Panel Statement
Panel: Beyond Locative: Media Arts after the Spatial Turn
As our cities are becoming digital and physical hybrids, observers have sketched techno-dystopian scenarios in which urban technologies would induce ‘frictionless’ consumption, quasi-military control, and social capsularization of city life. Simultaneously, artistic interventions seek to reclaim the urban environment through visualizations, narratives and by spurring chance encounters, mediated through these same technologies. Still one cannot escape the sense that these different views and practices share an idealized mythology of urban life. How can thinkers and makers come up with affirmative perspectives on the potential of location-based urban technologies, instead of departing from an oppositional reflex that longs back to an urban paradise lost?
- Michiel de Lange (1976) is a part-time Lecturer in New Media Studies, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University (NL); co-founder of The Mobile City, a platform for the study of new media and urbanism; and advisor e-culture at the Mediafonds. In 2010 Michiel finished his PhD at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam (Department of Philosophy), with a dissertation called Moving Circles, mobile media and playful identities (2010).