“Towards Geospatial Cultural Planning: Strategies for Local Cultural Innovation through Locative New Media Art” presented by Ag
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Site Specifics: Mobile Media Art and the Contexts of Place
Presentation Title:
- Towards Geospatial Cultural Planning: Strategies for Local Cultural Innovation through Locative New Media Art
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Abstract:
Panel: Site Specifics: Mobile Media Art and the Contexts of Place
Globalization and developments in technologies and new mobile media have brought about a ‘spatial turn’ that has changed spatial conceptions and geographical imaginations. The current ‘spatial turn’ echoes the critical concepts of space developed by Lefebvre, de Certeau and Foucault in the 1970s with an emphasis on the production, practices, and politics of lived spatiality. These concepts became ‘guides’ to a critical analysis of the developments and potential of locative new media art in the age of mobile media. Today’s developments in mapping and GIS technologies allow for a new ‘spatial thinking’ about a socio-spatial dialectic: the relationship between the ways in which social processes and social action shape and explain geographies and vice versa. Locative media and pervasive computing have reconfigured our understandings and experiences of space and culture—from the microcosm of the everyday to the macrocosm of spatial flows. The new geographical pursuits of locative new media art are site-specific explorations of a human geography.
This paper explores the potential of locative new media art as a strategic catalyst for urban revitalization and community development. Locative media allow for active community participation and expression; for urban and cultural narratives to be discovered and articulated in urban layers; and for augmentation of past or future realities and virtualities. Locative media can enhance civic engagement and intercultural citizenship, foster a sense of locality, and thus create a sustainable component for the local community and society at large. These ideas are unfolding in a field that merges or oscillates between locative media and mediated localities. They encourage local cultural innovation by fostering site-specific cultural understanding. This paper addresses questions such as, what kinds of social/spatial relations are made possible through locative new media art projects? And how can these projects be adopted in a cultural planning framework as catalysts for local urban and community development?
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Full text (PDF) p. 2396-2401