Curating the City: Urban Interfaces and Locative Media as Experimental Platforms for Cultural Data

Our contribution is concerned with the way urban interfaces are used for access to cultural collections – whether institutionally embedded, or bottom-up, participatory collections. Designed in code and exploring affordances of new location-based and/or mobile technologies for urban spacemaking, these interfaces are thought to be powerful tools for ideals of participatory urban culture. We propose to approach these “projects” as curatorial machines, as urban experimental laboratories for cultural data. This entails a threefold perspective: on curation, on code, and on principles of creative (sometimes artistic or playful) experimentation. For this, we connect our thoughts to the curatorial project of museal and archival institutions, of preserving, and “caring” for the object, as well as creating new contexts for the object and providing access for an urban public. The latter issue is very much in transition as a result of current ambitions for new public engagement and ideals of participation, and as a result is now pervasive in all socio-economic and political regions of contemporary culture. Also, we witness a current interest in the principles of data curation as the care for, interaction with, interpretation and visualisation of digital data, as the datafication and codification of culture invades all corners of urban life. Design of interfaces is central in how we can access, work with, and make meaning with digital culture.

Departing from the concept of dispositif in the analysis of interfaces, we propose to bring together the fact that the interfaces are coded and designed, to (playfully) experiment with their affordances. In our approach to this intersection of datafication of, and the proliferation of interfaces for “culture”, we aim to develop heuristic tools for critical evaluation of this phenomenon, broadly bracketed as urban interfaces or as interfaces of cultural curation.