Urban Interfaces: Between Object, Concept, and Cultural Practice

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Abstract

In this collection of essays we wish to propose the notion of urban interfaces as a lens through which we can explore how situated media, art, and performances shape, critically reflect on, intervene in, and reimagine contemporary, urban public spaces. We focus on contemporary cities as complex, socially dynamic and increasingly performative and mediatized infrastructures and environments. Rapid and radical transformations of urban culture and urban publicness are spurred by intensified (global) mobilities, the ubiquity and proliferation of digital information and communication technologies, and the spread of datafication and platformization. On a discursive level, these transformations are heavily debated in connection to themes like, for instance, participatory culture and civic engagement, urban governance, processes of social-spatial inclusion and exclusion, changes in ownership, or their invasive influence on urban public space through a relentless push of commercialization and privatization, quantification and so on. On a ’street level,’ these issues take shape within the variety of cultural practices surrounding media, art, and performance. The contributions in this collection zoom in on the connection between these cultural realms.

Media, art and performance in our view offer privileged sites for investigating the challenges, frictions and questions surrounding these urban transformations, as well as their own role in (re)shaping urban public spaces. Our primary focus is on the creative and artistic design and curation of urban interfaces as cultural practices–in particular on how technological, material, and socio-cultural processes shape intersections, interactions, and interventions of bodies, spaces, and technologies and produce meaning in urban spaces and situations. To analyze how urban interfaces work and reflect on their own working, this special issue examines a range of objects and practices, such as media architecture, urban screens, and interactive installations; location-based games, augmented reality, data visualizations, and mobile mapping; and other live urban interventions, events and performances, specifically in cities in Europe, Asia, and the United States. These, however different, all bring forth often fugitive yet meaningful instances of public interfacing in and with urban spaces.

To investigate these disparate objects and practices from a more or less coherent and comparative perspective, we propose [urban interfaces] as a searchlight, its provisional character indicated by brackets. For this issue, we have invited contributing authors to analyze specific urban objects and practices as urban interfaces. In their contributions they explore how urban interfaces can function as a demarcation of a corpus and as a theoretical lens. As a heuristic tool it directs our view to specific objects and practices, and inquires how these shape today’s urban, public spaces. Between object and concept and cultural practice, then, this lens of [urban interfaces] is helpful for exploring the specificities of media, art, and performance in urban public spaces, in what they are, how they work and what they bring forth. This entails an analytical focus on the materiality, mediality, and performativity of interfaces as well as instances/situations of interfacing. To further develop this perspective, we discuss in more detail in the following sections of this introductory essay (1) how we approach the ’urban‘ in [urban interfaces]; (2) how we conceptualize ’interface‘ in [urban interfaces]; and (3) how instances of media, art, and performance situate and activate [urban interfaces]. We conclude with a short reflection on what it implies to think theory and cultural practice together.
Original languageEnglish
JournalLeonardo Electronic Almanac
Volume22
Issue number4
Early online date2019
Publication statusPublished - 2019

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