Panel Statement
Panel: Site Specifics: Mobile Media Art and the Contexts of Place
Globalization and developments in technologies and new mobile media have brought about a ‘spatial turn’ that has changed spatial conceptions and geographical imaginations. The current ‘spatial turn’ echoes the critical concepts of space developed by Lefebvre, de Certeau and Foucault in the 1970s with an emphasis on the production, practices, and politics of lived spatiality. These concepts became ‘guides’ to a critical analysis of the developments and potential of locative new media art in the age of mobile media. Today’s developments in mapping and GIS technologies allow for a new ‘spatial thinking’ about a socio-spatial dialectic: the relationship between the ways in which social processes and social action shape and explain geographies and vice versa. Locative media and pervasive computing have reconfigured our understandings and experiences of space and culture—from the microcosm of the everyday to the macrocosm of spatial flows. The new geographical pursuits of locative new media art are site-specific explorations of a human geography. This paper explores the potential of locative new media art as a strategic catalyst for urban revitalization and community development. Locative media allow for active community participation and expression; for urban and cultural narratives to be discovered and articulated in urban layers; and for augmentation of past or future realities and virtualities. Locative media can enhance civic engagement and intercultural citizenship, foster a sense of locality, and thus create a sustainable component for the local community and society at large. These ideas are unfolding in a field that merges or oscillates between locative media and mediated localities. They encourage local cultural innovation by fostering site-specific cultural understanding. This paper addresses questions such as, what kinds of social/spatial relations are made possible through locative new media art projects? And how can these projects be adopted in a cultural planning framework as catalysts for local urban and community development?
- Tanya Toft recently received her double MA in Media Studies from The New School, NY, and in Modern Culture and Cultural Dissemination with profile in Urbanity and Aesthetics from Copenhagen University. Her research is focused on the interrelationship between new media art and the transformation of urban spaces and socio-spatial structures, which she explores in a combined framework of artistic and strategic development. In her master’s thesis she develops a rethinking of urban cultural planning in the ’temporary’ cultural logics of the digital city and proposes the media-architectural event as a temporal, mediated catalyst for urban development and revitalization. She has presented her research at The Transformation of the 21st Century City 2010; MediaCity 2010; Critical Themes Graduate Student Conference 2011; The City: Culture, Society, Technology 2011; and EURA Conference: The City Without Limits 2011. tanyatoft.com
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