[ISEA2015] Paper: Paul Sermon, Claire McAndrew & Swati Janu – 3×4: Exploring metaspace platforms for inclusive future cities

Abstract (Short paper)

Keywords: Informality, metaspace, telematic, resettlement, communities, videoconference, urbanism, population, India, cities.

In megacities such as Delhi and Mumbai – and within one of the fastest growing cities within the world, Ahmedabad – more than 50% of the population live in informal urban settlements. 3×4 metres is the plot size seen to be provided in some resettlement colonies, a government initiative which relocates people within informal inner-city settlements to vacant land on the periphery. In a collaboration between Professor Paul Sermon at the University of Brighton, Dr Claire McAndrew at The Bartlett, UCL, Swati Janu a Delhi-based Architect and photographer Vivek Muthuramalingam from Bangalore, 3×4 looks at informal settlements differently where informality is not viewed as a problem, but a promising new model of urbanism for the global south. 3×4 uses an immersive telematic networked environment to provide a playful, sensorial exploration of new hybrids of digital space. Merging two 3×4 metre room installations in Delhi and London through mixed-reality, this transnational dialogue intends to set an aspiration for developing metaspace platforms in megacities of the global south. It builds upon practice-based research conducted as UnBox LABS 2014 Fellows in Ahmedabad, India; which used an immersive installation to explore the qualities and values built through selforganised communities that are lost in the resettlement process.

  • Prof. Paul Sermon is Professor of Visual Communication at the University of Brighton, UK. He has developed a series of celebrated interactive telematic art installations that have received international acclaim. Paul was previously Professor of Creative Technology at the University of Salford and has worked for over twenty years as an active academic researcher and creative practitioner, primarily in the field of interactive media arts. Having worked under the visionary cybernetic artist Professor Roy Ascott as an undergraduate Fine Art student at the Newport School of Fine Art in the mid 1980s, Paul Sermon went on to establish himself as a leading pioneer of interactive media art, winning the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Linz, Austria, shortly after completing his MFA at the University of Reading in 1991. An accolade that then took Paul to Finland in the early 1990’s to develop one of the most ground breaking telepresent video installations of his career Telematic Dreaming in 1992. paulsermon.org
  • Dr Claire McAndrew is a Research Associate and Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) at the Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering, The Bartlett UCL’s Faculty of the Built
    Environment, UK. Combining social science insight with design-led thinking, she is interested in the possibilities of design and digital technologies to facilitate connections between people through urban space for transformative effect. Her research since 2008 has
    focused on the embedding of design interventions in public spaces to shape cognition and behavior in the contexts of human wellbeing, security and resilience, and future workplaces as they extend beyond buildings into the fabric of the city
  • Swati Janu, Delhi, India
  • Vivek Muthuramalingam, Bangalore, India

Full Text (PDF) p. 142-145