The pervasive city

Abstract

New-media artistic engagements with city-making are challenging our understanding of time and space. With the advent of GPSinspired art and Web 2.0, the relationship of citizens with their physical spaces and urban experiences is put at stake. GPS mobile devices allow transposing audiovisual recordings from different spaces while the social Net provides a participative medium to reconfigure local spaces and emotions. On the one hand, locative art delivers augmented environments to the user navigating through a specific site. On the other hand, net art expands our understanding of the role played by collective perceptions and memories within and beyond the city. The overlay of both media produces an evolutionary audiovisual archive by the interaction of visitors with both the site and the website, the local and the global, which let it be up-dated and interesting for public collaboration in innovating or enhancing the spatial practices of the contemporary city. This paper explores some emerging urban applications of mobile, embedded and distributed media architectures, as well as the role of networked communities in the construction of the environment. Copyright 2008 ACM.