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2017, May 9 12 CONFERENCE Geomedia 2017

Lai-Tze Fan edited this page May 23, 2017 · 37 revisions

LF = side note by Lai-Tze Fan

Geomedia 2017: Spaces of the In-Between

Karlstad, Sweden


Wednesday, May 10: DAY 1

KEYNOTE 1: Gillian Rose

"Visualising the Smart City" (The Open University, UK)

On the digital image

  • Hoelzel and Marie - Soft Images 2015: the way we experience digital images is different from analogue images

    • a digital image is a file, an image, that appears on the screen as a geometrical object but it's inextricably mixed up with data
    • appears to be a hard image, but is a soft image
    • gives the illusion of stability over time
  • an image becomes a tentative representation within a constantly emergent and amorphous digital field

    • Hoelzel and Marie: "the actualization of network data"

Smart cities

  • the smart city "uses data to run itself better"

  • Rose did a study (close reading) of promotional videos of smart cities that she found on YouTube

    • e.g. "Citeos: The City with a Smile!" (Vinci energies)
    • aimed at authoritative audiences (e.g. policy makers) that in the UK need to be forward looking but also need to save money
    • 80% of cities in Europe claim to have a smart city plan underway
    • questions of what kinds of people get represented
    • smart cities are always about mobility, esp traffic mobility
    • mobility of people, infrastructure, and especially data -- all of these types of mobility are translated and turned into visible data
    • even the design and setting of the videos are mobile: things are always shifting around
      • getting a sense of smooth sliding on screen that's "crucial to the kind of rhetoric that proposes 'smart'--the future of the urban"
      • "this digital fluid visuality"
  • compares these promotional videos to Twitter and the speed of it, lack of deep engagement

    • ran Twitter through a data visualization method: Lev Manovich's free software of visualizing cities through selfies
    • Rose investigates why the default of these visualizations is to ponder the colour dispersion, such as the blue/orange contrasts
    • orange/yellow section is a cluster of photos of people being "smart": being somewhere smart, at a social event, taking a photo of something smart, and being smart by posting about this on Twitter
      • Rose calls this section affective
      • Colin McFarland calls the city a learning machine
    • Rose makes the point of the contradiction of learning about the future of the city through photographs, which are a representation of the past
    • blue sections depict the digital: the sky, water, air -- metaphors of the cloud
      • Rose mentions John Durham Peters on air and hysterical media

Conclusion

  • issues of methodology

  • wants to think more carefully about flows of these data and their circulations via geolocative data

    • issues of labour about where sophisticated digital images are produced; "issues of data journalism"
    • LF: what about by WHOM?
  • geography of "thrown-togetherness" (someone else's term): Rose is only looking at one platform as one approach to this digital field and cities as fields

    • cities, in Withers 2015 pg 17: "stratified constellation of [dense] technical memory matter, composed of resources that shape political and cultural imaginaries ... with depth, height, scale, extensiveness and duration ... Its forms may change and its content migrate, accuing or shedding"
  • on the Internet of things: Twitter feed @theinternetofshit (?), with people collecting things in terms of where the Internet breaks down

    • "thank god someone has finally put the Internet in a hairbrush"
  • SUMMARY: 3 things to track through in the field of digital geomediations"

    1. circulations (fields, networks, clouds)
      • Louise Amours (sp?) on clouds
    2. thrown-togetherness
      • when different forms of the digital rub up against each other and create different effects
      • people can ignore big urban screens (CORPORATE) bc they are becoming used to be attracted to/distracted by small little screens (micro-CORPORATE?)
    3. reinventions

Q & A

  • Q: Simon: question on methodology--assessment of own experience of using these digital methods and data vis in the humanities project

    • we are highly persuased by big data as media scholars and their high rhetorical prowess, but epistemic values of these methods have been questioned
  • Q: democratizing access to and participation with digital tools

    • lots of people are not using these tools thoughtful; taking the data as face-value and proof
  • A: Rose acknowledges she's Foucauldian in training and sees a disciplinary and rhetorical contrast in approach to digital tools

  • Q: when looking at promo videos, did you come across critiques of smart cities as a privilege in itself?

    • "smart" has inherent privilege; investing in a smart city is a privilege: some people cannot afford to work smart, but have to work hard
  • A: Rose notes that rhetorically, the reason smart is strong is because its opposite is to work stupid, and no one wants to work stupid

    • she's looking at different smart projects--for instance, one on efficient shopping and avoiding shopping crowds, which also reflects capitalist privilege
    • critiques of "smart" when there are city blocks that are designed to not have toilets; how is that smart??
  • Q: James North: utopian thinking of smart cities; any value of looking backwards to descriptions or ideas of "high tech" cities in the past?

    • LF: hrm...is smart relative? Like modernity as a relative high tech and smart.

PANEL: Urban Communication and Social Power

André Jansson and Maja Klausen -- "The Spreadable City: Urban Exploration and Connective Media"

  • talk emerges from Handbook of Emergent 21st C Cities
  • drawing from Henri LeFebvre (1974) -- urban space should be conceived of as a contested and multilayered social space
  • exploration in terms of counter-hegemony, relative to searches for authenticity and autonomy
  • negotiation between visiting abandoned spaces and representing them (esp through spreadable media and through cultural capital)
  • Jansson and Klausen asking: how do spreadable media contribute to "porosity" and internal differentiation of cultural fields?

Martin Potter and Jonathon Louth -- "Songs from the White Building: Storytelling and the Production of Space"

  • comes out of a documentary project in development since 2010
  • Potter went from documentary work to immaterial focus
  • documentary projects previously done:
    • bigstories.co: Potter describes the development of intimacy and community through communal exchange of work and stories
    • Island Connect: reconciliation project through digital storytelling

White Building project

  • draws from Roberto Unger (2014) -- What is Wrong with the Social Sciences Today

  • "It's not about blueprints, it's about successions; it's not architecture, it's music."

  • by building plasticity into design of architecture, enables recurring destruction of capitalist regime (ooh!)

  • builds a theoretical framework through LeFebvre's spatial triad: perceived, conceived, imagined

    • HL himself speaking to Foucauldian models of space such as the heterotopia
      • Potter mentions LeFebrvre's conception of heterotopias (distinguished through David Harvey in Rebel Cities)
      • a utopian reimagining
    • thinking of the value of thinking of utopias in spatial design
  • Potter describes Unger's method, unlike LeFebvre's, as an anti-necessitarian social theory

Exploration of Cambodian white building

  • in order to address urban problem of people coming from provinces into cities, needed to provide social housing

    • briefly refers to the white building as clean and pure, then describes the economic organization (segregration?) of the city
    • LF: really paints a picture of the social atmosphere of this city from an aerial view; maybe a geolocative project here
  • from the 70s through to Khmer Rouge and current desolation, there have been multiple creative interventions of the white building

    • have set up many public space shows and events: gallery space, library and archive room, festivals
    • over a period of eight years, white building has remediated itself
    • communities organizing itself to run different events
    • online archive: www.whitebuilding.org

Tindra Thor -- "Urban Hacks -- Exploring Graffiti as Disruptive Urban Communication"

  • graffiti artists look at spaces that people seldom look at and make them their own

    • see the unseeable spaces
  • looking for marks in the city of people and how she could interact with them

  • she saw a tree with a Christmas ornament and added to another ornament next to it; later, someone added a stuffed heart that says "I love you"

  • looking at spatial hactivism from the perspective of autonomous Marxist framework that has connections to graffiti and street art

  • What is graffiti? Writing graffiti as a subversion of the hegemonic imagining of what the city should look like

    • a politically communicative act
  • What is hactivism? Expanding from technological placement to analogue and urban environment

    • carries idea of freedom re: tech skills and open source
    • source (?): "blowing apart of depressive structures"; a hack is about outsmarting something
  • hackers (build things) vs. crackers (destroy things)

  • LF: question of exclusivity of hacking and the exclusivity of graffiti circles: to belong, to have a personalized tag, to recognize other tags

    • what do you think about the mass-popularization of political graffiti through people like Banksy?
  • LF: hactivism is often about erasure, not addition. Really, hactivism should be about destruction: Alan Liu thinks about hactivist art as objects that are made, singular, significant, and then destroyed. How do you negotiate absence with added presence? How does attention factor in with this negotiation?

Arno van der Hoeven -- "Historic Urban Landscapes on Social Media: A Participatory Approach to Urban Heritage"

  • examines UNESCO's Historical Urban Landscapes project, their recommendations for integrating heritage preservation and urban planning

  • this project looks at how it's possible to reconcile hertiage and urban planning

    • for example, how to give new uses to historical buildings
  • it also encourages the use of info and comm tech to documen, understand and present the complex layering of urban areas

  • van der Hoeven's Q: how can heritage practices on social media address some of these issues?

    • e.g. online participatory heritage practices
    • invite audiences to contribute their own memories, tagging spaces--crowdsourced activities

Storytelling

  • using social media for narrating the "layers of lived experience" (Cauchi-Santoro 2016)
  • active engagement with heritage, bring info to the public domain
  • storytelling and mapping represent the complex layering of historic urban landscapes re: what the UNESCO recommendation tries to achieve

PLENARY PANEL: "Geographies of News"

Chair: Henrik Ömebring

Julie Firmstone -- on local news (University of Leeds, UK)

  • news bound with geographies; newsworthiness tied up with ideas of proximity and local relevance; boundedness of space
  • narrative of local journalism in crisis in academia, industry, and policy making
    • "not a sexy topic" (Klies Nielsen, 2015)
  • examines how "crisis" rhetoric is a useful tool to sharpen practices and democratic value of local journalism and news

Exploration of changes in local news

  1. Organizational structures

    • local news as less local: results in daily to weekly publications and closure of many local newspapers
    • consequences for: plurality, diversity, quality, localness?
    • emerging sources of news, esp. digital news sources: 300 in UK, 438 in USA, 350 in Netherlands
      • hyperlocal/sublocal news might better serve a small neighbourhood
  2. Journalistic roles

    • decline in informational role and watchdog role
    • increased sensationalism, campaign role (ways to connect and engage with public through dramatization, anger, "standing out"), and representation of the public
    • reliance on social media for news; but in this sense, excludes those who don't participate digitally--becomes a kind of (source?) "upscale democracy"
  3. Audience consumption practices

    • in viewing local news as part of a media ecology, must consider local news from the perspective of the audience
    • Chris Anderson: "news ecosystem is the entire ensemble"
      • must take a non-media centric view
      • should consider local authorities and other local actors
    • a media ecology approach should evaluate changes through audience conversation and research

Lars Nyre -- "Making Media Prototypes to Explore Media Journalism" (University of Bergen, Norway)

  • chronology of different prototypes for locative journalism on mobile media: LocaNews, PediaCloud, Amplifon, NewsCloud, Auditor
    • some based on sound and some on text
    • this talk will address two of these media types: LocaNews and NewsCloud
  • collaborative basis to developing these prototypes:
    • collaborative team needed: info science perspective (agile, scrum), user interface design (interaction design), media scholar to explore domains, critical analysis based on interviews and qualitative interpretation

Medium 1: LocaNews

  • local news app for the mobile phone at Extreme Sports Festival, Voss, 2009
  • three proximity zones with different news copies for each zone: over 500m away (town), 100-500m (neighbourhood), 0-100m (here)
    • zoom-in stories: for people who were more interested in visiting the place
  • difficult for journalist students to write news stories according to location (space) and not actuality (time)
  • used the app LocaReader, which users found intuitive
  • problem of pitching this to anybody: the more local the story is, the lower the threshold of relevance, but the size of the audience is also lower

Medium 2: NewsCloud

  • located in London April 2014 and Bergen June 2016
  • word cloud displays drew words from articles were all written on Wikipedia or Bergens regional newspaper
  • again, journalists were more concerned with temporal actuality than with geographical location
    • marketing personell were way more enthusiastic to commercializing this: automatized advertisement
  • similiar to LocaNews, aspect of CONTINGENCY: readers found interesting content by accident through "sideways search" and "serendipity"
  • word clouds as just as useful for drawing out news info as live maps

Conclusion: "Locative journalism is a futile endeavour." - esp. bc journalists themselves were unenthusiastic - journalists want this to be time-relevant; actuality news

Nikki Usher: on data visualization of the DC Beltway and the idea of elitism in Beltway journalism (George Washington Uni, USA)

  • data visualizations of red/blue dispersion in the USA: red seems to dominate but in these visualizations of red counties, only about 22 million people

  • the narrative that Trump won because of rural voters doesn't make sense

  • Usher looks at the Washington DC Beltway: to be eligible for Congress journalism, one must live within the Beltway, where the real estate is 44% more expensive than living just outside of the beltway

    • so: is Beltway elitism a real thing?
    • what is a "beltway story"?
  • methodology: interviews with regional reporters, big data analysis of Senate Committee & Correspondence list using Twitter (lists political journalists in Washington), and LinkedIn analysis (how long have people been in Washington, have they gone to elite schools?)

    • some of these journalists are the best and brightest of young journalists, but they lack historical perspective
    • and the ones who come from elsewhere (most of them!) lack local familiarity

Matthew Weber -- "Space and Place: The Fallacy of Online Local News" (School of Comm and Info, Rutgers University, USA)

@docmattweber

  • hyperlocal news is not profitable

  • hyperlocal media operations are "geographically-based, community-oriented, original-news-reporting organizations indigenous to the web and intended to fill perceived gaps in coverage of an issue or region and to promote civic engagement"

  • GDELT maps journalism across the globe: and clearly favours the West

  • archive.org : "Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more"

    • good tool to look at how online content has changed over time
  • power of archived web content: screen grab from Donald Trump's website

    • nothing about press releases, but they disappeared
    • Internet Archive has the press releases, including one from Dec 7, 2015: "Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration"
    • a great way to view and understand what existed online even if that content changed or was deleted
  • Weber looks at the metadata level for easier analysis; much smaller scale (50 or 60x smaller in computing power)

  • via Internet Archive, analyzing early news history of the web

    • much shorter stories over history
    • hyperlocal news is not necessarily local in content; proposes meso-local news?


Thursday, May 11: DAY 2

KEYNOTE 2: Christian Licoppe

"Mobilities and Urban Encounters in Public Places in the Age of Locative Media" (Telecom Paristech, France)

  • dynamics among public/private, strange/familiar
  • ethnographic research in locative media

The modern metropolis: encounters with anonymous strangers

  • urban public places have a different expectation of behaviour

  • contrasts with the ideal-typical village

  • urban spaces as fluxes of equivalent entities

  • the notion of onlooking is something central; characteristic participation status in urban public places

    • chance meeting with acquaintances projects expectation of mutual acknowledgement and a conversation
  • Licoppe contrasts urban stranger encounters to location aware mobile applications

  • the phenomenon of discovering others on screen, so that strangers are not anonymous anymore, but psuedonymous strangers

    • personal info is given and so they are not really "strangers" anymore
  • games (Mogi, Ingress, Dragonquest 9), social networks (Foursquare), dating apps (Tinder), car sharing (Uber)

1. Revisiting Georges Perec's Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1974)

  • sat for three days in Paris café and tried to describe all things around him

  • then switched to described "the rest":

    • "that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars and clouds" (Perec 2010: 3)
    • Perec as an onlooker
  • Licoppe replicates and extends Perec's project through ethnographic study of Foursquare

    • looking not only at the kind of things that could only become apparent to connected onlookers
    • but also that which would require to step out of Perec's frame of participation in urban public places
    • there are some things that don't fit or make sense in the Parisian looking stance
  • Perec describes what is visible around him to his naked eye, based on common sense categorization with lists that any passer-by would recognize

  • if you do the same with connected users, you also see places through repetition

  • with Foursquare, people were creating places (lists of places) through checking in

    • "repackaged" places in Foursquare's list interface
  • Perec describes passer-bys: descriptors for anonymous strangers in public places seen from an anonymous onlooker perspective (except for a celebrity and a familiar stranger)

  • and there are repeated encounters with some people (who are either strangers or socially connected)

    • with Foursquare, these are not people to be seen, but clicked upon
    • strangers with available personal info (profiles and history)
    • cannot be described within the frame of the passing anonymous stranger

- so: the onlooker stance, which is central to Perec, cannot be sustained completely when dealing with locative aware relations

2. Encounters with "Psuedonymous" Strangers in the Location-Augmented Metropolis

  • special case of encounters with strangers: meeting people we have never met but about whom we have prior knowledge

    • e.g. being told to go see X and Y for something (like a hairdresser); psuedonymous stranger
  • compare with encounters with virtual acquaintances and the development of a digital service economy

    • peer to peer platforms and social network applications
    • increasing opportunities for virtual acquaintance encounters: e.g. MOGI game in Japan
  • this is a trend that is reinforced with the move from computers to mobile devices

  • mobile locative media banalize chance encounters with virtual acquaintances and pseudonymous strangers

  • Case 1: chance encounter through Foursquare: a stranger came up to someone and asked if they were the [name] who had been interacting with them on Foursquare, and they spent an afternoon together

    • characteristic pattern: discover mutual proximity, build on this to initiate face to face encounter (Licoppe and Inada 2010), managing the identification recognition of the pseudonymous other
  • Case 2: Grindr "multiplex" encounter in a bar

    • juxtaposition of "open and friendly" Grindr profile versus scowly and unfriendly person in real life
    • encounter that mixes face-to-face encounter and mediated interaction
    • a multiplexity of communication channels

Mobile locative media and future urban mobilities and socialities

  • should locative media become pervasive?
  • the default expectation that a person one gets near to would be a "pseudonymous stranger"
  • Licoppe examines Black Mirror, a TV show depicting dystopian future in which people are connected as familiar strangers
    • LF: show satirically depicts lack of eye contact
    • initiating topics in encounters with strangers, using safe topics and relying on available shared context as a reservoir of relevant topics
    • in a connected world, info available on screen personal data, the form and content of which is shaped by design
    • co-experienced as mobile bodies

3. The Stalker: A Deviant Figure in the Metropolis

  • what makes the stalker scary is that they threaten the boundary between urban public spaces (where he comes from) and private spaces (where he trespasses)

    • they are a deviant that is a resident of the metropolis
    • in most cases, protected by anonymity and invisibility of the public space
  • if an encounter happens, often leads to aggression and violence

  • the "connected stalker" is not invisible, but detectable as a pseudonymous stranger

    • detected in the vicinity of the home, not necessarily in a private place
    • difficult to discriminate between legitimate occupation of public place and trespassing
    • threatening because of their silence; taken as a refusal to acknowledge mutual proximity
  • also possible: new forms of solidarity and care based on location awareness

    • one example of stalking through Mogi, two friends are 1000 miles away watch out for each other
    • fits into arguments regarding liquid surveillance (Lyon and Bauman 2013)

Conclusion

  • city of (anonymous) strangers --> connected city of (psuedonymous) strangers
  • destabilizes and reshapes figures which are typical in the metropolis: the onlooker and the stalker
  • would be interesting to look at the figure of the flaneur
  • reframes the organization of chance encounters between strangers in pblic places
  • explores the potential of technologies which are there and developing
    • weak digital privacy laws, strong neoliberalist politics
  • implications regarding:
    • urban planning: developing individualized urban planning
    • political theory: severing the link between urban public spaces and the democratic order inherited from modernity***

PANEL: Place and Space: Chinese Cities in Digital Practices

Sun Wei -- "Knitting a 'Chinese Knot' of Urban Places: Urban Communication as Localism -- A Study on the Space of Shanghai's 'Sinan Mansion'"

Research Questions

  • how tech generate a novel sense of place, characterized by the practices of 'nodal subjectivity,' flowing mosaic space and multiple timelines

  • "global sense of place"

  • metaphorical comparison of Sinan Mansion to the meaning and implication of a Chinese Knot

  • Sinan Mansion in Shanghai is a local landmark

    • in Luwan, a formerly French concession area--a district that serves as a symbol of Shanghai's cosmopolitanism in the mobile globalization era
  • Sun considers the value of locals in the Luwan region, their lifestyle hybridizing Western and Oriental cultures

  • local place identity is built on the ideal of "the classical old Shanghai," which knits together aspects of history and culture

  • municipal government draws from the French consession era to "re-globalize" Shanghai in the ways that it has previously been thought

    • Shanghai isn't compared to Beijing or Xian, but Paris or New York
    • emphasizing idea that "Shanghai belongs to the world"

Use of WeChat account of Sinan Mansion

  • account shows the weaving of history, geographical factors, and interactions in virtual-cyberspace

    • realistic activities and cultural imaginations are stressed--combo of present practices and French culture/history
  • Sinan is open to the public and offers a QR code-based tour with several routes

  • Sun argues that the line between virtual and material fades out

  • frequent branding of Sinan as pinnacle of Chinese cosmopolitanism or globalized culture (?)

    • the local residents disagree because of poor living experience--e.g. bad plumbing
  • Chinese knot metaphor: Sinan is a node linking China to the global network

    • but through co-presence of these intricacies, comparable to a knot rather than node

Xie Jing -- "Community Cartography: How Mobile Interfaces Generate Senses of Connectivity and Implacement"

  • mobile interfaces as a method for locals to recognize and memorize community

Mobility and sense of community

  • transportation and info tech create vast mobility

  • new mobility results in a new sense of community

    • mobility and settlement are no longer opposites, but as counterparts
  • existing abstract system and mediation of connecting people in modern society; using imagination provided by mass media and standardized technologies

  • but the new practice of community includes things like: city pedestrian, bike sharing, and mobile apps by newspapers

  • Xie is interested in how people depict themselves in the city as examined through Weibo (China's Twitter)

  • also interested in the production of content of newspaper mobile apps by community directors and residents rather than journalists

  • bodily-spatial relationships have changed: "more sufficient bodily-spatial completeness" "because we understand more about where we are, where we are going, and what we are doing"

    • sense of assimilation, orientation, and safety via wider and more historical contexts
  • discusses "Mapping Yiwu City by your Running" on WeChat as a collaborative project where people create patterns on maps by running them out

Zhao Min & Lu Ye -- "Lawn Music Festivals as Landscape and Public Life in Cosmopolitanism"

Shanghai's 2040 Plan

  • the imagination of cultural space in government-led top-down urban regeneration/renewal in Shanghai

    • striving for excellence in "global city" idea
    • "Shanghai 2040" plan of innovation, humanities, green
  • Shanghai's mayor Han Zheng described the ideal future Shanghai: the building could be read, the streets are easy to walk around, and the city should be culturally warm

  • similar Western models: London Canary Wharf, Oslo's Fjord, and Paris' Le Marais

  • interested in public parks, summer festivals, and Old Town restoration

  • have re-opened the Dai Shi Jei (Big World) building, where there used to be many performances in 1930s Shanghai

Case Study: Strawberry Music Festival 2017

  • background: the music festival is a new thing in China

  • the lawn music festival is less than 20-years-old in China

    • the first one was the Midi Music Festival in 2000, focusing on underground rock music
    • youths called this "China's Woodstock"
    • grew very fast: Midi 2004 in Beijing: 4 days, 45 rock bands, 80k viewers
    • in 2007, 24 lawn music festivals in China; 2012 -- 89, 2014 -- 148
  • Strawberry supported by music company MODERNSKY

    • expanding to Hong Kong **********
    • this is more mainstream, not underground rock
    • strawberry connotes ideas of "spring, romantic, love" unlike underground rock (LF: rebellion??)
  • everyone attending is under 50-year-olds, especially girls 18-20 years

  • spatial structure: open space suggesting welcome, watching each other and the screen

  • deliberate attendance for girls to watch each other and overdress as much as possible

    • sharing on social media to get across the idea that they are cool bc they participated in this
    • LF: reminds me of Coachella and Instagram culture
    • LF Q : do you think these things are determinist if they develop separately? Or is it not really separate when Chinese pop culture adopts and adapts their own digital versions: Weibo, WeChat, now Strawberry

Conclusion

  • new landmark for young culture in Shanghai
    • arguably a mix of commercialism and independence of personality
  • "if you give them this space, they will do something for themselves"
    • the government thinks Midi is dangerous, whereas Strawberry is "safe" and "soft"

Pan Ji -- "Our Places, Our Rule: How Weibo-Bloggers Create Digital Place Identification Protesting the Jingan-Zhabei Incorporation"

  • Pan considers changes in geographical spaces and the meanings that the government gives to these spaces

  • Zhabei-Jingan incorporation: a proposed merge of two districts

    • but Jingan is more Westernized (related to French concession era)
    • Zhabei related to labour class; the men are considered more masculine, "they fight better" (lol)
    • social media compared the merge to a "wealthy lady marrying a former farmer"
  • mediating geographical space in cyberspace: overlapping of spaces to become something new

  • mentions the significance of ancestral homes in Chinese culture that still applies to Shanghainese identity

    • if your grandfather is from some rural space, then you are from that place, no matter how long it's been since you've moved to Shanghai
  • Pan argues for the impact of social media to publish and pool together otherwise private feelings/cognitions/memories about space

    • stuff that used to be invisible becomes visible in a public space
    • also, gives urban spaces new meaning by juxtaposing texts from various time-spaces
  • Shanghai Fabu is a Shanghainese Weibo account

  • government effort but netizens can also add their own content

  • problematic relationship and contrast between non-local official vs. locals residents

    • decision by non-local officials do not represent the interests of locals
  • gov's rationale for the merge: will promote development and cut down on administrative costs

  • intertextuality of cyberspace motivates civic engagement and distrust of government's urban land policy

  • research found satirized protests and open requests for local decision-making about urban spaces are commonplace

    • Shanghainese citizens play the "Shanghainese ancestry" card to argue that the non-local officials don't have the historical knowledge to accurately represent and speak to necessary changes in Shanghai

Zhou Haiyan & Li Meihui -- "The Fourth Pattern of the Public Bicycle Network: A Study on the No-Pile Sharing Bicycle Network in Urban China"

Fourth pattern of urban comm network

  • three patterns of urban public bicycle network represents three patterns of urban comm network

    • considered models of Copenhagen Pattern (wide coverage of networks, enhanced ability to cross different spaces), Paris Pattern (nodes finely distributed), and Developing Country Pattern (numerous network veins)
  • relative to bike sharing system, Li notes that the in-pile system doesn't tell people if there's a bike or not, but non-pile system is more accurate for identifying bikes in the area

    • credit system where proper use of bike location sharing = 0.5-1 RMB for 30 min rent
    • improper use costs a user 40 credits and low credits = 100 RMB for 30 min rent

PANEL: Digital Spatial Ecologies: Geolocating the Layers of History and Memory in New Media

Agatha Mergler -- "Walter Benjamin and Geomedia"

  • Benjamin couldn't use a map until basically when he was finishing his PhD
  • WB digital project: walterbenjamindigital.com (?)
    • inspired by his interaction with the city of Berlin

Benjamin and Maps

  • layers of the Berlin map: layers of social classes and their dwelling and movement in the city space
  • Topotext Digital Tool: location tool to map places mentioned in text
    • Mergler looked at Berlin Chronicle
  • considers thinking how these maps can be used to map Benjamin's memories, as he had wished relative to an idea of the kind of Berlin of his time
    • LF: if you're using photography, doesn't that participate in the loss of aura? This kind of representation is mediated nostalgia. Photography always has the potential of mediated nostalgia.
    • LF: reminds me of Baudrillard's Colliseum

Geomedia in Benjamin?

  • Kingsbury and Jones argue that Benjamin's theory about aura could be applied to think about Google Earth
    • dialogic thinking in an Apollonian way: geomedia as good or bad, surveillance as ubiquitous or resisted via geomedia

Markus Reisenleitner -- "The Digital Traces of History: Geolocating Vienna's Gentrification"

  • explores the value given to the local as something that is very much dependent on the imaginaries of space that produce certain forms of boundedness
    • how is this exploited?
  • ease of digital mapmaking obviously leads to proliferation of dig maps
    • but maps' representations of urban phenomena are "slippery"

(- urban planners of Celebration, Florida were tasked with creating a history for the development)

Theorizing digital mapping tools

  • affordances of digital mapping tools continue to produced ever-more detailed landscape that are related to De Certeau's description of mapping of "opaque past and uncertain future"
    • Reisenleitner reads digital mapping tools as a strategy of representing the future in the way that masks its uncertainty
    • compares with Deleuze and Guattari's "tracing" as reproduction through selection that is static and modernist
  • flattened conceptualizations of local have effect of deterritorialized gaze of panoptic gaze that needs to be subject to critique (with considerations of alternative formations)

Vienna's gentrification

  • what can be mobilized?
  • 2016: 150th anniversary of the Ringstraße in Vienna as part of transformation into modern city (with rising population)
  • now, population rising once again through migrants and working class district--which were not depicted in original idealized mapped plans of this future Vienna
  • mobilization of dig maps for large-scale development and renewal projects

Three development projects

  • Reisenleitner explores three differently scaled development projects: Main Station, Loft City (Ankerbrot) and Aspern Urban Lakeside

  • before WWI, Vienna was capital of Hapsburg empire and had its highest population

    • these three sites as part of wider strategy of recentering density
    • tracing changes in these sites allow for understanding of established boundaries between bourgeosie and proliteriat
  • discusses futuristic mockups and long exposure photography that implies fast-moving city and people

    • juxtaposed with "sepia-toned photos of derelict warehouses on the wrong side of the tracks"
  • LoftCity's history pitched as part of development's "authentic" working class history

    • Instagram pull of photos from LoftCity make no reference to this "authentic" history, but are largely party photos of the people who can afford to live in these lofts
  • difficult to interpret "official remembering" through spatial meaning making

  • but easier to recuperate in-between spaces and vectors of mobility that are obscured in these gentrification projects and how they're marketed

  • Urban Lakeside and bakery became prominent through delivery bands that criss-crossed the cities

    • pay attn to them to get different impression of what's happening on these surfaces
    • drawing out criss-crosses of arrival/departure with different historical depths
    • Benjaminian understanding of space; how these roots are mobilized in specific locations in any given moment

Joshua Synenko -- "Play, Preservation and the User-oriented City: Navigating (through) Flusser’s Technical Image"

  • geomedia's large impact on aesthetics, politics, history, and knowledge

  • revisits Flusser to ask: what does it mean to envision as a solitary memory practice?

  • negotiates different literature perspectives of geomedia and its affordances and limitations

    • so: geospatial interfaces challenge our indiv and collective identification with space
  • urban computing design aimed at situating human control

    • UC designers and collective users are equally concerned with collective memory approach
  • collective memory explored through: interrogation of sites, politics, experiences, and technologies

  • Jason Farman argues that pervasive computing challenges the expectations of the downfalls (?) of computing, such as presence, action, communication, and memory

Flusser's "imaged world"

  • Synenko examines Flusser's imaged world as an epistemic and ontological intervention
  • for Flusser, the image establishes distance from the concrete world
    • tech images are programmed as opposed to being apprehended
  • Flusser: "The apparatus does as the photographer desires, but the photographer can only desire what the apparatus can do."
  • maybe expand how we think of memory to encompass Flusser's envisioning, address subjectivity at the heart of collective memory

Mark Terry: "Contemporary Treatments of Actuality: Digital and Spatial Turns to Social Change"

  • issues of authenticity and being "truthful" in documentary filmmaking; and "whose voice appears"
  • but contemporary advances in digital domain and with multilinear doc, changes these kinds of expectations
  • mentions Lev Manovich's syntagmatic and paradigmatic organization of content in databases (versus narratives)
    • paradigmatic content as the imagined (associated in theory)

Youth Climate Report

  • created through Fusion software

  • 250 film units on a GIS map; each is a standalone documentary produced by a student addressing various climate change aspects

    • but lots of content formed through student interaction--"hidden data discovered in the spaces in between"
    • like data formed through spatial analysis
  • project goals:

    • visual data delivery system of new climate research around the world
    • oops, missed one ):
    • provide voice for global scientific community
  • UN delegates and negotiators have a better understanding of the scientific data that they would otherwise only see numerically and on paper

  • Youth Climate Report connects what scentists talk about with images and more information

  • nonlinear web create possibilities and obstacles for documentarians and viewers

    • "important that viewers do not have too many options available"
    • but the multilinear documentary is often about these options
  • with the idea that choices disrupt the "flow" of documentaries, Terry has separated the interruptive metadata from the individual videos

Virtual Reality approach

  • new project that depicts ice shell collapse in Antarctica in the Winter
  • DEM photography used to take GPS satellite image of the snow as it is in Antarctica and mapped into the VR project

Q from Maureen Engel for Jill and Lai-Tze: how much does this matter that this is in an urban wild?



Friday, May 12: DAY 3

PANEL: Theorizing and Historicizing Geomedia

Paul Adams -- "Filter Bubbles in Geo-historical Context"

  • draws upon "attention economy" from Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck
  • issues of distraction from attention in American political rhetoric
  • Trump on Twitter as a "weapon of mass distraction"

Filter bubbles

  • filter bubbles: geographers have discussed the power of distance to shape knowledge and information
    • such that geographical separation contributes to heterogeneity of worldviews
    • similarly: academic bubbles of schools of thought that may shut down alternative perspectives
  • Adams compares with digital bubbling and containment
  • example of New Guinea landscape of rugged terrain that physically separated people such that their languages have developed separately and have become very distinct

Echo chambers

  • echo chambers: "largely closed, mostly non-interacting polarized communities centered on different narratives" Bessi 2016
  • compared with filter bubble that may monitor digital activities through algorithms that subsequently shape your online activities
    • Adams has noticed that his ads in Sweden offer things like "how to learn a foreign language in a month" and "taxes for ex-pats"
  • cookies tracking personal info as surveillance mechanism
    • forms a key part of attention economy: grabbing, catching, utilizing through digital surveillance

Filter bubbles and "fake news"

  • alternative media lacks a way of "calling out" fake and invented stories

Christoph Borbach -- "Times of the In-Between. Towards the Epistemic Background of Locative Media"

  • U Siegen: "Locating Media" research training group

  • re: people who think they know what GPS is, which thinking traditions and epistemes inform geomedia?

  • thinking about how radar and sonar have also shaped geomedia

    • sonicity (acoustic and electromagnetic phenomena)
    • reads the frequency domain as an epistemological object

Spatial and temporal structures of communication

  • draws from Claude E. Shannon's "mathematical theory of communication"

    • in addition to the chart's representation of spatial in-betweens, the physical characteristics of communication delay also suggest temporal aspect of commmunication
    • indexical temporal effect that is a fundamental part of locative media
    • things take time to be sent from one point to another
  • Aristotle verbalized the concept of metaxy: to metaxy (the in-between)

    • LF: IN-BETWEENESS AND ACTION; RELATE TO DISSERTATION

Shifts in acoustic episteme

  • time-delay property has been utilized by sonar and radar, and later GPS
    • Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni may have been the first to perceive delay as a function of the perception that could be calculable
    • in Die Akustik (1802)
    • demonstrates an epistemological shift in the conception of sound (in terms of measurement)
  • different method of sounding: Franz Algnor proposed a shift in the rhythm of sounding lines to rhythm of frequency (1922)
  • LF: Borbach seems to suggest a De Certeauean texturology of the ocean based on its materiality
    • he mentions the materiality of the ocean--a "fluid and liquid channel"
    • readable but also computable

Tristan Thielmann -- "Towards a General Media-methodology of Navigation"

  • changes in discourses of geomedia
  • has previously tried to describe a genre of converging cartographic and geographic representations
    • methodology now has to consider situated geography
  • case studies will be on the first GPS and first digital car navigation system

Early "virtual travel"

  • virtual travel through pre-recording tech can be traced to 1905
    • attempts to capture residential routes through "photo-auto guides"
    • navigation instructions were included as arrows within the photographs
  • numbered photo-auto guides correspond to a larger map with these numbers
    • e.g. Photographic Automobile Map Chicago to Milwaukee (1905)
    • only the chosen photographs were added to the network of the maps
      • LF: issues of archival and selection/exclusion

Early GPS car navigation: ETAK

  • compares to the ETAK Navigator in 1985 that later became the TomTom

    • offered a first person navigational perspective
  • Thielmann tried out the ETAK: it only shows you where you are and where you want to go, not how to get there

    • but still offered the user a new perspective: an idea of what was and is "a digital place"
  • Downs and Stea's (1973) wayfinding process: four sequential and interrelated steps:

    1. determining orientation
    2. making route decisions
    3. monitoring the route
    4. recognizing the destination
  • compares determining orientation to Foursquare and Swarm

    • Foursquare agorithms that recommend restaurants depending on where you've previously eaten and checked in; Swarm tracks your checkins of leisure and compares them with your friends "to see who has had the best week" (lolllllll -_-)
    • re: #1 of wayfinding: determines what (where??) the place is, where the person is, where they were, and where they will go to
  • "Place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place" (Tuan 1977) LF: return to this to think about pause

  • LF: digital place visualized mapping of Foursquare (and by Foursquare) uses the orange/blue colouring to designate placement and maybe "energy" or dynamicism

    • Q: I'm wondering if you've tried to read into these colour designations and their meaning, as Gillian Rose did with Manovich's blue/orange city photo visualizations from Keynote 1??
    • blue as the digital: sky, water, air, cloud--maybe as the designation of precision and knowing through these hard blue dots that tell you where you are; you are here
    • orange as being "smart" but also warm and affective--maybe as the fluidity and flux of affect, trajectory over designation?
  • A: more uniform look to the blue/orange


KEYNOTE 3: Scott McQuire

"Geomedia, Urban Communication, and Participatory Public Space" (University of Melbourne, Aus)

Opening notes

  • dynamics of networked urban space in an urban context that is characterized by growth/scale of cities and cities vis-à-vis life on the planet
  • draws upon Hannah Arendt on public space as "the appearance of the political"
  • public spaces as critical encounter zones for people who are different
  • "geomedia" emerges from many points; for McQuire: impact of media on space/place, and vice versa
    • with each as complex, heterogeneous assemblages
    • all media is geomedia insofar that it has impact on space/place

Geomedia

  • particular affordances that constitute a new condition of media in the present
  • geomedia under three particular terms
    • ubiquity, positionality, realtime
  • proposes expansion Jenkins' "convergence" to include the integration of other domains: logistics, transport, health, finance
  1. ubiquity as relative; "today's ubiquity could be tomorrow's scarcity"

  2. positionality (term well known since 1990s); GPS, geocoding, place-sensitive software

    • effect of positionality: place becomes a powerful organizing logic for information
    • place as filter for all Internet searches on Google
    • double edge: access on-site info (changing function and value) OR data cacheing that implicates globally
  3. realtime: not live connection (too old; since telegraphy)

    • rather, capacity for simultaneity has become more distributed
    • event mediation of one place but appears on another
    • LF: similar to Shaun Moores' digital doubling of place

Melbourne S11 protest

  • urban media event: example of Melbourne demonstration against World Economic Forum: S11 protest

    • tried to blockade the building by using mobile phones to organize tactics of where to move relative to the police's location
  • digital media & public protest

    • e.g. Arab Spring
  • criticism of media coverage, with protesters angry that media didn't cover police violence against S11 protesters

  • quote from [WHOM?]: mobile media offering "new modes of expression and political change to capture their sovereignty"

  • e.g. Hong Kong Central occupation; photo of a sea of phone flashlights held up could look like a rock concert, but is also a demonstration of their mass mobile power

  • voluntary and involuntary coverage of protests are possible through realtime feedback and surveillance

  • compare with traditional attributes of protests in public spaces, including streets and public squares

  • Scott Lash: social bond becomes communication bond: less embedded and more ephemeral

Australian history and public space

  • Billibellary's Country app

    • available in Apple App Store: a walk of Indigenous history in Melbourne
    • looks at the way U Melbourne's campus reflects continued injustice for Australian Indigenous
  • Australia has been "quite extreme" in their lack of recognition of its own colonial history

    • while treaties with Indigenous have been broken, Australia has never had a treaty
    • McQuire critiques the selective history offered by the country
  • examines the establishment of a public monument only put up in 2016

    • public monuments help to establish what counts as part of a city's history
  • with mobile media, don't have to negotiate permission to include or document aspects of a city's history

  • so with Billibellary, geolocative media can document and highlight locations, the history and significance of which can be contested

  • looks at art exhibitions in city spaces and tries to go beyond aesthetics to think about representations of history

    • e.g. "We are all Boat People" project ( www.boatpeople.org ?)
      • projected on Sydney Opera House with a photo of settler ships instead (ha)
    • e.g. 99% Batman signal
    • e.g. Game Over laser projection in Egyptian protests
      • lasers pens were also used to disrupt surveillance and to demonstrate collective display
  • city as symbolic space

Urban annotation practice

  • McQuire asks: who gets to write the city and how will the visibility of urban annotation practices be determined?
  • problematic: Occupy Wall Street protesters charged with felony that only applies to permanent defacement
  • "layers of power that affect public space in the contemporary city"
  • there are current efforts to represent city through photographs and film (media forms that become belatedly)
    • but media has also become operational, "it becomes co-constitutive in constructing social spaces and practices"

Participation in public space

  • everybody thinks it's good, everybody wants it, but what does it mean?
  • Saskia Sassen's notion of "open source urbanism"
    • go further: not just how do citizens speak back to city officials, but how do citizens speak to each other?
  • McQuire proposes that there is an urgent need to negotiate public sociability and urban civility
    • Richard Sennate (sp?): this isn't just ethical, it's also from skill (coming from experience)
    • similarly, public sociability must be learned

Some projects re: "second generation screens"

  • refers to Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's giant sun piece

  • the screens we're used to are up high, looking down

    • vs. a screen in Federation (?) Square in Melbourne: "second generation screen"
    • faces away from the street into a gently sloping amphitheatre
  • e.g. SMS Origins

    • speaks to Melbourne's 50% migrant population
  • e.g. Hello

    • worked with choreographers to move away from language (to be international)
    • audience teach each other to perform short dance sequences
    • user sees a dance on a screen and mimics it; whole process shown on large screen
    • no publicity so that audience wouldn't have preconceptions
    • not about displacing body or transcending space (away from space); rather, about embodied interaction with networked affordances
  • projects are about playful, affective experiences and dialogues

  • move away from idea of media as extension of communication (across space over time); instead, potential for displacement

    • vs. Schivelbusch's construction of space/time across the nation
    • vs. idea that materiality's disappeared, we've got rid of space/time (LF: HAROLD INNIS space and time biases)

Discursive reconsiderations

  • displacement and emplacement as polarities that McQuire wants to move away from
    • how about also: extension, magnification, amplication
    • away from the technomanagerial idea of smart media that only plays lipservice to citizen
  • changing this kind of discourse towards creative, social agenda: the infrastructure of the smart city
  • reframing "smart city" from "communicative city"
    • how about repurposing these city screens?
    • challenging that it should be display only, for advertising, opening up to user-generated content, that it should only be related to the event in the place and instead, networking those screens
  • towards rich interactions among diverse inhabitants: need to broaden smart city agenda to consider distributed communicative affordances

Challenging older terms

  • challenging older terms like media participation

  • the participation as part of an audience allows for transversal connections that art already does very well

    • possibility to consider incommensurable aspects
    • allows citizens to commensurate factors through "fuzzy logic"--playful encounters
  • breaking down of paradigm that mediation is belated, that it re-presents something that has already occurred*********

    • this is very much about Mekonnen Tesfahuney's comment in Keynote 1 (Gillian Rose) about primacy and authenticity of face-to-face interactions
  • Bernard Siegler on synchronization and "herdish" behaviour

Q & A

  • Q Jacek Slomicki: relative to discussions of how to "improve" our mediated reality through geomedia, technologies are based on ontological principles

  • A: working with Indigenous youths in Australia to talk about digital storytelling

    • had to first problematize what constitutes digital storytelling
    • youths were quite technologically literate but also expressed issues of what kind of content they could/should include
    • this revealed for McQuire the need for a re-elaboration of the technologies and how to use it
    • distributing their content online on a mass-scale is problematic
  • Q Ruma Sen: Occupy New York spaces have been reappropriated by government; how to negotiate and keep the spirit of democracy where you acknowledge these spaces can indeed be taken over by the government

  • A: example of using flash mobbing for advertisement

    • we "shouldn't look for purity in the end"
    • these interventions are relatively small-scale
    • ask instead: how are we imagining the infrastructure? What does this say about how people are inhabiting the city?
    • meanwhile, can make moves towards that kind of participatory culture
      • re: expectations of things like screens as being for only display, how about transforming ingrained modes of inhabiting the city and moving towards more participatory modes of inhabiting cities
  • Q: These are very specific interventions. Thoughts on future public life in an ordinary sense? Also have to ask questions about expertise of creators and journalists that are experts.

  • A: experts often don't think about implications of things like geomedia for people's privacy

    • as humanities scholar, suggested that they have to tell people what they are doing and how they might benefit
    • prepare to have convos in these disciplines; work with people in law re: intellectual property and policy
    • this is what humanities scholars have to bring to the table
  • Q Heather Zwicker: Sense 8 Netflix sci-fi series as about connection that skips the screen. What is it that [you're moving towards]? Is it love? Something out of capitalism?

  • A: historical threshold to recognize: what it was versus is used for

    • we're not going to get through the problems we're facing collectively (like capitalism) without considering the ways we're interacting with each other to figure out the levels of "sharedness"
    • and start to build other layers of understanding
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