Street Furniture and the Nation State: A Global Process

In the popular imagination, street furniture has traditionally been understood as evoking a sense of national or local identity. From Paris’ metro entrances, DDR lampposts in Berlin, and London’s york stone pavements, the designed environment has been able to contribute to the unique qualities of a place. In some instances this was deliberate. In postwar Britain for instance, the Council of Industrial Design – a state-funded design organization - often appeared to measure the quality of street furniture on the basis of its national characteristics. On other occasions, the relationship between such objects and identity emerged accidentally. In Britain during the 1980s, for example, the replacement of Gilbert Scott's red telephone box with an alternative BT model provoked considerable debate. For many people, this act was not just a Conservative attack on nationalization and state-ownership, but also on the very fabric of British identity. This understanding of street furniture has retained its currency for many years, and cities across the world have used street furniture to provide a sense of visual coherency for neighbourhoods in need of new identities, strengthening their character and improving the public's relationship to them. In this way, street furniture has been employed as a cipher for the narrative of regeneration, in which - as a means of altering the identity of a space - street furniture can project a new face upon the street. Increasingly however, advertising companies are able to lever themselves into the street furniture market by offering to provide the service to the local authorities for free in return for advertising space. In offering this service, global companies like JC Decaux, Wall and Clear Channel command a huge amount of commercial power within the city. The excessive homogenization of street furniture coupled with the overwhelming presence of advertising which is increasingly sanctioned by local authorities keen to reduce costs, has resulted in the perception of poorer quality streets. Thus, the irony of regeneration is that by seeking to promote the unique identity of a city, many places often end up looking more and more alike. This paper will examine recent developments in the process by which the street is furnished and the agents responsible. It will specifically look at how these changes have affected the relationship between street furniture and identity, and equally the effect this process has had on understandings of national design histories. Clearly, evaluating contemporary street furniture through the lens of the nation-state is of very little value, since the international differences between street furniture are considerably less marked than they used to be. This extraordinary aesthetic convergence is partly linked to economies of scale - after all, just how many different kinds of bus stop can Europe afford to have? Yet it also reflects some of the challenges posed by globalization and privatization of public space. This paper will reflect upon that process, and how these bigger narratives increasingly affect the landscape of the street

Transforming Culture in the Digital Age International Conference in Tartu 14-16 April 2010

A short history of cultural participation by Nico Carpentier Accessible Digital Culture for Disabled People by Marcus Weisen Understanding Visitors’ Experiences with Multimedia Guides in Cultural Spaces by Kamal Othman, Helen Petrie & Christopher Power Can you be friends with an art museum? Rethinking the art museum through Facebook by Lea Schick & Katrine Damkjær On Scientific Mentality in Cultural Memory by Raffaele Mascella & Paolo Lattanzio Paranoid, not an Android: Dystopic and Utopic Expressions in Playful Interaction with Technology and everyday surroundings by Maaike de Jong Theorizing Web 2.0: including local to become universal by Selva Ersoz Karakulakoglu How Web 3.0 combines User-Generated and Machine-Generated Content by Stijn Bannier & Chris Vleugels Artificial Culture as a Metaphor and Tool by Kurmo Konsa Playful Public Connectivity by Anne Kaun Habermasian Online Debate of a Rational Critical Nature: Transforming Political Culture. A case study of the “For Honesty in Politics!” message group Latvia, 2007 by Ingus Bērziņš Transformation of Cultural Preferences in Estonia by Maarja Lõhmus & Anu Masso Taste 2.0. Social Network Site as Cultural Practice by Antonio Di Stefano Online Communication A New Battlefield for Forming Elite Culture in China by Nanyi Bi Internet, blogs and Social Networks for Independent and Personal Learning of Information Theory and Other Subjects in Journalism, Advertising and Media by Graciela Padilla & Eva Aladro The Artist and Digital Self-presentation: a Reshuffle of Authority? by Joke Beyl Communicative Image Construction in Online Social Networks. New Identity Opportunities in the Digital Age by Bernadette Kneidinger Digital Identity: The Private and Public Paradox by Stacey M. Koosel Mystory in Myspace Rhetoric of Memory in New Median by Petra Aczél Life Publishing on the internet – a playful field of life-telling by Sari Östman From the Gutenberg Galaxy to the Internet Galaxy. Digital Textuality and the Change of Cultural Landscape by Raine Koskimaa The “Open” Ideology of Digital Culture by Robert Wilkie Digital Poetry and/in the Poetics of the Automatic by Juri Joensuu Re: appearing and Disappearing Classics. Case Study on Poetics of Two Digital Rewritings by a Finnish Poet by Marko Niemi, Kristian Blomberg Cybertextuality meets transtextuality by Markku Eskelinen Metafictionality and deterritorilization of the literary in the hypertexts by Anna Wendorff The Public Sphere of Poetry and the Art of Publishing by Risto Niemi-Pynttäri Solitude in Cyberspace by Piret Viires & Virve Sarapik Reprogramming Systems Aesthetics: A Strategic Historiography by Edward A. Shanken Stepping towards the immaterial: Digital technology revolutionizing art by Christina Grammatikopoulou Creativity in Surveillance Environment: Jill Magid and the Integrated Circuit by Amy Christmas Audience Interaction in the Cinema: An Evolving Experience by Chris Hales Delay and non-materiality in telecommunication art by Raivo Kelomees Robot: Ritual Oracle and Fetish by Thomas Riccio Digital art and children’s formal and informal practices: Exploring curiosities and challenging assumptions by Steven Naylor Locative Media and Augmented Reality: Bridges and Borders between Real and Virtual Spaces by Marisa Luisa Gómez Martíne

Socio-Cognitive and Affective Computing

Social cognition focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions. On the other hand, the term cognitive computing is generally used to refer to new hardware and/or software that mimics the functioning of the human brain and helps to improve human decision-making. In this sense, it is a type of computing with the goal of discovering more accurate models of how the human brain/mind senses, reasons, and responds to stimuli. Socio-Cognitive Computing should be understood as a set of theoretical interdisciplinary frameworks, methodologies, methods and hardware/software tools to model how the human brain mediates social interactions. In addition, Affective Computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects, a fundamental aspect of socio-cognitive neuroscience. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, electrical engineering, psychology, and cognitive science. Physiological Computing is a category of technology in which electrophysiological data recorded directly from human activity are used to interface with a computing device. This technology becomes even more relevant when computing can be integrated pervasively in everyday life environments. Thus, Socio-Cognitive and Affective Computing systems should be able to adapt their behavior according to the Physiological Computing paradigm. This book integrates proposals from researchers who use signals from the brain and/or body to infer people's intentions and psychological state in smart computing systems. The design of this kind of systems combines knowledge and methods of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, as well as physiological data measurement and processing, with those of socio-cognitive and affective computing