[ISEA2011] Panel: Michelle Teran – Fu­ture Guides for Cities

Panel Statement

Panel: Sniff, Scrape, Crawl: Part 2

Wide­spread par­tic­i­pa­tion on so­cial net­works and use of lo­ca­tion-aware de­vices have helped cre­ate an ever-in­trigu­ing re­la­tion be­tween the in­for­ma­tion that peo­ple pub­lish on­line and phys­i­cal lo­ca­tion. Using cur­rent gen­er­a­tion smart phones to pro­duce im­ages and videos, such as Apple’s iPhone, by de­fault at­taches geo-tagged in­for­ma­tion to con­tent. Con­cur­rently, pub­lic APIs, such as from YouTube, pro­vide struc­tured ac­cess to con­tent with geo-lo­ca­tion, mak­ing it rel­a­tively easy to link an on­line video back to an ac­tual phys­i­cal site. As net­worked dig­i­tal ex­change makes the so­cial and ge­o­graph­i­cal ever more shift­ing, a po­ten­tial is cre­ated for un­ex­pected re­la­tions and en­coun­ters. How­ever does this po­ten­tial give us the home in­va­sion or the pos­si­bil­ity of a more play­ful, serendip­i­tous en­counter? In my pre­sen­ta­tion I will in­ves­ti­gate both sides of the ques­tion and in­tro­duce “Fu­ture Guides for Cities” a three-year re­search pro­ject that ex­plores the map­ping of cities through on­line video archives and the peo­ple who cre­ate them.

  • Michelle Teran, born in Canada, ex­plores the in­ter­ac­tion be­tween media and so­cial net­works in urban en­vi­ron­ments. In her work she looks at dif­fer­ent as­pects of how urban space is de­fined, oc­cu­pied and me­di­a­tized. She has a so­cial and site-spe­cific prac­tice which fo­cuses mostly on the stag­ing of urban in­ter­ven­tions and per­for­mances, such as guided tours, dis­cus­sions, walks and open-air pro­jec­tions as well as par­tic­i­pa­tory in­stal­la­tions and hap­pen­ings. She is the win­ner of the Trans­me­di­ale Award, the Turku2011 Grand Prix Award, the Vida 8.0 Award and Prix Ars Elec­tron­ica hon­orary men­tion (2005, 2010) Cur­rently she is within the post-grad­u­ate Nor­we­gian Artis­tic Re­search Fel­low­ship Pro­gramme where she is doing prac­tice-based re­search at the Bergen Na­tional Acad­emy of the Arts. She lives and works be­tween Bergen and Berlin.

Full text (PDF) p. 2350-2355