Social Grid: Online/Offline Participation in Artistic Projects

SOCIAL GRID
Media Empowerment towards
Online/Offline Participation in
Artistic Projects
Ana Velhinho
[email protected]
CIEBA - Artistic Studies Research Center,
Faculty of Fine Arts of the University
of Lisbon
408
ABSTRACT
Departing from the concept of ‘grid’ as a structural tool
for organization, combination and location, this research
focuses on the grid in relation to social participation
within artistic and design projects. Participatory culture
is currently framed as a product of a networked society
powered by personal media and ubiquitous connectivity,
conducting to a radical cultural shift that shapes the
media system towards what people want it to be.
The grid structure has become popular mostly by the
web image-aggregators, web browsers and social media
platforms that use it to present and navigate through
content. Furthermore, the geographical grid-based
location services, like the computing tools provided by
Google, have been encouraging several practical and
creative approaches based on digital mapping and
media-navigation through physical world. These tools
combined with augmented reality technologies, available
in our mobile devices using common sensors such as the
camera or the accelerometer, can also promote visual
enhancement of perception by triggering contextual
multimedia information and visual aids. Such practices,
based on what is called ‘locative media’ (labelled as
Locative Art whenever applied to geographically oriented
artworks), allow the exploration of real-time context
awareness using mobile devices as boosters to placebased storytelling that can be applied to education, art,
gaming, engineering, architecture, tourism and heritage
among other possibilities.
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Above all, the common feature of several artistic
and design projects is promoting collaboration and
engagement of communities within the contexts they
are inscribed, based on media empowerment and social
capital provided through the call for user participation,
raising awareness to the creation of hybrid environments
that can bridge from the screen to the public space. A
sense of mixed reality, combining ‘high-tech’ and ‘low-fi’
approaches, can potentiate spatiotemporal visualizations
and storytelling outputs that activate pathways/networks
evocative of connections between people, places or even
memories that feed – as raw material and found footage
representations – our image-mediated culture.
Keywords:
Locative Art
Mapping
Networks
Personal Media
Social Participation
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From the graphic and cartographic lens of the ‘grid’ as a structuring
tool, participatory culture is addressed as a product of a networked
society powered by personal media and ubiquitous connectivity,
translated into a ‘social grid’ that is at the core of digital mapping
and media navigation that blend virtual and physical worlds. Such
locative participatory practices and creative visualization approaches
constitute key instruments to better understand and perform in our
networked and media-based culture and engage with communities,
as they foster place-based storytelling and personal voices enabled
by media empowerment, and act against persistent asymmetries, as
the so-called “digital divide”. In this sense, the presented references
support the ongoing research on the development of a visual and
collaborative methodological model, grounded on the Internet’s
technology and socio-communicative paradigms allied to the power of
visualization grounded on social capital.
THE GRID AS AN OPERATIVE
TOOL CONNECTING VIRTUAL
AND PHYSICAL SPACE
The grid, as an operative tool, can be understood as a foundational
device that intends to organize and provide structure to a given
experience towards an object or territory. It has been used
throughout the history of mankind, especially during the Renaissance,
as a geometric, cartographic and urbanistic instrument to calculate,
arrange, and make content navigable, based on the double
take between the whole and the fragment, as well as the idea of
construction and deconstruction. The same underlying concept of
linked nodes, has been adapted to technological systems such as
the computational grid, that relies on the robustness and scalability
afforded by the distributed architecture of the matrix.
Today, we can state that grid-like forms are mostly related to networks
and information flows (like in web image-aggregators, web browsers
and social media platforms) organized in data clusters that tend to
be spatially represented, as a notational augmented space. The new
geographies promoted by media and Geoweb – enabled in 2005 after
the introduction of applications and services based on geospatial
data, particularly those introduced by Google – define a new cityscape
overlaid with contextual information, including tags assigned by the
crowd where subjects constitute nodal points within a connected
collective.
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Herlander Elias (2012:142) refers to this augmented version of the
city as an “empowered geography” where the media grid overlays the
urban grid of the city. Elias (2012: 179) identifies the need to recognize
new types of users that are active nodes within the mob, labeling them
as “trackers” or “navigators” close both to the idea of the videogame
player and the Baudelairean flanêur that stroll through the city,
returning to a pedestrian scale that promote the Situationist dérive.
Within this context, according to Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie (2015),
image acquires a new function other than representation, since
image production is overtaken by image processing based on the
mathematical matrix of bitmap format (pixels) and the algorithmic
processing used for compression, circulation and storage. This
fundamental change to an “operative” and “total image of the world” –
being the world envisioned as a database – is underpinned by Google
Street View, founded in 2007, as it embodies a paradigmatic change
not only in the status of the image but mostly in our experience of the
world. The concept of “image-screen” proposed by Hoelzl and Marie
(2015) refers to the image as a collage that sews together physical
space and data space and is no longer a representation but the visible
evidence of the access to networks of exchanging data that support
the new experience of the city. The artwork Postcards from Google
Earth (2010) by Clement Valla exposes precisely the imperfections and
discontinuities of the hybrid photographic and cartographic patchwork
of Google’s endless and atemporal photomaps. In this point of view,
according to Hoelzl and Marie (2015), images become software that
provides programmable “views” of the world as a database, updated in
real time.
The processing of the world as a shared image reconfigures how
representation affects the experience. In this way, the importance
of open sharing and co-creation, provided by participation, are
fundamental building blocks for today’s society, which demands new
mediatic and participatory literacies.
PARTICIPATION THROUGH
MEDIA EMPOWERMENT
Systematically since 2007, commercial tools, particularly the location
computing services provided by Google, have been inspiring and
encouraging several creative endeavors, based on digital mapping and
media navigation through the physical world.
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The artistic project MAP (2006–2013) from Aram Bartholl satirizes this
sense of mixed reality using a ‘low-fi’ technic by placing life-size pin
markers of Google interface as alien intruders on the urban landscape,
raising awareness to the creation of hybrid environments that bridge
from the screen to the public space. Likewise, in previous Bartholl’s
project WOW (2006-2009), he explored such approaches when he
had people strolling through the city with individuals following them
carrying big physical name tags above their heads, just like what
happens when you are tagged online.
Nevertheless, effective hybridity can actually be accomplished by
locative media, which allow the exploration of real-time context
awareness using mobile devices as boosters to place-based
storytelling, that can be applied to education, art, gaming, engineering,
architecture, tourism and heritage among other possibilities. Within
everyday life tools, the use of geo-location computing, including its
application combined with augmented reality technologies available
in our mobile devices using common sensors such as the camera
or the accelerometer, can enhance visual perception by triggering
contextual information, visual aids and complementary multimedia
content through speech, gesture or image tracking. We can name as
an example the Geocaching, asserted as the technologic version of
the treasure hunt through gamification of real space, by using GPS
data to connect a community of adventurous practitioners all over
the world. Other example of ‘geo-entertainment’ is the social media
global phenomenon Pokémon GO, launched in 2016, as a locationbased and augmented reality game that aims at finding and capturing
virtual creatures, that are disclosed in the same space as the user
through the screen of their mobile devices, drawing a more active and
immersive experience as the gamers have to navigate through the
physical space.
In a more specific view, Locative Art branches from New Media and
Interactive Art by the application of such locative technologies in
the art field. Those tools can be used whether to implement largescale and geographically oriented artworks like the proclaimed
“GPS drawing” practices or applied to more disruptive and politically
engaged pieces. The Transborder Immigrant Tool (2007) developed
by the EDT (Electronic Disturbance Theater) depicts such activist
practices, consisting in a mobile app designed to provide survival
instructions to help US/Mexico border crossers while also delivering
them poetry.
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Reassigning imagery that we perceive as ‘computer-native’ to larger
scales and off-screen contexts, accomplishes the ‘augmentation of
reality’ provided by new media systems and the Internet, embodying
the ‘overwhelmingness’ of the grid we find ourselves in. From
the textual description of “cyberspace” in William Gibson’s book
Neuromancer (1984) as a fluid and networked graphical data-scape, to
the code and hacking-inspired graphics present in the ASCII works of
Vuk Ćosić or the visuals explored in movies like Tron (1982) and Matrix
(1999), we can observe some of the initial propositions for giving the
Internet’s grid a shape.
The contamination of large-scale physical spaces was a step
further, also explored by Ćosić in ASCII Architecture (2000), which
appropriated the urban façade of St George Hall in Liverpool for
graphic screening. This media strategy of video mapping is currently
used by the entertainment industry as a powerful cinematic technique
to address large audiences in public spaces. Other immersive and
interactive approaches can also be found on early works like the
CAVE installation The Living Web (2002) by Christa Sommerer, Laurent
Mignonneau and Roberto Lopez Gulliver, or in the panorama inspired
concept of T-Visionary developed by Jeffrey Shaw in 1993, having
several versions until 2015 using interaction and virtual environment
technologies. Both pieces are focused on physical navigation through
a massive amount of images, resulting, correspondingly, in audio
and visual meshes streamed from the Internet or in 360 degrees
grid-based stereoscopic clips of television recordings organized in a
database allowing associative and affective browsing. Also connecting
geographic and virtual space, Masaki Fujihata explores since 1992
time and space visualizations in works related to the reconstruction
of collective memories using video indexed with GPS data, in a series
he called Field-Works, originating renown pieces like Field-work@
Alsace (2002) or Voices of Aliveness (2012) which call for participation
and provide navigation interfaces giving users access to linked
video images, where the pathways are evocative of geo-connections
between people.
Connectivity is otherwise approached by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
who brought vital energy to Madison Square Park in New York with
the interactive piece Pulse Park, Relational Architecture 14 (2008),
using visitor’s biometric information as input. The output is a light and
movement ephemeral performance fed by the network of participants,
where each node contributes with its vital signs captured by sensors
and shaped as light beams. Another direction on participation is Joan
Fontcuberta’s photomosaic installation "The world begins with every
kiss", created in 2014 for the Plaça d'Isidre Nonell in Barcelona.
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This piece uses a classic format of urban art such as tiling to transport
the grid structure of web image aggregators recreating a reminiscence
of the public Facebook wall on the public street wall. With this
approach the artist invites the passers to a double take on the image:
a macro view on affection and freedom manifest in a provocative
kiss photo as a result of a puzzle of 4000 photos, where each ‘pixel’
is a micro view of anonymous users that responded to the open call
question “What is freedom to you?” posed by the photographer on
the national newspaper El Periódico. Hence, this piece is extensively
representative of participation based on user-generated content,
reaffirming our democratic image-mediated culture.
In the book Participation is Risky. Approaches to Joint Creative
Processes (2014), participation is presented grounded on theoretical
framing and empirical practices, towards citizen engagement, media
and culture. Being aware of the existence of different degrees and
quality of participation, and also the fact that only a minority of people
are active contributors to digital and networked media (beyond the
random clicking and endorsing), this publication acknowledges the role
of both ‘low-fi’ and ‘high-tech’ media tools in social change, including
mobile networked media which perform regardless of time and
location, based on a commonality of sharing experiences (Huybrechts
2014:23-24). In fact, as stated by Henry Jenkins (2006), Participatory
Culture rises as a new form of cultural production propelled by media,
creating space for informal and innovative proposals by users, side-byside with the dominant industry.
In this regard, the concept of “extended cultural industries” proposed
by Mirko Tobias Schäfer (2011) is convoked in Participation is Risky
(2014) as explanatory of the production of cultural products that
allow different forms of participation, that range gradually from
“Accumulation (re-mix)”, to “Archiving (structure)” and “Construction
(create)”. Overall, the book Participation is Risky (2014) provides useful
insights on frameworks for participatory Art and Design projects,
regarded as open processes of thinking, characterized as “risky tradeoffs” concerning the conscious and unconscious negotiations between
makers (experts), participants (non-specialized agents) and objects
involved in undefined outcomes, or as the authors name it “things” –
envisioned not as closed results but as “social-material assemblies”
of people and objects gathered around “a matter of concern”
(Huybrechts 2014:32). The term “things” is appropriated from Bruno
Latour’s approach on “Action-Network Theory” evoking the product of
a kind of prosthesis that allows us to grasp the full complexity of our
surroundings that we usually are unable to see (Huybrechts 2014:59),
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and invokes the nature of co-dependent, circulative and transformative
looping agency expressed by actors or ‘actants’ (term favored by Latour)
within a network, as they can be human or non-human and hold equal
importance within that system (Latour 1990). Across this concept, the
risk and uncertainty are embraced as qualitative parts of any project,
which mirror the complexity of systems intrinsic to our information and
networked society. Hybridity is also being asserted as a key adjective in
our mediated culture, alluding to more than a techno-human condition
that merges man and machine. Instead, it is being considered in a wider
sense of mixed environments (virtual and real) and products (mixed
typologies and formats). Lev Manovich (2015) sees “hybridization” as the
second stage of media that began in the 1970s when the seminal article
“Personal and Dynamic Media” (1977) by Alan Kay and Adele Golberg
proclaimed the computer as a metamedium, in the extent to which
simulates all other media. For Manovich the “media hybrids” provide “new
media gestalts” that merge together to offer a coherent new experience
(Manovich 2015: 167):
The new “global aesthetics” celebrates media hybridity and
uses it to engineer emotional reactions, drive narratives, and
shape user experience (Manovich 2015: 179).
For Manovich it all derives from software that, according to him, powers
and shapes it all in contemporary society – from media to networks and
the overall globalization. Despite the ‘cold’ technicality of such argument,
we should not forget that there is room for creativity if people use tools
for their purposes and not the other way around, as alerted by Hoelzl
and Marie (2015) when they state that we operate images but they also
operate us.
Applied to art and design participatory projects, the term ‘hybridity’ gains
a very specific meaning that should be valued as an emerging mindset to
approach participatory practices:
We used the concept ‘hybridity’ to describe participatory
projects that are situated on the border between participatory
(participant-driven) and expert-based (maker-driven)
approaches. […] These hybrid participatory projects form an
in-between zone, a ‘gluing element’ or bonding agent that
gathers disparate people, objects and contexts, stressing
collectivism and shared ownership. At the same time, it is a
marginal space, carrying traits of previously disconnected or
incompatible fields or discourses that do not belong to (one
of) the participants, leading to uncertainty. Furthermore,
hybridity refers to a situation of ‘interpretative flexibility’, in
which projects generate different or alternative meanings for
different social groups […]. (Huybrechts 2014: 282)
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Megafone.net (2004-2014) developed by the Catalan artist Antoni
Abadi must be highlighted as a pioneer in what concerns the concept
of ‘hybridity’ based on the experimental use of mobile phones in art
(years before the boom of smart cities and advanced communication
devices) within socially vulnerable groups. This project was praised in
2006 with a Golden Nica from Ars Electronica Festival in the stream
of Digital Communities, for its interdisciplinarity and innovation. This
online platform of collaborative webcasts operated, for over a decade,
as an art and social communication project that provided skills and
technical means of expression to local communities, using the Internet
as a public space for literally amplifying their voice, as the name of the
project suggests.
This is a project focused essentially on mobility and designed for
collective performances that act upon the geography of the cities
where it is implemented. Organized by channels, dedicated to
targeting groups converted into spokespeople (not only of their
communities but of themselves), it encourages the spontaneous
recording of personal experiences and opinions. Among those groups
we can find taxi drivers in México (2004-2014), young gypsies in Leida
and in León (2005), sex workers in Madrid (2005), people with limited
mobility in Barcelona (2006-2013) later replicated to Geneva (2008)
and Montreal (2012-2014), motorcycle couriers in São Paulo (20072015) and displaced refugees and immigrants from several places
since 2009. Each node of this network represents simultaneously an
individual and a group, as we can see in the grid-based presentation of
the participants’ page available on the website.
Although Abadi had innovatively developed and expanded technology
to implement the Megafone.net using creative communication
strategies, even before the current accessibility of social media, the
key feature of his artwork is undoubtedly the social relevance of media
empowerment of communities that otherwise would not have a voice
or could not have access to technology. As important as the artist’s
ethnographic and network research is the “production of services”
core to his working methodology (Parés, 2014:18), having participant’s
affordances in mind, thus preparing them to act autonomously.
Beyond the access to tools and training provided by the workshops
that precede the online publishing of the user-generated content,
the participants continue to develop their skills through media
appropriation. In this sense, this socially engaged public artwork
stands out as a catalyst for action, deeply impacting on how we view
these people and how they view themselves and use the tools for their
own purpose.
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FINAL REMARKS
From several perspectives and examples, the grid was used
throughout this research both as a metaphor and an operative
device to support the argument of hybrid and mediated connections
that ultimately rely on people’s empowered participation, together
as individuals and networks. More than ever, people’s actions,
displacements and productions – as they become more easily tracked
by media – have been fueling creations that allow the visualization of
hidden layers of our everyday life that usually are only processed by
computational algorithms.
Far from wanting to encourage an exclusive technical take on
our culture, my main objective was actually the opposite: to draw
attention to the need for media and visual literacy in order to revert
the computational language and frameworks of devices, that dictate
our ways of looking and acting in the world, to our humanly ways of
understanding and connecting with people, objects and territories by
using media and visual tools on our behalf and on our own terms.
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Elias, H. (2012). Post-Web. The Continuous Geography of Digital Media.
Lisboa: Media XXI.
Hoelzl, I., Marie, R. (2015). Soft Image. Towards a New Theory of the
Digital Image. Bristol, Chicago: Intellect.
Huybrechts, L. (ed.) (2014). Participation is Risky – Approaches to Joint
Creative Processes. Amsterdam: Valiz.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
New York, London: New York University Press.
Latour, B. (1990). On actor-network theory. A few clarifications plus
more than a few complications. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/
files/P-67%20ACTOR-NETWORK.pdf (accessed 10.10.2016).
Manovich, L. (2015). Software takes command. New York, London:
Bloomsbury Academic. (1st ed. 2013).
Bibliografia/References
Abadi, A., (ongoing). Megafone.net. http://megafone.net/ (accessed
10.10.2016).
Parés, R. (2014). Megaphone.net/2004-2014, in: Antoni Abad
megaphone. net/2004-2014. Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
(MACBA), Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), Barcelona. pp. 11 – 25.
Schäfer, M. (2011). Bastard Culture! How User Participation Transforms
Cultural Production. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
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