavating the city, as a spatial metaphor to describe digital networks, should finally allow the disclosure of an implicit knowledge that is – as a first hypotheses and starting point for my inquiry – at the basis of a variety of new political technologies in today’s network society.

With the increasing interconnection of computers, the machines of discrete logic transformed into a collective medium (cf. Bolz / Kittler / Tholen 1994). This involved the construction of common meaning, as it was realized in the visual world of cyberspace.4 Given the fact that the digital space represents an enormous amount of binary numbers, the question arose as to how this new, invisible space could be adequately structured? For this reason, Andreas Dieberger, who was a postgraduate student at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) in the early 1990s, coined the term “Information City” to describe a spatial user interface for hypertext (cf.. Dieberger 1994). In order to resolve the problem of “getting lost in hyperspace” (Dieberger 1993), Dieberger’s city metaphor attempted to make the structure of information systems easier to understand by drawing a cognitive map of the information space. In his concept, hypertext documents are visualised as houses in the “Information City” using architectural knowledge from city planning in order to build an information environment that helps to navigate hypertext.5 The “Information City” defines an “ontology of spaces and connections” in order to “explicitly create structure in an unstructured information domain” (Dieberger 1998). In this sense, navigation through cyberspace is only possible when this structure is communicated to the user. In other words, not only the visibility, but also the readability of the city, is central to this concept.

What’s more, the physical city also contains an urban grammar, whose codes are readable in a built environment. Modern architecture built of concrete, steel and glass gets more and more replaced by a post-modern architecture, “whose forms are so neutral, so pure, so diaphanous, that they do not pretend to say anything” (Castells 1996, p. 450). This architectural silence, which implies less a new form of insignificance, but rather a permanent process of overcoding, is responding to the spatial transformations caused by new information technologies: “The dramatic changes in information technology deeply affect the core of our system, and in so doing lie at the very roots of its spatial pattern of change” (Castells 1991, p. 126). And as Manuel Castells underlines in his early book “The Informational City” (cf. Castells 1991), this involves a rather complex process that has nothing to do with the alleged disappearance of cities maintained by the idealistic speech of technological determinism. Thus, the organizational restructuring of economic, social and institutional circumstances transforms the “Informational City” into a socially contested space. Unlike Diebeger’s concept of a container space, which has only to be filled with meaning, the physical and digital space appears here as a socially produced space.6

In the transformation of the “Informational City” we can witness a significant shift in the relationship between space and society, a shift that is characterized less by a specific form than by a process. In his three-volume work on the information age, Manuel Castells describes this process as the increasing dominance of the “space of flows” over the “space of places” that is decisive for our current understanding of spatial orders. Thus, cultures have always been able to develop over long distances, but not in real time. And this fact marks a new historic event: “The space of flows is the material organization of time-sharing practices” (Castells 1996, p. 442). In our digital environment, time and space merge into a new material foundation on which the dominant social processes are reorganized by information flows. The “space of flows” serves as the basis for those social practices that are crucial for the conception of economic, political and symbolic structures of society. One of the key features of informational society is the networking logic of its basic structure,7 hence “the functions to be fulfilled by each network define the characteristics of places that become their privileged nodes” (Castells 1996, p. 444). To put it in other words, the “space of flows” is not placeless, but its structural logic is.

Given this transformational process, French philosopher Pierre Lévy questioned the implications of new information and communication technologies for the organization and management of local communities (Lévy 1996, p. 151ff.). And in doing so, he refers to three standpoints that came up in the debate about new communication systems and which often led to misunderstandings in the relationship between the city and cyberspace: first, the position of analogy, which represents a mere doubling of institutional forms into cyberspace and can be found in the expression of the “digital city”;8 second, thinking in terms of substitution, which implies the replacement of classical urban functions by technical means of cyberspace and is mainly fostered by the “managers of the territory” using catchwords such as teleworking, remote learning or distance education;9 and third, the assimilation of cyberspace on behalf of the urban model by implementing information superhighways, underground networks or public traffic into the digital space.10 Instead of analogy, substitution and assimilation, Lévy emphasises the articulation between the space of the territory and what he calls the “space of collective intelligence” (Lévy 1996, p. 162). What matters here, is less a low-cost access to the technological infrastructure or the free exchange of content, but more the possibility to open up the processes of collective intelligence in order to exploit the potentials of new communication systems in re-articulating a community spirit.

The revitalization of urban communities should, therefore, be accomplished by technological means, all the more as a “new Athenian Age” (Al Gore) was proclaimed in the early 1990s as a result of the new information and communication systems: “Cyberdemocracy or electronic democracy are the new tubes which should transform the passive spectator democracy into an active participatory democracy and, at the same time, create a global public sphere” (Leggewie 1997, p. 5). And as German political scientist Claus Leggewie notes in this context, only the well-informed citizen constitutes an important and valuable part of the virtual community (Leggewie 1998, p. 40). Here the concept of community interferes with the “Information City” mentioned before, since all knowledge has to be gathered and structured through spatial organizational regimes, in order to be visible and readable for the digitally enlightened Netizen.11 This ideal of a city of knowledge refers to the utopia of an egalitarian and global community, which is characterized by the libertarian spirit of new data networks (see Barlow 1996). The “virtual community” (cf. Rheingold 1994) implicates a sense of collective identity that “is reinforced by rituals of self-assurance and mutual recognition and is constituted, not least, by the definition of the >Other<” (Leggewie 1998, p. 43f.). In this sense, these new community networks, which implement very strong patterns of inclusion and exclusion, awoke the hope of modern “technocrats” for a “democratic self-government” (Leggewie 1998, p. 38).12

The productive power of new technologies, therefore, constitutes new forms of knowledge, which, in turn, give birth to new regimes of control. And within the “digital city” these are linked to a political practice of governance that is based on “the instrumentalization of personal allegiances and active responsibilities: government through community” (Rose 1996, p. 331). As British sociologist Nikolas Rose points out in this context, the “community” as a new form of self-governance is not related to the society as a whole, but rather aims at the single, self-regulating individual and social groups. The virtual community relies on a network-oriented mode of governance that implies the activation and submission of its respective members. Nonetheless, the cybernetic promise of self-governing communities involves the danger “that there is little chance of social change within a given network, or network of networks” (Castells 2001, p. 22). Thus, the capacity of networks to switch off incompatible nodes, or to integrate them into their own functionality, undermines the possibility of an articulatory practice and that means of democracy itself.

In the struggle over the establishment of symbolical orders, we witness a permanent confrontation of different forces. In contrast to pure Cyber-utopianism, new information and communication technologies have always been structured by powerful interests. The Internet, therefore, does not represent some kind of unattainable substance, as it is supposed by a techno-determinist point of view, but rather it is the product of its own power relations. Given the fact that digital data is simply a sequence of zeros and ones, there are numerous ways in which it could be made visible and legible to the user. Thus, it is not by accident that the city has been chosen as one of the most meaningful metaphors in the early days of the Internet. The city has (like Cyberspace) a military origin and it is defined (at least symbolically) by walls whose gates constitute the interface to the rest of the world. In this sense, every human computer interface contains some sort of metaphor (e.g. Laptop, Desktop, folders, trash can, windows, etc.). The interface determines how the user conceives the computer itself and the world accessed via this computer. In keeping this matter, media theorist Lev Manovich states: “Far from being a transparent window into the data inside a computer, the interface bring with it strong messages of its own” (Manovich 2008, p. 184). Hence, by organising the digital space in specific ways, the interface provides distinct models of the world.

In the “war of metaphors” (Marchart 1998, p. 72), the hierarchical concept of the city offered an organisational regime of inclusion and exclusion in order to draw the line between the visible and invisible, the expressible and inexpressible, order and chaos. By tracing the tracks of the digital city back to this early phase of network culture, we come across the old desire for information control, which, in turn, constitutes the Cyberspace as social space traversed by power relations. Hence, the information space provides a venue for individual and social practices, for ways of living, cultural patterns, knowledge, power, and domination. In realising these forces, new identity fields arise within the virtual communities and thereby the rules for their governance. However, these strategies of governance, which are responsible for the constitution of the communities, as well as the activation of their subjects, are themselves always at risk, because “what they demand of citizens may be refused, or reversed and redirected as a demand from citizens for a modification of the games that govern them, and through which they are supposed to govern themselves” (Rose 2000, p. 100). Like in any other transformation process new fault lines emerge and give rise to new forms of subjectivity. Based on their knowledge, these subjects may respond to power in one way or the other – in order to obey or resist.

This paper is a slightly modified version of my lecture given at the 1st conference of the SLSAeu: Textures in June 2010 in Riga. I would like to thank Armin Medosch, Rasa Smite, Felix Stalder and Brian Holmes for their comments, and especially Hana Yoosuf for her revision.

References:

* Barlow, John Perry (1996): A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Retrieved June 12, 2010, from http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

* Bollmann, Stefan (1995): Einführung in den Cyberspace. In id. (Ed.): Kursbuch Neue Medien. Trends in Wirtschaft und Politik, Wissenschaft und Kultur (pp. 163-165). Köln: Bollmann.

* Bolter, Jay David (1996): Die Metapher der Stadt im elektronischen Raum. Telepolis. Retrieved June 12, 2010, from http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/6/6000/1.html

* Bolz, Norbert/Kittler, Friedrich/Tholen, Christoph (1994): Computer als Medium. München: Fink.

* Castells, Manuel. (1991). The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring and the Urban-Regional Process. Oxford: Blackwell.

* Castells, Manuel (1996): The Rise of the Network Society. In id., The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Vol. I. Oxford: Blackwell.

* Castells, Manuel (2001): Materials for an exploratory theroy of the network society. British Journal of Sociology (pp. 5-24). Vol. 51, Issue 1.

* Dieberger, Andreas (1993): The Information City – A Metaphor for Navigating Hypertexts (Research paper). Presented at the BCS-HCI’93. Loughborough.

* Dieberger, Andreas (1994): Navigation in Textual Virtual Environments using a City Metaphor (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Vienna: University of Technology.

* Dieberger, Andreas (1998): A city metaphor for supporting navigation in complex information spaces. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing (pp. 597-622). Vol. 9.

* Holmes, David (1997): Virtual Politics. Identity and Community in Cyberspace. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage.

* Lefebvre, Henri (2000): La production de l’espace. Paris: Anthropos.

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* Leggewie, Claus (1998): Demokratie auf der Datenautobahn. In Claus Leggewie/Christa Maar (Eds.), Internet & Politik. Von der Zuschauer- zur Beteiligungsdemokratie (pp. 15-51). Köln: Bollmann.

* Lévy, Pierre (1996): Städte, Territorien und Cyberspace. In Stefan Iglhaut/Armin Medosch/Florian Rötzer (Eds.), Stadt am Netz. Ansichten von Telepolis (pp. 151-162). Mannheim: Bollmann.

* Lynch, Kevin (1960): The Image of the City. Cambridge/London: MIT Press.

* Maar, Christa/Rötzer, Florian (1997): Virtual Cities. Die Neuerfindung der Stadt im Zeitalter globaler Vernetzung. Basel: Birkhäuser.

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* Pias, Claus (2008): Schöner leben. Weltraumkolonien als Wille und Vorstellung. In: In Anett Zinsmeister (Ed.): welt[stadt]raum. Mediale Inszenierungen (pp. 25-51).Bielefeld: transcript.

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* Wagner, Kirsten (2008): Digitale Städte, InformationCities und andere Datenräume. In Anett Zinsmeister (Ed.): welt[stadt]raum. Mediale Inszenierungen (pp. 105-128).Bielefeld: transcript.

1. In October and November 1995 the Telepolis-exhibition took place in Munich and Luxembourg, where these topics have been addressed (cf. Maar/Rötzer 1997).

2. For example, space colonisation projects during the 1970s (cf. Pias 2008).

3. My dissertation project deals with a geneaology of net cultures, in order to retrace the phenomenon of “Medien-Werden” resp. “Unsichtbar-Werden” (cf. Vogl 2001) of Computer-mediated communication. The goal of the work is not to look again for the “origins” of the Internet or to rediscover the “New” of new media, but rather to define net cultures of the early 1990s as an experimental playground for new forms of knowledge that are fundamental for the understanding of today’s network society. For this purpose, the city metaphor serves as a guideline to describe the setting and to introduce the main actors, as well as to define the field of research.

4. The term cyberspace has often been used synonymously with that of virtual reality. But the crucial difference lies in a certain intersubjectivity or dispersal of subjects, “because a single person does not exist in cyberspace, but in virtual space” (Holmes 1997, p. 234).

5. This idea of a visual structure is mainly based on the work of Kevin Lynch. (cf.Lynch 1960).

6. This goes back to Henri Lefebvre and his trialectics of social space (cf. Lefebvre 2000).

7. This explains the term „network society“ used by Manuel Castells, though he underlines that it does not contain the full meaning of the “informational society” that would also include components like the state or social movements (Castells 1996, S. 21).

8. De Digitale Stad (DDS) in Amsterdam has been considered as a model for a variety of digital cities that were founded in Europe during the 1990s (e.g. Bologna, Kiev, London, Berlin and Vienna).

9. In this sense, the exodus from the city should enable a “new elite of the digital age” (Freyermuth 1996, p. 86) to escape from overcrowded urban sprawls and thereby from the dark side of civilization. However, except for some very few prominent examples, this renewed version of “Go West!” has not become real and also the promising figures related to telecommuting have been disproven early (Castells 1991, p. 165f.).

10. The information superhighway with its (mainly male) fantasy of individual freedom and unlimited mobility was in direct contrast to the urban environment with its winding streets and public places (c.f. Bolter 1996).

11. Here I am following the research done by Kirsten Wagner (cf. Wagner 2008).

12. In order to avoid misunderstandings here, one has to underline the difference between independent initiatives like DDS on the one and neoliberal attempts to recuperate those initiatives on the other hand. In fact, community projects in the beginning 1990s had to fill a complete lack of official initiatives in the field of digital media. While projects such as DDS (or Internationale Stadt Berlin) tried to create an open and public space within the digital sphere and thereby distinguished themselves by a high level of reflexivity about matters of community, modern technocrats subsequently instrumentalized those democratic experiments by channeling them into newly built creative industries and by a process of ongoing gentrification during the 1990s.

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