“E-Tower: Ludic Urban Experience Through Reactive Architecture and Personal Mobile Devices” presented by Colangelo and Dávila

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Symposium:

ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art
More presentations from ISEA2011:

Session Title:

Locative Media and Interaction

Presentation Title:

E-Tower: Ludic Urban Experience Through Reactive Architecture and Personal Mobile Devices

Presenter(s):

Venue(s):

Sabanci Center, Istanbul, Turkey

Abstract:

Large media facades, reactive architecture, geo-tagging and location aware mobile devices represent a privileged confluence – a fluid, digital layer that permeates the city and in turn makes existing physical structures permeable. In an act of research creation, E-TOWER engaged this architectural permeability by transforming the CN Tower – until 2007 the world’s tallest free-standing structure – into a beacon for the city’s “energy” by allowing participants of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche 2010 to text the word “energy” and additional comments to a number provided in order to activate faster and brighter animations on the tower’s LED light system. E-TOWER enabled highly visible, distributed participation in public space using mobile phones and reactive architecture as part of a larger experiment in e-imagining and augmenting social practices and public encounters by inscribing cooperation and collective play into urban subjectivity. An overview of relational architecture, urban screen, and projection based artistic and cultural interventions in public space that led to the development of E-TOWER is included.

The ingredients of technoculture in the age of supermodernity –urban space, projectors, walls, computers, mobile devices, LEDs– mixed together in the correct proportions, allow for rich interaction, and a reflection on community, subjectivity, and place – the very opposite of the distracting and distancing effects they have in more commercial contexts. Architects, new media artists, governments, and other stakeholders can capitalize on these emergent properties of architecture and urban space by creating dynamic, hybrid spaces that provide, collect, process, and display information and re-inscribe collective identity and play in public space.