Performing the Media City: Experience, Emotion and Exploration

Anna Notaro

‘The form of the city changes faster than the human heart’ Charles Baudelaire - poet

‘space…is in close relation to instincts, drives,

emotions and actions” Paul Schilder - psychoanalyst

While descriptors such as ‘informational city’ or ‘digital city’ are more established, I find media city more useful in encompassing both the historical dimensions of the relation between media and modern urban space, and in connecting this history to the changes driven by digital convergence in the present.

(Scott McQuire, The Media City, 2008,p.21)

Weblink

Weblink

Weblink

Chinese Pavilion in an English Garden, 18th century by Thomas Robins

Detail front cover leaf of 1827 edition of Confession of an English Opium Eater

Gallerie of shops in Paris by Ted Drake 2005

Weblink

Weblink

Weblink

Weblink

Itinerarios del SonidoVito Acconci video

Weblink

Mark Shepard ‘The Sensient City Survival Kit’Weblink

This book is a collection of essays from artists, psychogeographers, designers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising people’s intimate biometric data and emotions using technology. The book is the outcome of a research process which aimed to reach a deeper understanding of a project called ‘Bio Mapping’, which since 2004, has involved thousands of participants in over 16 different countries.

Bio Mapping emerged as a critical reaction towards the currently dominant concept of pervasive technology, which aims for computer ‘intelligence’ to be integrated everywhere, including our everyday lives and even bodies.

emotions have profoundly changed in the lastdecade or so, due to our renewed experienceof the world, our re-built perception of spaceand time, our re-created ways of establishingpresence, identity, relations, collaborations.Due to the digital membrane which has beencovering all our planet and which is nowbecoming indistinguishable from the rest ofthe planet itself.

AOS: Art is Open Sourcereinventing the world using ubiquitous technologies

The scenario we have tried to address in our research: the conceptualisation, design and implementation of a tool for urban navigation, in which the emotional, narratives expressed by people while inhabiting and using urban places, spaces and objects become instantly and radically available, accessible and usable.

Weblink

an Emotional Compass: new ideas for wayfinding in cities

Weblink

Weblink

Weblink

The city and the urban environment represent man’s most consistent and, on whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.

Robert Park (1967)