Mediating Place: with focus on London’s spaces
This project, the ‘design’ project, is titled ‘Mediating Place’. ‘Mediating Place’ (as do most titles), gives some indication of the plurality of concerns within the project.
Along with the other four projects in the Leverhulme ‘Spaces of the Media’ programme this project is focused on investigating and exploring different ways emergent technologies are re-shaping media and the public sphere; and, in what possible ways they may do so in the future.
In the first instance, ‘Mediating Place’, is focused on an exploration of the ways in which various ‘locational’ or ‘locative’ media - which are becoming an increasingly pervasive presence in our everyday lives - affect the way we relate to our world, or worlds, now and in the future. It is apparent that our environment (particularly urban) is increasingly mediatised – infused with media technologies and their concomitant content, therefore the project is also concerned with how this ‘media-full’ environment, re-mediates our relationships to those objects and spaces to which we are connected, and, ultimately our relationships to each other as well. The project pays heed to the way we ‘place’ the ‘media-things’ that make-up our environment and also in how in these placements we make the spaces in which we carry out our lives significant – make the spaces of everyday practices into places that are meaningful to us.
We have designed and will throughout the project design media-things that present new arrangements and produce opportunities for new performances of media.
The media-things that we are designing are ‘propositional objects’; props to help understand future opportunities (proposals) of the new ‘performance’ spaces of media and the technologies that produce them. The prop(osition)s are designed to act, in a sense, as an ‘apparatus criticus’ looking critically and signalling ‘choices to be made’ in future developments of media and its places. In so doing, they also act as critical ‘reflection’ on current practices in media production and reception and also the technological apparatuses through which they are produced.
The ‘props’ will increasingly be designed for what may be referred to as open affordance – for emergent use. These first prototypes (on exhibit here) are ‘motivated’ towards a ‘use’ but the later objects will allow for ‘user’ developed content and adaptation (evolvement) of ‘use’ by users.
To sum up, the various props we are designing use a constellation of technologies to locate, dislocate and relocate media in the city, in order to offer new engagements, practices and experiences in public space. These designs are critical propositions; acting as locus for reflection on present and past practices and providing purchase for critique of what may be.
[Further detail]