Ambient Screens (HK University Press, 2016)

JoLMA, 2024

Thanks to the technological dislocation of the eye of the beholder, the mechanical eye or both of them together, along recent decades the view from above has become a widespread, somehow trivial way to experience the world, imposing a new scopic regime. Deeply enmeshed and dependent upon technologies of surveillance, vertical perspective does not only democratize the point of view of the power: it provides us with an inhuman gaze on the world, liberating images from the constraints of naked human vision and erasing the distinction between images and maps, producing what Peraica has called total images. These topics are explored through a number of case studies from the visual arts.

Economic and Political Weekly, 2020

Visual Studies, 2014

As more and more virtual windows appear -in shop windows and subway lines, in so many pockets and handbags -our understanding of contemporary visual culture must account for new ways of seeing in and experiencing spaces filled with screens. This renewed enquiry is an interesting site not only for reflecting critically upon previous theorizations of the screen, on the filmic and the senses, and on the specific spaces produced as a result of screen culture; but also for experimenting with more visual modes of research. Visualizing the screen is not only a matter of making visible the networks of meaning to which screens give viewers access or imagining the types of seeing the screen enables. It is most importantly an exercise in "fixing the shadows" of our interactions with and deployments of the screen so that they may be analyzed in the specific visual contexts where they appear and into which they disappear. Though my research is ultimately grounded in the rather common idea that screens are increasingly visible in contemporary urban space, this evolution, at the outer limits of its logics, suggests the partial disappearance of screens as particularistic, limited interfaces with contemporary imagery. Through their integration into the very architectures of late modernity and informational capitalism (Arvidsson, 2006) and into the atomized visual field of the viewer in an extension of what Virilio (1884) terms "opto-electric perception," the boundaries of screen experience and the visual experience of real space seem to be blurring.

Large screens both off er a new mechanism for transmitting information to an immediate public and provide a platform for interactive communication that has the potential to connect communities across vast distances. However, successful delivery of this dual function is rare. Too oft en large public screens replicate existing models of content delivery, targeting "messages" at a passive "audience, " thus overlooking avenues for civic engagement based on the capacity of digital media to support new forms of participation and even dialogue. In this section we will examine in depth a collaborative project that involved the live linking of large screens in Seoul and Melbourne. Th is was a unique and groundbreaking project that not only required technical coordination between remote sites but also involved the commissioning of original artistic content. A stipulation of this artistic content was that it also had to be interactive. Hence, the public audiences located amid the public sites of the two large screens were also invited to participate in the construction of the content that appeared on the respective large screens. In eff ect, audiences in both cities were interacting with and contributing to the formation of the same visual content on screens that were linked up in real time. Our aim was to consider whether such events would stimulate an awareness of the function that a large screen could serve in generating transnational modes of cultural exchange and enhancing our understanding of public space.

Screens

In her essay "In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Verticality," artist and theorist Hito Steyerl traces the historical shift in visual perspective from the linear to the vertical throughout the last century. Vertical perspective, she argues, is a view from above that exacerbates the distance between subject and object and, thereby, turns perspective into a "one-way gaze of superiors onto inferiors, a looking down from high to low." Steyerl analyzes paintings and new technologies that, she argues, are central to the acceleration of the predominance of vertical perspective. Using Steyerl's proposition as a point of departure, I argue that a reorientation from vertical perspective to immersive perception can help shift the political, ethical, and social values of our time. I am interested particularly in immersive forms of perception as achieved through contemporary, participatory artworks that empower horizontal, democratic systems as well as the production of subjectivity. Blurring the boundaries between art and life, these artworks facilitate an environment in which traditional roles of immobile and observational spectatorship are exchanged for activated, rhizomatic forms of thinking. This immersive form of perception offers a position of resistance to the damaging perspective of verticality. Through multisensory perception and multi-perspectival viewpoints, immersive perception effectively eliminates the dichotomies of perspective: up/down, inside/out, subject/object. In this thesis, I argue that participatory artworks should be reconsidered as models of resistance to the damaging, predominant perspective of verticality and contend that they have the power to create possibilities for plurality, collective power, and community.

Azimuth (VI), nr. 12, "Technology and the Sublime", ed. by Giulia Rispoli and Christoph Rosol, 2018

Our sense of the self and its relation to its surroundings is being increasingly reshaped by telematic prostheses that expand our felt sense of inhabiting and interacting with the wider environment. Geotagging, Google Earth, biomapping, telepresence, augmented reality (AR), and distributed intelligence are creating new locative sense-perceptions, unprecedented narratives, and new feelings (and praxes) of agency-at-a-distance in the extended environment. The paper considers methods (and effects) of enhancing connectivity and efficacy between a person and his/her surroundings via mapping techniques, storytelling, and social and artistic projects using telecommunication and locative media. Roy Ascott’s question Is there love in the telematic embrace? (1990) underpins others: How might new media platforms potentiate the creative force of the imaginal to produce a measurable change in the world? Can locative media deepen our sense of embeddedness, recreating those ancient reality-maps where selfhood was co-extensive with community and Nature? Might this spur us to address today’s urgent social and ecological challenges? Or will these media further abstract our actual relatedness to the environment, narrowing it to more quantifiable and qualifiable instrumental operations?

2009

People living in urban areas have grown accustomed to the moving visual images surrounding them -displayed upon large screens attached to or integrated in the architecture of the city. In public squares, shopping streets or any other place where people gather, the moving image has become part of everyday public life. The growing ubiquity of mobile technologies in this environment has added another layer of moving image culture on top of the city. Different contexts and spaces, virtual and physical, are overlapping and changing all the time. Theorists and writers describe this development as a new augmented reality, responsive architecture or ambient experience design: a new environment that will lead to a different notion of public space, in turn creating new relationships between people and places. Without doubt the way that these media -from electronic sensors, urban screens and CCTV systems, to GPS and RFID tags -are experienced has significantly impacted the way people communicate as well as their practices of physical and affective orientation. But does this lead to the conclusion that public space is no longer determined by city planning and geographical boundaries? Throughout history artists have tried to reconsider, remap and re-appropriate the boundaries of the city, sometimes reviving older methods in order to cope with new technologies. This paper focuses on contemporary artistic practices that use mobile technologies either as platform or tool to reconsider people's relationships to mobile technologies and place. If these technologies really are so influential in shaping one's relation to the city, do such artistic projects succeed in creating a new affect of place?