Walking Code

This paper describes an early stage research project that seeks to apply Situationist concepts of psychogeography to urban walking as artistic and activist practice. The project seeks to ultimately create a syntax that can be used to describe and codify the subjective spatial practice of walking in the city. This process is a conceptual and discursive exercise to generate new knowledge about urban space as embodied data space that seeks to create a practical open framework that can be deployed to algorithmically generate walking experiences tailored toward specific desires and activities. This will be achieved through the development of algorithmic methods to analyze, comprehensively describe and codify urban walking movements, developing a granular understanding of spatial movements. Walking in this project is understood as a performative act situated within urban systems based on data and algorithmic processes. As urban space is increasingly defined, determined and abstracted by these processes this effort seeks to propose a counter-movement building a language of urban walking to appropriate these processes to create rich crowd sourced walking experiences that suggest alternative user-centric modes of reclaiming the right to the city. This, of course, will also be embedded in data

Augmented Interventions: Re-defining Urban Interventions with AR and Open Data

This chapter proposes that augmented reality art and open data offer the potential for a redefinition of urban interventionist art practices. Data has emerged as a significant force in contemporary networked culture from the commercial commodification of online presence as practised by internet giants Facebook and Google to the 2013 revelations of the unprecedented scale of the US Government’s data collection regime carried out by the NSA (Gellman and Piotras, U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program, http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us- internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845- d970ccb04497_story.html, 2013). Big data and its effective deployment is seen as essential to the efficient running of any enterprise, from city governance to commercial enterprise and, of course, government intelligence services. In parallel to developments in big data open data sources have proliferated opening access to myriad data sources previously only available to Government and corporations. We have seen advances in techniques of data scraping and manipulation which have democratised the ability to parse, analyse and effectively manipulate data, developments which have powerful implications for artists and activists. This chapter examines the possibilities for redefining the activist art practice of urban intervention with data and augmented reality to introduce new hybrid techniques for critical spatial practice (Rendell, Critical spatial practice. http://www.janerendell.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/critical-spatial-practice.pdf. Accessed 18 September 2017, 2008). The combination of AR and Open Data (in the broadest post-wikileaks sense) is seen to provide a powerful tool-set for the artist/activist to augment specific sites with a critical, context-specific data layer. Such situated interventions offer powerful new methods for the political activation of sites which enhance and strengthen traditional non- virtual approaches and should be thought of as complementary to, rather than replacing, physical intervention. I offer as a case study this author’s NAMAland project, a mobile artwork which used Open Data and Augmented Reality to visualise and critique aspects of the Irish financial collapse

Locative Media as Remix

While data-driven art is not new, recent developments in technical, artistic, and social spheres have coalesced to produce new opportunities for artists and activists who remix data with space and place to form locationally specific political critiques of great power and flexibility

Preserving Born Digital Art : Lessons From Artists\u27 Practice

This paper looks at the complex nature of developing effective and appropriate strategies for the preservation of born digital art, in particular networked art. These issues are approached from the perspective of artist practitioners, focusing on a case study of the preservation of a net art project by the author. It is suggested that any preservation strategy begins with artists and the conservation practices that are inculcated into the very act of creation. The paper proposes that for institutional digital art conservation initiatives to be successful they must originate from a pre-existing culture of preservation within digital art communitie

Impact16 Transdisciplinary Symposium, Pact Zollverein, Essen Germany

IMPACT16 is an encounter with HOOD, RYBN.ORG und FORMATIONS, three expert collectives whose diversified forms of cooperation and flexible working practices transcend disciplinary boundaries. How and where do alternative realities come about both in and between different fields of knowledge? How can we productively uncover contradictory ›rift zones‹ in today’s world? What kind of frameworks for action can we cultivate? Informed by multiple perspectives and practices in the arts, politics, technology, sociology, economics and science, the contributing collectives’ inquiries and strategies circumvent disciplinary limits and constraints and open up new spaces for thought and action. The transdisciplinary symposium offers 30 participants from broad backgrounds in the arts and science, time and space for in-depth exchanges and interventions as well as experiments in both practice and thought. IMPACT16 takes place as part of the module ›Techniken des Transfers‹ within the project framework of the Alliance of International Production Houses which enables, for the first time, special conditions of support for participants. Impact is a transdisciplinary symposium that brings together artists and advanced students, practitioners and theoreticians from the natural and social sciences, technology, architecture and urban planning, philosophy, political activism, as well as from the visual and performance arts. It takes place over 4 days at Pact Zollverein center in Essen German

The construction of locative situations: locative media and the Situationist International, recuperation or redux?

A trend exists within locative media art of invoking the practices of the Situationist International (SI) as an art historical and theoretical background to contemporary practices. It is claimed that locative media seeks to re-enchant urban space though the application of locative technologies to develop novel and experimental methods for navigating, exploring and experiencing the city. To this end, SI concepts such as psychogeography and the techniques of detournement and the de ́rive (drift) have exerted considerable influence on locative media practices, but questions arise as to whether this constitutes a valid contemporary appropriation or a recuperative co-option, serving to neutralise their inherent oppositional qualities. The paper will argue that there is an identifiable strand of locative art works which through their contin- gent re-appropriation of situationist techniques can be thought of as being involved in the ‘construction of locative situations’, and that these (re)applications of situationist practices point to future directions for locative media’s artistic engagement with the accelerating ubiquity of locative technologies

The Construction of Locative Situations: the Production of Agency in Locative Media Art Practice

This thesis is a practice led enquiry into Locative Media (LM) which argues that this emergent art practice has played an influential role in the shaping of locative technologies in their progression from new to everyday technologies. The research traces LM to its origins at the Karosta workshops, reviews the stated objectives of early practitioners and the ambitions of early projects, establishing it as a coherent art movement located within established traditions of technological art and of situated art practice. Based on a prescient analysis of the potential for ubiquitous networked location-awareness, LM developed an ambitious program aimed at repositioning emergent locative technologies as tools which enhance and augment space rather than surveil and control. Drawing on Krzysztof Ziarek\u27s treatment of avant-garde art and technology in The Force of Art , theories of technology drawn from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and software studies, the thesis builds an argument for the agency of Locative Media. LM is positioned as an interface layer which in connecting the user to the underlying functionality of locative technologies offers alternative interpretations, introduces new usage modes, and ultimately shifts the understanding and meaning of the technology. Building on the Situationist concept of the constructed situation, with reference to an ongoing body of practice, an experimental practice-based framework for LM art is advanced which accounts for its agency and, it is proposed, preserves this agency in a rapidly developing field

Augmented Resistance: the possibilities for AR and data driven art

This article discusses the possibilities for Augmented Reality (AR) as a driver of data based art. The combination of AR and Open Data (in the broadest post-Wikileaks sense) is seen to provide a powerful tool-set for the artist/activist to augment specific sites with a critical, context-specific data layer. Such situated interventions offer powerful new methods for the political activation of sites which enhance and strengthen traditional non- virtual approaches and should be thought of as complementary to, rather than replacing, physical intervention. I offer as a case study this author’s “NAMAland” project, a mobile artwork which uses Open Data and Augmented Reality to visualise and critique aspects of the Irish financial collapse. The project, overlayed Dublin with an activist derived data-layer which supported and enabled physical interventions, making visible/concrete abstract financial dealings through situating them in real space, enacting a virtual layer of critique which facilitated and catalysed wider debate

#Riseandgrind: Lessons From a Biased AI

#RiseandGrind is a research-based artwork that, through a process of active engagement with the machine-learning tools of what is known as artificial intelligence, sought to make visible the complex relationship between the origins and context of training data and the results that are produced through the training process. The project using textual data extracted from Twitter hashtags that exhibit clear bias to train a recurrent neural network (RNN) to generate text for a Twitter bot, with the process of training and text generation represented in a series of gallery installations. The process demonstrated how original bias is consolidated, amplified, and ultimately codified through this machine learning process. It is suggested that this is not only reproductive of the original bias but also constitutive, in that black-box machine learning models shape the output but not in ways that are readily apparent or understood. This paper discusses the process of creating and exhibiting the work and reflects on its outcomes

Forget the flâneur

This paper discusses the connections between the ‘flâneur’, Baudelaire's symbol of modernity, the anonymous man on the streets of nineteenth century Paris, and his contemporary digital incarnation, the ‘cyberflâneur’. It is argued that, although the fl neur could be successfully re-imagined as the cyberfl neur in the early days of the web, this nineteenth century model of male privilege no longer fits the purpose. It is suggested that it is time to forget the flâneur and search for a new model to consider the peripatetic nature of location-aware networked devices in the digitally augmented city