Art installation project: #MyNeighborMonVoisinMeinNachbar

Oxford Artistic and Practice-Based Research Platform (OAR), 2017

Companion to Medieval Vienna. Brill's Companions to European History, 2021

Growing slowly through the centuries, organically developing outward from inner circles, Vienna was sufficiently populous […] to yield all the luxury and all the diversity of a metropolis, and yet it was not so oversized to be cut off from nature […]. The last houses mirrored themselves on the mighty Danube or looked over the wide plains, or dissolved themselves in gardens and fields, or climbed in gradual rises the last wooded foothills of the Alps. One hardly senses where the nature began and where the city ended: one melted into the other without opposition, without contradiction. Within, however, one felt that the city had grown like a tree that adds ring upon ring [...]1

2010

Cognitive Maps, 2010

People in a modern city are like rats in a maze 1. They need a tool of space recognition to get acquainted with the environment they have been forced to live in. Historically towns owed their uniqueness to deep roots in local tradition. The central market square constituted the heart of the town. A magic circle of the ramparts and the moat determined a safe and familiar existence space, which the inhabitants could easily recognize and flawlessly identify with. It was the legible street network, connected by the nodes of squares, marking out formally important places, that facilitated the 'wayfinding' (Lynch, 1960) in urban maze. Compact, hierarchical skyline of the town, dominated by domes of churches and a town-hall tower, constituted a characteristic visual code of urban space 2. Since the time of Industrial Revolution, cities used to give their inhabitants a sense of security and an opportunity of spatial orientation thanks to their small size and ordered grid layout within a limited area. Along with spatial expansion of 19 th-and 20 th-century cities, consequent development of their suburbs and mixture of forms, functions and architectural styles, a chaos crept into cities, defined by S. Chermayeff and Ch. Alexander as "modern space salad". Modernism, introducing globally unified architectural patterns and inhuman scale urban structures, rejecting traditional harmony and hierarchy, contributed to the sense of disaffection and alienation in a big city. Simultaneously though, the same modern trends started off the revolution in visual arts. Artists' abandoning lounges for the sake of the streets, freedom of artistic voice and expression of form, inspired a number of research on the processes of artwork perception as well as its social and even political role in the public space (Kwon, 2002). The paper deals with the theories on urban space recognition and the role of public art in raising the 'imageability' of urban enclosures as well as their cultural quality and social attractiveness. The author presents the methodology of visual art location in urban public places on example of Poznan city. 1 The E.C. Tolman's experiments on the behavior of rats in mazes, performed in the 1940s, proved that both man and animals create a tentative, mental map to recognize and learn environmental relationships. 2 The best known historical spatial form records are the waterside panoramas of numerous cities found in the landscape paintings of the 18 th century (e.g. the landscape of Venice, Verona, London and Warsaw painted by Bernardo Bellotto, Canaletto).

Science, Technology and Arts Research Journal, 2013

Article Information Photography has been used as a research tool throughout a range of disciplines. In the last decades usage of photos in landscape and urban design grow noticeably; yet applying it in architectural research or education for discovering social determinations needs more attentions. In this study 34 participations in second year of architecture were involved in a photo-survey using self snapshot photography approach for the selected urban environment with open ended questionnaires in Shiraz, Iran. Despite the observers' lacks of visual research skills, they pay an equal attention to physical and social environment even in the absence of social activity facts in the photos. I argued that students used their mental image and memories of the urban space in commentaries about each photos. Besides, they used visual facts in each photo for arguing and make conclusions logically. Yet, two kinds of challenges indentified in this study. The first emerged from 'educational constraints' which has less attention to urban spaces, social and behavioral activities in architecture education and conduce to fewer comments' of observers on visual irregularities and diffusions in managing signboards, urban graffiti and façade designs. The second which could be named as 'cultural constraints', derives from cultural legacies and historical attachments which leads observers to be more sensitive to rehabilitation and revitalization rather than new buildings. Hence, the observer approaches like this, eliminated more contemporary interactions between citizens and modern build environment in visual survey.

A signal or a symbol has been sent with conscious. Urban space has signified elements like landmark. Landmarks as references signs orient the people. Landmarks are defined as an external point of reference that helps orienting in a familiar or an unfamiliar environment. This study is about to clear out the meaning of landmark for the city users who have perceived reference point with their memory and perception. In other words, this study is about discovering how the city affects the people who experience the urban space within semiotic of landmarks in Konya, Turkey. The method of this study is photo-elicitation to understand how people orient themselves in moving within urban space considering landmarks. Analysis of interview texts, there were six different type of landmarks as; city memory-historical, city landscape/ square, high rise/skyscraper, daily life/city usage, personal memory/personal perception , circulation pattern. In this study the semiology of communication studies codes established by society to produce messages consciously sent and received as signals, signs and symbols.

2015

In this article, I consider the reception of images that are present in a city space. I focus on the juxtaposition of computer ‐generated images covering fences surrounding construction sites and the real spaces which they screen from view. I postulate that a visual experience is dependent on input from the other human senses. While looking at objects, we are not only standing in front of them but are being influenced by them. Seeing does not leave a physical trace on the object; instead the interference is more subtle — it influences the way in which we perceive space. Following in the footsteps of Sarah Pink, Michael Taussig and William J. T. Mitchell, I show that seeing (to paraphrase the title of an article by the last of the above mentioned scholars) is a cultural practice. The last part of the article presents a visual essay as a method that can contribute to cultural urban studies. I give as an example of such a method a photo ‐essay about chosen construction sites in Poznań,...

Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, 2018

This chapter raises preliminary issues and questions intended for those undertaking urban investigation through the camera lens. It issues an invitation to think critically about what a photograph is and how photography might be deployed in critical urban research and commentary. Entire cities are un-researchable. Yet 'slicing' them for investigation raises issues of partiality, limitation and applicability to the bigger issues of our time. Staring into a crack in the ground might entertain you but how useful is it really in understanding how the social world actually works? Thinking about photography Before embarking on photographic exploration of urban landscapes it is vital to put some thought into what is actually a photograph. I will suggest some frameworks for thinking about photography and will preface this by saying something about seeing and photography and the relationship between them. We learn to negotiate urban landscape in scanning mode. We selectively take in jumbles of visual data in nanoseconds, on the hoof, while sifting it for (personal and social) significance. These are fleeting and fragile ways of seeing. More attentive ways, the kind that form the point of departure for urban investigation, take time and concentration. The camera focuses us as researchers and provides a technology for more disciplined observation. Seeing is a skilled social practice (Jenks, 1995). What we see and how to see it is bound up with how we learn to be social beings, and with the ways in which the social world is organised. In other words seeing is bound up with who we are and how our world operates. Seeing does not connect us to some outside realm; it is an integral part of the bigger social matrix in which we operate. So seeing in the context of urban research is part of a delicate balancing act. We are part of the social conventions of seeing in a particular (conventional) way and we can also search for new ways of seeing, ways that challenge and rearrange social conventions. This is the creative bind in which urban researchers operate. Now let us move from seeing to knowing. How we know about things through seeing them is not immediately obvious. There is no clear map that takes us from one to the other and both are selectively focussed activities. As John Berger (1977) reminds us, the relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled. This is something for to think about in the context of practice and specific projects. Permutations in the connection between seeing and knowledge form the second creative bind in urban photographic investigation and analysis.