Theater, Public Space and Digital Augmentation

Presentation for Unga Klara
8th May 2013
Stockholm Kulturhuset

“Digital tools allowing theatre audiences to engage with a performance beyond the traditional consumer relationship” http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/1180/digital-bridges.htm (Digital Bridges, Cambridge University 2013) 

Readings of Space and Place 

Representational Space
"Representational spaces: space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’, but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated—and hence passively experienced—space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects. Thus representational spaces may be said, though again with certain exceptions, to tend towards more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs" - Henri Lefebvre 'The Production of Space' p39.

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces: William H. Whyte from Nelly Oli on Vimeo.

This witty and original film is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others don't. Beginning at New York's Seagram Plaza, one of the most used open areas in the city, the film proceeds to analyze why this space is so popular and how other urban oases, both in New York and elsewhere, measure up. Based on direct observation of what people actually do, the film presents a remarkably engaging and informative tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be made more hospitable to those who live in it.
 Running time: 58 min, Year released: 1988

-       The most used plazas tended to have small groups of twos or threes

-        The most used plazas also have, in absolute numbers the greatest number of individuals

-       The number one activity is people looking at other people

-       There is not much mixing between groups or between individuals within the space

-       Audience spaces, display space.

-       Exits, entrances, connections, corners, levels, obstacles, ledges and edges

-       Choreography of the space

-       The “visualization of movement is the ultimate test of a design”

-       People do not stop to talk in the middle of a large space

-       People tend to sit where there are places to sit

Monumentality
Monumentality is the coded organization of space where hierarchies are attached to “the strong points, nexuses or anchors” (Lefebvre 222), resulting in the meanings of that space. Monumentality overwhelms the senses to create a confined sense of presence in interpretation. This confinement is due to how "monumental qualities are not solely plastic, not to be apprehended solely through looking. Monuments are also liable to possess acoustic properties, and when they do not this detracts from their monumentality" (Lefebvre 225). In the monumental space the "'properties' of a spatial texture are focused upon a single point" (Lefebvre 225).

See “Unsettling Representation: Monuments, Theatre, and Relational Space” (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10486801.2010.488834)

Technologies of Augmentation: The Digital Layer and the Narrative Performative

1. Rendering place and space

Street Museum
http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/Resources/app/you-are-here-app/home.html


























Museum Studies and QR Codes

Historicizing Public Space with QR Codes from Jim Barrett

Augmented Reality Flashmob
http://www.sndrv.nl/ARflashmob/

Amsterdam has the first Augmented Reality Flashmob in the world. (SATURDAY 24th April 2012) http://tinyurl.com/29t8qnv 

Imagine the Dam Square in Amsterdam filled with statues and odd characters and only you can see them trough the camera of Android- and iPhone. Saturday the 24th of April this is going to be the case. At exactly 14.00 hours the National Monument on the Dam Square will be surrounded with digital 3D statues that can be viewed in Augmented Reality with the Layar app. The rumour is that even the iconic Beatles will be there crossing the street like in the famous picture on the Abbey road.

Sander Veenhof is the creator behind this amazing idea. Veenhof says: “Every square in every major city in the world knows the 'human statue' phenomenon. On the Dam Square in Amsterdam Darth Vader, Superman, a Gladiator and some undecipherable sort of gothic characters colour the scene.“ But this Saturday it will be a whole other sight, at exactly 14.00 hours a big group of people will hold their Androids and iPhones in the air, turn on their Layar browser and take screenshots of the amazing 3D characters that we will place in Augmented Reality on the Dam Square. You can actually walk around them to look at them from all angles by just using your phone and the Layar browser. We are really looking forward to see the faces of those who have no clue of what’s going on.

Van Veen Teamed up with TAB Worldmedia, one of the leading creative media companies that specializes in Layar concepts to realize his idea. Augmented Reality experts Johannes la Poutre and Remco Vroom, founders of TAB Worldmedia, immediately offered their expertise and resources to realize this concept. La Poutre “when we heard about this amazing idea we were immediately captured by it. To realize this idea you need a solid and somewhat creative technical infrastructure and that is exactly what we like to build.”

JOIN the flashmob on Saturday the 24th of April at 14.00 hours on the Dam Square in Amsterdam. Prepare your phone, install the Layar Augmented Reality browser and look for the layar using “ARflashmob” under the local tab. Choose your favourite character and share your screenshots with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Hyves, MobyPicture or what ever other kind of social media you have.

2. Virtual Spaces

Inside the Mind of Macbeth
Virtual Macbeth was designed to demonstrate how we might best use the affordances of virtual environments for Education. Shakespeare’s Macbeth re-imagined in Second Life provides an adaptive bridge between classic texts and new media technology. In the virtual, the abstract can be made concrete, and complex poesis and abstractions of Shakespeare’s verse can become embodied, elusive, visceral, and affective. The poetic use of metaphor, image and symbol that permeate Shakespeare’s language is brought to 3D life using the online world as a discursive design space where visitors experience the motivations and emotional journey of character, and explore and make personal sense of the universal themes of Shakespeare. 

Minecraft
Some experts have brought Minecraft into the classroom, allowing teachers to customize lessons and students to engage with concepts in new ways. And while educational games aren't new, Minecraft has some unique advantages that could usher in a new direction in education. In the future, students across the world may spend their class time punching trees.

Yoshikaze http://yoshikaze.blogspot.se/
Yoshikaze is an artists' studio in Second Life, run by Goodwind Seiling aka Sachiko Hayashi with support from Humlab, Umeå University, Sweden. Its main activity is to provide a SL residency programme for SL artists ("Up-in-the-air" Residency). The residency is project based and can be applied to throughout the year. The artist is expected to give at least one presentation of the project at the end of the residency. The residency length is normally 1-3 months.

Machinima
Machinima is the use of real-time 3D computer graphics rendering engines to create a cinematic production. Most often, video games are used to generate the computer animation.



En film gjord av studenter på Kulturanalysprogrammet i Umeå.

3. Audio and Space

And While London Burns (Audio - Sound tours, triggered sounds)

"The defamiliarising effect of the internal voice/narration, layered over the city and drawing curious attention to it, operated in a very different way to the much cooler, matter-of-fact ‘art tour’ narration in May. Indeed, this form combined with the narrative’s subject matter to create a weird sense of looking at London in the past rather than the present. A disillusioned city trader speaks melancholically of anticipated disaster – part personal (his partner has left him), part economic (this 2007 piece eerily anticipates the financial crash of the following year) and part environmental (catastrophic climate change is anticipated as imminent). The effect as I listened was to create a sense of looking back at London in a period (now!) of blind and blithe confidence about its own assumed continuation … back from a desperately less optimistic future… That effect is accentuated further by the periodic references to and sights of London’s historical past – at the outset we see the remains of the Roman temple of Mithras (now preserved amidst a building site); at the climax we climb to the peak of the Monument to the Great Fire of London, down Pudding Lane… Empires have fallen here before, we are reminded; disaster has struck and wiped out the present… This present is not forever."
From - Site, Performance and Environmental Change

4. Audience Involvement


Blog Opera




The Playable Actor/Console Yourself from jim on Vimeo.
Console Yourself

The Truth About Marika (2006 The Company P)

This outreach will always include 'Social Media' – Twitter (tags, channels), YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

5. Objects as Meaningful





3D Max and Sketch Up http://www.digitalurban.org/2010/08/augmented-reality-for-3d-max-and.html

 Internet of Things

QR Codes in Space and Place by Jim Barrett

QR Codes

The Port
The Port was a virtual island of 16 acres (about 6, 4 hectors) inside the on-line 3D world Second Life. Between 2004-2008 The Port artist collective produced a series of artistic actions that challenged ideas about the separation between the 'real' and the 'virtual. The magazine Flack Attack was one of these, the production of 'real' objects made in 'virtual' spaces (see image above) was another.

No Matter
No Matter is an installation of imaginary objects made both in Second Life and in physical space.
No Matter reflects the tension between the SL virtual economy and real economics by:

(a) commissioning 25 builders and artists to produce 40 imaginary objects in Second Life space;

(b) paying them in Linden dollars at an equivalent scale of $1.50 to $12.00 per object; 

(c) extracting the objects from Second Life — a closed system where 3D models cannot be exported; 
(d) reconstructing these objects as 3D paper replicas in physical space.
http://turbulence.org/Works/nomatter/

Thank You!

Sketching the Digital Project

Spatial Media Design

Spatial media design is the planning, implementation and execution of media installations that operate interactively in spaces. Something as simple as a map can be used to create spatial media, but in this course we will be using Quick Response Codes (see introduction here). Spatial media using QR-Codes build environments that are information rich. Moving through through these environments activates flows of information. Objects and places can be tagged with spatial media and if they are open public spaces then this information can be made available to many people. Spatial media, when it is done effectively places a layer of information over a physical space that is accessible to all.

Making a sketch lets you put your ideas on paper, giving them a form that can be questioned, commented on, developed and changed. Its not about making a 'good' sketch,' it is about having a conversation with yourself, and those you are working with. In this session we are going to sketch and plan a curation project that uses QR-Codes to create a mixed media museum space in the public domain.

The Tools

Pencil and paper
camera/phone/PDA
audio recorder
laptop computer
tablet computer
QR-Codes
Websites (blogs, Facebook, wikis, existing sites, online archives)

Measurement/Collection

·      Site

-       drawing

-       photography

-       diagrams/maps

-       archives

·      Information

-       interviews

-       texts (print, audio)

-       documents (images, records etc.)

·      Architecture

-       buildings

-       objects

-       design (both of subject and project)

·      Articulation

-       interface

-       media

-       hardware

-       software

Display/Interaction
Most of the content you will be working with will be curated; that is you must find it rather than make it.  Because you are working with curating you need to classify your materials and organize them. One possible way of organizing your materials is according to mode and location:

MODE	ONLINE	OFFLINE
Digital
Objects
Texts
Architecture

 Intellectual Property Rights

Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce.

IP is divided into two categories:  Industrial property, which includes inventions (patents), trademarks, industrial designs, and geographic indications of source; and Copyright, which includes literary and artistic works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works, artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, and architectural designs.  Rights related to copyright include those of performing artists in their performances, producers of phonograms in their recordings, and those of broadcasters in their radio and television programs.  For an introduction to IP for non-specialists, refer to:

• WIPO Intellectual Property Handbook (a comprehensive introduction to the policy, law and use of IP)
• Understanding Copyright and Related Rights
• Understanding Industrial Property

The innovations and creative expressions of indigenous and local communities are also IP, yet because they are “traditional” they may not be fully protected by existing IP systems.  Access to, and equitable benefit-sharing in, genetic resources also raise IP questions.  Normative and capacity-building programs are underway at WIPO to develop balanced and appropriate legal and practical responses to these issues.  For more information, refer to:

• IP and Traditional Knowledge
• IP and Traditional Cultural Expressions/Folklore

Writing the Space
In creating the space of your exhibition I think it is worth paying attention to Alternate Reality Gaming ("An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform and uses transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by participants' ideas or actions." Wikipedia). In the development of ARGs these aspects are important:

• Audience Analysis. Identify audience traits including age, gender, job description, cultural aspects, and other demographic considerations including team dynamics.
• Learning Objectives and Goals. Identify the learning objectives. All activities within the environment should support the acquisition of these objectives. Link objectives and goal statements to the specific business needs. Having a clear goal in mind will help ensure a focused design.
• Compelling Story. Create a story arc containing a beginning, middle, and end. A compelling story, combined with good writing, is a key element in a successful environment. Creating meaningful characters, and roles that players can easily relate to through their own value system, is extremely important.

Make An Alternate Reality Game! from Jane McGonigal

Consider the advice of Jane McGonigal and the articles linked above on ARG and learning when planning your spatial media project.

Gender and Sexuality in Virtual Worlds and Digital Literature

Föreläsning/workshop om genus/sexualitet i olika digitala arenor (virtuella världar, digital litteratur) (2 timmar) Lärare: Jim Barrett

The Avatar, The Reader and The Self: Gender and Sexuality in Selected Digital Arenas 
Two popular modes of digital mediation are virtual worlds and digital literature. This lecture will introduce both by first providing a brief history of their development and the basics of how they function and convey meaning. At the center of both virtual worlds and digital literature is the concept of interactivity. In this lecture I will provide explanations of how gender and sexuality are performed and represented in the interactive digital environments according to six works; three virtual worlds (Second Life, World of Warcraft, and The Sims) and three works of interactive digital literature (Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson, Facade by Mateas and Stern, and Little Red Riding Hood by Donna Leishman). In order to prepare for the workshop and student work on gender and sexuality in digital areas we will focus on:

- How agency is represented and embodied in the works
- The concept of reader versus user in relation to the works
- How narrative architecture functions in the works
- The use of perspective and stereotypes in the works
- The role of simulation and narrative in the works

Workshop om genus/sexualitet i olika digitala arenor (virtuella världar, digital litteratur) (2 timmar) Lärare: Jim Barrett In this workshop you will be instructed in creating an avatar in Second Life according to a written abstract (50-150 words) based on gender and sexuality. You will first be asked to develop an avatar identity with a focus on gender and sexuality as a character in the written abstract (this could be an oppositional gender or a transgendered avatar). You will then create an account and choose a default avatar in Second Life and author it yourself according to your abstract (you will need an email for this). Next you will be asked to enter into a social situation with your avatar in Second Life. Finally you will be asked to write a short description of how the you experienced the social situation as your avatar. The performance of gender and how it was received and responded to by others in the social situation are important in this exercise. Consider the visual and gestural ques involved in the social exchange as the avatar. You will submit the short description of the social situation as the avatar and offer some reflections upon it based on the first lecture.
Handledning digitala arenor (2 timmar) Lärare: Jim Barrett

Space and Place in Architexture

And do you know what "the world" is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by "nothingness" as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be "empty" here or there, but rather a force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there [...]. Frederick Nietzsche, The Will to Power.

Space

Place

Architecture

Architexture

Lefebvre's argument in The Production of Space is that space is a social product, or a complex social construction (based on values, and the social production of meanings) which affects spatial practices and perceptions. As a Marxist philosopher (but highly critical of the economic structuralism that dominated the academic discourse in his period), Lefebvre argues that this social production of urban space is fundamental to the reproduction of society, hence of capitalism itself. Therefore, the notion of hegemony as proposed by Antonio Gramsci is used as a reference to show how the social production of space is commanded by a hegemonic class as a tool to reproduce its dominance." Wikipedia

Lefbvre writes: “social space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity—their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder” (p.73). Lefebvre objects to the reification of space by rejecting the Cartesian model, separating “ideal space” from “real space.” Instead, space is a product of something that is produced materially while at the same time “operate[s]…on processes from which is cannot separate itself because it is a product of them” (p.66). (Thinking Culture)

"We are forever hearing about the space of this and/or the space of that; about literary space, ideological space, the space of the dream, psychoanalytic topologies, and so on and so forth. Conspicuous by its absence from supposedly fundamental epistemological studies is not only the idea of 'man' but also that of space -- the fact that 'space' is mentioned on every page notewithstanding [...] Consider how fond the cognoscenti are of talk of pictural space, Picasso's space [...] Elsewhere we are forever hearing of architectural, plastic or literary 'spaces'; the term is used as much as one might speak of a writer's or artist's 'world.' Specialized works keep their audience abreast of all sorts of equally specialized spaces: leisure, work, play, transportation, public facilities -- all are spoken of in spatial terms. Even illness and madness are supposed by some specialists to have their own peculiar space. We are thus confronted by an indefinite multitudes of spaces, each one piled upon, or perhaps contained within, the next: geographical, economic, demographic, sociological, ecological, political, commercial, national, continental, global. Not to mention nature's (physical) space, the space of (energy) flows, and so on."
The Production of Space

Lefebvre identifies three forms of space; the mathematical, the mental and the social (14), which are dialectically related to each other through the codes used to experience them. These codes rest on two conceptions of space; the representations and the representational.

"Because Lefebvre is referring to not only the empirical disposition of things in the landscape as 'space' (the physical aspect) but also attitudes and habitual practices, his metaphoric l'espace might be better understood as the spatialisation of social order. In this movement to space, abstract structures such as "culture" become concrete practices and arrangements in space. Social action involves not just a rythm but also geometry and spacing. Spatialisation also captures the process nature of l'espace that Lefebvre insists is a matter of ongoing activities. That is, it is not just an achieved order in the built environment, or an ideology, but also an order that is itself always undergoing change from within through the actions and innovations of social agents. In short, all 'space' is social space, and a systemic approach is nesessary that avoids a partial, discipline-based analysis (...) and keeps the intersections on space with an overaching regime or spatialisation in sight." (Rob Shields, Lefebvre: Love and Struggle - Spatial Dialectics Routledge 1999: 154-155).

1. Spatial practice refers to the production and reproduction of spatial relations between objects and products. It also ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion. “In terms of social space, and of each member of a given society’s relationship to that space, this cohesion implies a guaranteed level of competence and a specific level of performance” (p.33).

2. Space as a mediated form is tricky because it is both experienced and understood simultaneously. You cannot experience a space and understand it as something else, other than what you experience it as. The same goes for mental space; when it is thought/understood it is experienced. However, space is produced and it is so by a set of relations mediated through codes according to Lefebvre.

3. Lived space (Representational space): as directly lived through its associated images and symbols. The experience of space in the traditional emotional and religious manner. Formed by everyday life. The space of the everyday activities of "users" (or "inhabitants") - a concrete one, i.e. subjective. The "users" naively experienced space. The dominated - and hence passively experienced - space, making symbolic use of its objects. The representational space is the space that the inhabitants have in their minds. (Gronlund, 1999) Representational spaces refer to spaces “lived” directly “through its associated images and symbols and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’…” (p.39). These are the lived experiences that emerge as a result of the dialectical relation between spatial practice and representations of spaces.

Think Museum and You Think Space

4. Represented Space: Representations of space are certainly abstract, but they also play a part in social and political practice. Representations of space are tied to the relations of production and to the "order" which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to "frontal" relations. The producers of space have always acted in accordance with a representation. Such representations are thus objective, though subject to revision and have a practical impact.. The space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers, as of a certain type of artist with scientific bent, all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived. This is the dominant space in any society (or mode of production). Empty space in the sense of a mental and social void which facilitates the socialization of a not-yet-social realm and is actually also merely a representation of space.

5. At the center of social space is the Body.



This video is a response to a university module regarding the Production of Space. It traces the paths of shoppers in the Drake Circus centre in Plymouth, UK in an attempt to visualise the directional choices we make and show how they are affected by what we consider to be our 'personal space'.

We could go much deeper into 'Space' but maybe that's enough to break the surface of a topic that is really really big.

Place is different from Space but at the same time they rely on each other in order to be separate (in a dialectical sense).

Place: The oldest known theorising about 'place' is the treatise of Archytas of Tarentum, a Pythagorean thinker who lived in the Fourth Century BC. Like of the treatise of Anaximander, only fragments of it have survived. The fragments were written down by Simplicius who also saved the 'Anaximander fragment' for latecomers (Casey 1993: 14).
The main idea in the remaining fragments of Archytas' treatise is the logical conclusion that place is prior to all things. This follows from the assertion that 'to be is to be in place'. Nothing exists if it does not exist in place. From this follows that 'place' itself is nothing. If it was something, it would have to be in a place that would have to be in a place and so on ad infinitum. Archytas' ideas are also repeated by Aristotle in his Physics (Casey 1993: 14). According to Edward S. Casey (1993: 16), however, the views of Archytas and Aristotle differ in that while Aristotle takes place as a container of things, Archytas stresses that a thing constitutes its own place: the limit-of-being of a thing is the place that it constitutes since the unlimited is nothing.

'Place' is a concept that is so deeply entrenched in culture that it is impossible to give any straightforward definition of it. Due to its fundamental status in ontology, it is a rather basic concept used for defining other concepts. To understand its meaning, however, it is revealing to study its relation with other concepts close to it. 'Landscape' is one of the most important ones.

"The power a place such as a mere room possesses determines not only where I am in the limited sense of cartographic location but how I am together with others (i.e. how I commingle and communicate with them) and even who we shall become together. the "how" and the "who" are intimately tied to the "where", which gives to them a special content and a coloration not available form any other source. Place bestows upon them "a local habitation and a name" by establishing a concrete situatedness in the common world. This emplacement is as social as it is personal. The ideolocal is not merely idiosyncratic or individual; it is also collective in character." Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Towards a New Understanding of the Place-World. (23)

While place is not simply a question of location, it is a product, among the many described by both Casey and Lefebvre, of the formation of location (name, history, relation to places around it, use etc). Location becomes valuable for its place-ness. But location cannot be represented in the same sense as place can. Place is a referential construction that not only functions in a similar sense to a sign, but it is also performed in a similar sense to that ways that Lefebvre describes the rules that are enforced in the production of space. Think of the museum and how it is to be in a museum. I was once asked to stop running in the Centre Pompidou, it is not the way to be in the space of that place.

A target for the post-structural conception of space and place can be seen in the writings of Homi K Bhabha, who attempts to catalogue the transience of contemporary spaces and the power that contributes to the construction and representations of place:

From Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture:
If Renée Green's questions open up an interrogatory, interstitial space between the act of representation - who? what? where? - and the presence of community itself, then consider her own creative intervention within this in- between moment. Green's 'architectural' site-specific work, Sites of Genealogy (Out of Site, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Long Island City, New York), displays and displaces the binary logic through which identities of difference are often constructed - Black/White, Self/Other. Green makes a metaphor of the museum building itself, rather than simply using the gallery space:

I used architecture literally as a reference, using the attic, the boiler room, and the stairwell to make associations between certain binary divisions such as
higher and lower and heaven and hell. The stairwell became a liminal space [(from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold"], a pathway between the upper and lower areas, each of which was annotated with plaques referring to blackness and whiteness.'

The stairwell as liminal space, in-between the designations of identity, becomes the process of symbolic interaction, the connective tissue that constructs the difference between upper and lower, black and white. The hither and thither of the stairwell, the temporal movement and passage that it allows, prevents identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities. This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy:

I always went back and forth between racial designations and
designations from physics or other symbolic designations. All these things blur
in some way ... To develop a genealogy of the way colours and non-colours
function is interesting to me.'

'Beyond' signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future; but our intimations of exceeding the barrier or boundary - the very act of going beyond - are unknowable, unrepresentable, without a return to the 'present' which, in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and displaced. The imaginary of spatial distance - to live somehow beyond the border of our times - throws into relief the temporal, social differences that interrupt our collusive sense of cultural contemporaneity. The present can no longer be simply envisaged as a break or a bonding with the past and the future, no longer a synchronic presence: our proximate self-presence, our public image, comes to be revealed for its discontinuities, its inequalities, its minorities. Unlike the dead hand of history that tells the beads of sequential time like a rosary, seeking to establish serial, causal connections, we are now confronted with what Walter Benjamin describes as the blasting of a monadic moment [being with and only with oneself] from the homogenous course of history, 'establishing a conception of the present as the "time of the now"'.

In The Location of Culture, Bhabha advocates a fundamental realignment of the methodology of cultural analysis in the West away from metaphysics and toward the "performative" and "enunciatory present"[4] Such a shift, he claims, provides a basis for the West to maintain less violent relationships with other cultures. In Bhabha's view, the source of the Western compulsion to colonize is due in large part to traditional Western representations of foreign cultures.

Bhabha's argument attacks the Western production and implementation of certain binary oppositions. The oppositions targeted by Bhabha include center/margin, civilized/savage, and enlightened/ignorant. Bhabha proceeds by destabilizing the binaries insofar as the first term of the binary is allowed to unthinkingly dominate the second.

Once the binaries are destabilized, Bhabha argues that cultures can be understood to interact, transgress, and transform each other in a much more complex manner than the traditional binary oppositions can allow. According to Bhabha, hybridity and "linguistic multivocality" have the potential to intervene and dislocate the process of colonization through the reinterpretation of political discourse.

From the three examples of how space and place are produced, understood and reacted to it should not be too difficult to step over into the idea that architecture is the arrangement, control, organization, planning, integration, and changing of the representations of space and place.

As a process, architecture is the activity of designing and constructing buildings and other physical structures by a person or a machine, primarily to provide socially purposeful shelter. A wider definition often includes the design of the total built environment, from the macro level of how a building integrates with its surrounding man made landscape (see town planning, urban design, and landscape architecture) to the micro level of architectural or construction details and, sometimes, furniture. Wider still, architecture is the activity of designing any kind of system.Wikipedia

The mechanics of space and place can be seen to be at the center of architecture as a process. Think of buildings and what they mean to you:

From the concept of Architecture to the concept of the architexture. The term has been used in relation to the writings of cyberpunk author William Gibson to explain "the effect of place, space and architecture on "posthuman" form and ontology" (Farnell 1998)
Architexture aligns the important distinction between the text as a fixed and interpreted medium and the performative realities of mediated space in the post-industrial societies of the world today. It is possible to live in a text today, in fact it is compulsory in many situations as the French theorist Jean Baudrillard has argued for in his works on simulacra and simulation:

Simulacra and Simulation is most known for its discussion of images, signs, and how they relate to the present day. Baudrillard claims that modern society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that the human experience is of a simulation of reality rather than reality itself. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are signs of culture and media that create the perceived reality; Baudrillard believed that society has become so reliant on simulacra that it has lost contact with the real world on which the simulacra are based.

Sources

Farnell, Ross. Posthuman Topologies: William Gibson’s "Architexture" in Virtual Light and Idoru (1998)

Lefebvre Henri, The Production of Space (Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith) (1991)

Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place: Towards a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (1993)

Remixidity: Hybrid Spaces for Exploration

"Space is at once result and cause, product and producer; it is also at stake, the locus of projects and the actions deployed as part of specific strategies and hence also the object of wagers on the future - wagers which are articulated, if never completed" Henri Lefebvre, The Production on Space (1991)

"In these moments of heterogeneous entanglements of the social, political and technological space the meaning of the game as an entertainment tool transformed into a tool for public opinion expression and reflection." S. Lidtner, B Nardi et. al. A Hybrid Cultural Ecology: World of Warcraft in China (Forthcoming)

Hybrid, mixed or augmented space is produced by physical and mediated means. While anchored in representative technologies, the mediated elements of a hybrid space can be experienced in an immediate and fully embodied physical sense.

Perhaps the public face of augmented space at the moment could be assigned to the Nintendo Wii game console:


"Wii sounds like 'we', which emphasizes that the console is for everyone. Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion. No need to abbreviate. Just Wii." Nintendo anticipates worldwide sales of the Wii to reach 50 million units by March 2009.

My intention with referencing the Wii is to present a relatively established, although recent, concept as indicative of augmented or mixed reality space. From the fairly linear and demarcated system which defines the Wii I hope to move into more complex, nuanced, distributed and fragmentary examples of such hybrid spaces.


The Ping Body by Stelarc
Primary to space is the body. Inhabiting space as embodied is explored by the Australian artist Stelarc, whose work raises questions concerned with the body.


Players streaming into Astor Hall at the New York Public Library on Friday to play video games on the Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and other systems.(New York Times)

Museums, libraries and teaching spaces are in themselves examples of 'mixed reality' space based on the concept of information spaces. How augmented reality can be developed in such environments is just beginning to unfold in the present time.

The Second House of Sweden
In July 2007 the Second House of Sweden, the Swedish embassy in the online virtual world of Second Life opened to the public. The Second House of Sweden functions as an information portal for those living outside the country to access real-time information and events. Guides have been employed at different times to answer questions and promote discussion around things 'Swedish'.

In January 2008 a event with the title “House of Sweden goes Virtu-Real” was staged. A function was held at the actual Swedish embassy in Washington DC, The House of Sweden. At the same time the Second House of Sweden (an exact scale model of the Washington House) held a function. Linking the two where two interactive video walls
in each location and a telephone link allowing for conversation between the two.


Installation of the video wall in Washington's House of Sweden.


Looking through the video wall, with telephone, from the Second House of Sweden.

The Second House of Sweden is an innovative project exploring concepts of branding on the global scale, hybrid space, presence and representation.

Tagging
The concept of tagging, attaching a word or key phrase to a web page or blog entry is well established on the contemporary internet. The use of Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFIDs) to tag objects and places is a way of creating augmented spaces. The use of RFIDs for education, information distribution and storage and art has only just begun to be explored.


Presentation of the Augmented Reality installation at the Open Day of the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague, The Netherlands - January 27, 2007

Alternate Reality Games (AGRs)
An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.
The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants' responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyse the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium.

The production of space in an ARG can blend the physical with the virtual, or enmesh a mediated space with the familiar physical space of a neighbourhood or work environment. ARGs are geo-spatial, multi-modal, mobile and intermediated. One of the most recent ARGs is Traces of Hope, commissioned by the British Red Cross:

Vicious war in Northern Uganda has destroyed Joseph’s home and torn his family apart. He has one goal, to find out from the Red Cross if his mother is alive or dead.
Now he has arrived in the dangerous refugee camp they call Hopetown, he has 24 hours to track down the Red Cross messenger and he needs you to be his guide.
He has a satellite phone, you have the web – together you’ll make a great team. Time is running out; guide Joseph through sickness, fire and violence as together you follow his traces of hope.
Register to Play

Art as Augmented Reality
Art has long been a source of experimentation and investigation in regards to the potentials and boundaries of reality. In the field of augmented reality art is at the forefront of experimentation with the technologies available for blending and creating new forms of space.

Sheldon Brown (Director of the Centre for Research in Computing and the Arts at UCSD) is in my opinion one of the more interesting artists working in the area of augmented reality. Such projects as Mi Casa es Tu Casa result in a production of space that is hybrid, distributed and networked.


Mi Casa es tu Casa uses the contextual apparatus of museums with adjacent mission scopes to the art world, for bringing avant-garde strategies to engage ranges of social issues to venues that often use more pedantic forms of discourse." (Wikipedia)

Finally I would like to name a large scale project which problematise generally conception of space as physical and static. The Avatar Orchestra Metaverse (AOM) uses augmented reality technologies to articulate subjects as distributed in mixed or hybrid space.


The Avatar Orchestra Metaverse

The Avatar Orchestra Metaverse is a large group of new media artists and musicians which use Second Life as a space for coordinating and staging multimedia performances in real time over distance. These performances are achieved through the use of fast broadband internet connections and HUDs (Head Up Display) devices which allow for the running of samples from a central server. The effect created by the AOM performance creates an impression of shared space and immediacy.