Mobile Network Culture in Placemaking
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VOL NO VOL VOL NO ı , Current location technologies have become tools used by contemporary artists, theorists, designers and scientists to reformulate our understanding of social engagement within an enlarged concept of place. These new mobile networks have altered the way people exist in and relate to spaces where the real and virtual world blend, blurring the lines of traditional spatial denitions and frameworks. This special issue provides a variety of perspectives and practices on the meaning and interpretation of today’s locative media. L E ONARDO EL VOL NO ı , Current location technologies have become tools used by contemporary artists, theorists, designers and scientists to reformulate our understanding of social engagement within an enlarged concept of place. These new mobile networks have altered the way people exist in and relate to spaces where the real and virtual world blend, blurring the 4 lines of traditional spatial denitions and frameworks. This special issue provides a variety of perspectives and practices on the meaning and interpretation of today’s locative media. E C T R ONIC A L.A. L MAN Re.Play A mobile network C culture in placemaking 29/09 ¦ 01/10/2016 B U © . / 2016/ A RTICLE ARTICLE Emergent ABSTRACT Technology as Art In this paper I will present examples of my work in place-based augmented reality public art and describe the work in the context of the transition Practice and Public from literacy to electracy. Art as Intervention profound implications for art in the public sphere and where forces come together to create strong atmo- the discourse that surrounds it. sphere. This essay will give a brief overview. INTRODUCTION by With the emergence of augmented reality technol- Whereas the public square was once the quintes- ogy on widely used mobile devices, the distributed FROM LITERACY TO ELECTRACY John Craig Freeman sential place to air grievances, display solidarity, placelessness of Internet public discourse and identity express difference, celebrate similarity, remember, formation comes crashing back down to place. Loca- My work in augmented reality grows out of an ongo- Professor mourn, and reinforce shared values of right and tion is once again relevant to cultural production and ing collaboration with Greg Ulmer and his investiga- Emerson College, Boston, MA, USA wrong, it is no longer the only anchor for interactions digital art practices. Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jor- tion of what he has referred to as electracy. Electracy [email protected] in the public realm. Public discourse has been relo- dan Frith state that, describes the kind of literacy or skill and facility nec- http://JohnCraigFreeman.net cated to a novel space; a virtual space that encourages essary to exploit the full communicative potential of exploration of mobile location based public art. More- A new wave of theorists of locative media are new electronic media such as multimedia, hypermedia, over, public space is now truly open, as artworks can today taking note of the ways in which virtual social software, and virtual worlds. In his book Internet be placed anywhere in the world, without prior per- space and material space enhance, interact, and Invention: From Literacy to Electracy, Ulmer writes, Figure 1. Orators, Rostrums, and Propaganda Stands, John mission from government or private authorities – with disrupt each other as mobile media present us with “electracy is to digital media what literacy is to print.” 3 Craig Freeman, 2013. Augmented reality public art, Speaker’s new kinds of embodied interaction. The digital has It encompasses the broader cultural, institutional, Corner, Singapore. Screenshot by John Craig Freeman. not replaced the physical location, but has in fact pedagogical, and ideological implications inherent in © John Craig Freeman, 2013. Used with permission. intensified it.1 the transition our society is undergoing. The evolution of augmented reality as a public art In Applied Grammatology, Ulmer extends the work of practice can be traced to the work of Guy Debord and Jacques Derrida and his study of grammatology: the the Situationist International, and their concept of psy- theory and history of reading and writing. 4 Derrida’s chogeography. 2 Not long after it’s founding in Paris work focuses on the transition from oral culture to in the 1950s, the Situationists developed the idea of literate culture. 5 It turns out that we know quite a bit the dérive, a kind of open passage walk or drift. Par- about this transition, which occurred or continues to ticipants were encouraged to ignore the normal traffic occur all over the world. Ulmer uses what we know flows and circulations of planned urban developments about the transition from orality to literacy in order to and instead moved through a city in a way that fol- make predictions as to what we might expect from lowed its moods. The goal was to track the city’s emo- the transition from literacy to electracy. tions – the feeling and atmosphere of a place, to find what they called the plateau tourné. A plateau tourné Although some people speak about digital literacy is a turntable or hub – a vortex or center of power, and others refer to the emergent digital paradigm 60 LEONARDOELECTRONICALMANAC VOL 21 NO 1 ISSN 1071-4391 ISBN 978-1-906897-36-9 ISSN 1071-4391 ISBN 978-1-906897-36-9 VOL 21 NO 1 LEONARDOELECTRONICALMANAC 61 A RTICLE ARTICLE as a reemergence of orality, neither adequately de- ish an oral person, you would simply ostracize him or knowledge. We cannot build libraries big enough in It is a third kind, where order emerges from chaos, co- scribes the phenomenon. Just as literacy was built her from the community, making him or her, in effect, an electrate paradigm. herence from disassociation, sense from nonsense. on the shoulders of orality, electracy will be built on nonexistent. the shoulders of literacy. Reading and writing are still We have witnessed the beginnings of electrate Ulmer writes, necessary, but not adequate in and of themselves. At the dawn of literacy in ancient Greece, the technol- knowledge organization in the emergence of Google, Electracy will require, not only new technologies, but ogy which emerged was, of course, alphabetic writing. Wikipedia and such. Rather than using indexical order Many commentators have declared the need for also new institutions and a new sense of identity for Once collective knowledge could be passed along in to organize knowledge, electracy uses the hyperlink. a new logic native to new media, but few have individuals. books, it was no longer essential for individuals to Unlike its indexical counterpart, the hyperlink seems indicated how to invent it. Heuretics (the logic of memorize the entire story. It is even the case that to function much like the human brain, moving from invention) provides one proven (literate) procedure Ulmer’s theoretical work on electracy and my at- generations could forget important knowledge, such one idea to another, across related material by asso- for bootstrapping from one apparatus to the other. tempts to give it form, are informed, in part, by ap- as the fact that the earth revolved around the sun, and ciation. Since the brain exists in three dimensions, it This method involves working analogically. The key paratus theory of the 1970s. Although cultural theory that knowledge could still be retrieved years later, as adopts spatiality in its functions, so moving from one analogy is with the Greek invention of metaphysics, has largely moved beyond the deterministic tenants long as someone remembered how to read. The result idea to another is also like crossing an implied space meaning specifically (in Aristotle’s terms) the inven- of apparatus theory, in preference of a far more nu- was that the quantity of human knowledge was ex- –moving from here to there. tion of a category system. Electracy needs a mode anced and flexible theory of cultural agency, appara- panded exponentially. of classification that does for the digital image tus theory still provides a useful lens through which to what the concept did for the written word (defini- view and understand the social and cultural changes So, if alphabetic writing was the technology of literacy CHORA tion as a practice organizing things according to we are experiencing. It suggests that three elements in ancient Greece, Aristotle’s lyceum was the institu- essences and accidents). interact in a matrix to construct culture. The first ele- tion of early western literacy, which becomes today’s Like spoken language in orality and alphabetic writ- ment is the technology that emerges within a society. universities. ing in literacy, the Internet holds the promise of aug- Chora is to electracy what topic is to literacy, the The second is the practices and institutions that are menting and extending human thought and memory. organizing space and practice through which rheto- developed to make use of the technology. The third is It took a very long time for alphabetic systems to be People no longer use precious neurons remember- ric relates living memory to artificial memory. In our subject or identity formation on the part of the indi- practiced by large portions of the world’s population. ing the banal. Can you remember your best friend’s work, chora gathers multiple topics associated with viduals who are living in this new apparatus and begin Literacy was initially an elite practice. At the beginning phone number? Our cell phones have become cyber- a geographical region, or zone, into a scene whose experiencing their lives in a different way. of the twentieth century, there were certainly plenty netic, prosthetic devices designed to extend memory. coherence is provided by an atmosphere. This atmo- of things to know. It was, however, still possible to We now carry the World Wide Web in our pockets.