An international collection of arts groups reflects on strategies to redefine the urban experience and the arts through the creative application of new media technologies and new methods of collaboration.

From: berlinermagazin Buy soma no prescription, , Issue 9 (Summer 2005)
Text collaboratively written by: Stadtblind, Yellow Arrow, UnionDocs, Knifeandfork, Posttourismus Büro & Glowlab
Edited by: Jesse Shapins

We have heard for years now that urban environments are once again at the center of cultural and social innovation. Derided as they were by Le Corbusier and other Modernist reformers for their chaos, inefficiency, and unnecessary ornamentation, dense and vibrant cities all over the world have been growing rapidly during the past decades, both as tourist destinations and dynamic habitats. In what is an extension and illustration of this trend, fundamental transformations in digital technology have created a new dimension of urban experience that is gaining momentum globally, Kaufen soma.

These changes have reshaped everyday life in the city and given rise to an ever-evolving field of urban arts, fueling the reinvention of the discipline of psychogeography. Originally coined by the Situationist International in the 50s, it was defined as "[t]he study of specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." The Situationists hoped to escape the numbing spectacle of modern life through practices such as the dérive, Køb discount soma, a playful but attentive drifting through urban space, which sometimes continued for days at a time.

New technologies have provided the opportunity for some exciting experiments in psychogeography, creating the possibility of a derive that may never end, buy soma no prescription. What follows is a selection of such projects, all of which will be featured in the interdisciplinary arts festival Loving Berlin – Woche der Berlin-Liebhaber (Berlin Lovers’ Week).

The Colors of Berlin — Stadtblind

Operating in the border zones between contemporary art, urban design, and ethnographic research, Stadtblind is a Berlin-based arts group dedicated to the investigation and transformation of urban life, soma kopen. The Colors of Berlin was developed under the premise: “Zu oft wird Berlin blind betrachtet” (Too often Berlin is seen blindly). The specific objective of the work was to use photography and graphic design to challenge the conventional images of Berlin and instigate a new way of looking at the city. Buy soma no prescription, The core platform is a modification of the classic Pantone® color-fan containing five elements: a theme, an image, color blocks, a text, and a map. It has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Van Alen Institute in Manhattan, and Architekturgalerie am Weißenhof in Stuttgart.

It is Stadtblind's aim to distance viewers from that which is familiar, New Mexico NM N.Mex. , to re-frame the familiar in such a way that it becomes unfamiliar, fresh, and worthy of attention. The group presents the common spaces, objects, and surfaces of contemporary Berlin in an unusual manner that encourages viewers to perceive in a new way. It is precisely the everyday aspects of our lives that are most often overlooked; and it is precisely these everyday aspects that most constitute our lived experience of the city.

This project provides a good entry point to analyze the impacts of the technologies of digital photography and inkjet printing, two under-discussed new media that have broad-reaching impact, buy soma no prescription. The combination of digital photography and inkjet printing has created the ability to instantaneously capture, soma prices, view and print images, enabling a type of documentary photography unimaginable with traditional print film.

Whereas photography in the age of 35 mm was focused upon the single image, photography in the digital era is all about mass groupings. The only limitation to the number of photographs that one can capture is digital memory, which has dramatically shrank in bulk and cost, Buy soma overnight delivery, allowing average photographers to go out and take over 500 pictures in an afternoon without the slightest consideration of cost or storage. The cash-strapped photographer no longer agonizes over a single perfect framing, but instead is liberated to shoot freely. Buy soma no prescription, This project illustrates an enormously important trend in the arts and broader society: the mass shift towards a D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) mentality. Even five years ago, there was no consumer printer on the market that would enable decent quality prints at a reasonable price. For the first time in history, the most advanced means for producing content across all media (print, Arizona AZ Ariz. , video, audio, online, etc.) is accessible to average people, especially within developed Western nations, but increasingly throughout the developing world as well. Buy soma pills, The battle is no longer over the means of production, but over the distribution of content.

Yellow Arrow – Counts Media

Yellow Arrow is a global public art project that subverts the hierarchy of media power by creating an open forum for communication, buy soma no prescription. The project invites the questions "When does an object become art. What makes a landmark. Who says what counts?" By collecting and sharing places of personal significance, this public collaboration creates a subjective atlas, what the creators have called "a dynamic M.A.A.P. (Massively Authored Artistic Project) that expresses the unique characteristics, köpa billiga soma, personal histories, and hidden secrets that live within our everyday spaces.”

Participants place uniquely-coded Yellow Arrow stickers to draw attention to different locations and objects. Buy soma no prescription, By sending an SMS from a mobile phone to the Yellow Arrow number beginning with the arrow’s unique code, one immediately receives a message on one’s mobile phone, ranging from short poetic fragments to personal stories to game-like prompts to action. Their website extends this location-based exchange, by allowing participants to annotate their arrows with photos and maps in the online gallery of yellow arrows placed throughout the world.

With mobile technology, we are now able to integrate the social potential of networked experience with the immediacy of the physical world. Cheap soma, As Baudrillard wrote in response to the student strikes of 1968:

The real revolutionary media were the walls and their speech, the silk-screen posters and the handpainted notices, the street where speech began and was exchanged – everything that was an immediate inscription, given and turned, spoken and answered, mobile in the same space and time, reciprocal and antagonistic. The street is, buy soma without prescription, in this sense, the alternative and subversive form of the mass media, since it isn’t, like the latter, an objectified support for answerless messages, a transmission system at a distance. It is the frayed space of the symbolic exchange of speech – ephemeral, mortal, buy soma no prescription. Indiana IN Ind. , In a networked age, different communities across the globe have very different access to technology, but mobile phones have become widely available. By perceiving a network as something that is inherently a combination of physical, social, and technological components, this project brings these elements together under a paradigm that honors the type of vibrant exchange Baudrillard found so inspiring.

The Commons_Berlin — UnionDocs

UnionDocs is a Brooklyn-based documentary arts collaborative aimed at reinventing the documentary form so that it reflects the multi-dimensional and inter-connected nature of contemporary existence, αγοράζουν online soma. Primary concerns include: creating an open structure for interactive participation, conducting a critical investigation of the constructions of truth and objectivity, and engaging new audiences in the ongoing conversation. Buy soma no prescription, In a time when populations have become increasingly divided, UnionDocs has created a series of interrelated programs that put individuals in dialogue with one another.

The Commons_Berlin is a performance documentary that engages two distinct, yet related questions: What is common. What makes a city unique. Acquistare a buon mercato soma, By examining public space, intellectual property, consensus-building language, models of collective living, globalization and the collective unconscious, this inquiry attempts to paint the broadest picture of the myths and realities of what we share today. As a counterpoint, a fictional landscape called "The Commons" is constructed where possible alternatives are imagined, buy soma online. The Commons_Berlin borrows the structure of a rock concert and consists of short, song-length documentary pieces, buy soma no prescription. It is produced specifically for the Volksbühne's Rollende-Road-Schau.

One of the fundamental debates that has emerged with new media technologies is copyright law. Lawrence Lessig writes:

This rough divide between the free and the controlled has now been erased.... The technology that preserved the balance of our history — between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission — has been undone. Buy soma no prescription, The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture.

The same digital technologies enable collaborative work on a massive scale, while allowing every document to be stamped with supposed singular authorship. Order soma, Massive media companies and their squadrons of lawyers have claimed all intellectual property, including common thought that was previously source for public inspiration, as exclusively private. In opposition, a growing global movement has galvanized behind a notion known as "Creative Commons" (CC). Instead of the "all rights reserved" of the copyright cartel, a Creative Commons license guarantees "some rights reserved" and fosters the flexibility of creative exchange.

Hundekopf — Knifeandfork

Hundekopf is a new project exploring the experience of Berlin's Ringbahn, which encircles the inner city and is used as a literal vehicle to move between time and place in a fiction-historical narrative structured through SMS text-messaging, buy soma no prescription.

Stories (...) are like mountain tops jutting out of the sea, where to buy soma. Self-contained islands though they may seem, they are upthrusts of an underlying geography that is at once local and, for all that, a part of a universal pattern.

– Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (1990)

The Knifeandfork artist group approaches the urban environment as a narrative space - a human artifact constructed of stories both real and imagined that we collectively engage in telling. Missouri MO Mo. , So-called 'pervasive' technology is used as a means to expose the city's hidden layers and to create new ones, exploring emerging means of storytelling. Buy soma no prescription, Technology encourages stories that are dynamic and nonlinear, mapping closely to the ways in which the human mind and thought process persist. Multiple realities, stochastic storylines, deconstructed time, branching ... while the most brilliant of novelists such as Borges and Calvino and filmmakers from Kurosawa to Tarrantino have hinted at such techniques in the past, there are obvious limitations for passive media to go beyond mere representation of these structures, soma cheap. Games, on the other hand, with their rule systems, interactivity, and role-playing dynamic have always involved flexible outcomes dependent on the players' choices. Arguably an important evolution of literature in recent history, Montana MT Mont. , incorporating these elements gives new media storytelling a game-like feel.

A first-person perspective makes the "reader" simultaneously the narrator, a central character, and even the creator of the story, buy soma no prescription. As a result, the reader thinks, participates, and feels for the artwork, becoming emotionally involved with the story and ultimately, its outcome. It’s about actively acknowledging the role of audience perception: in Hudekopf, Massachusetts MA Mass. , the reader’s identity - whether a German accustomed to the S-bahn from a daily commute or a visiting American seeing the city for the first time - is not at all arbitrary, but an essential element of the piece.

With wireless devices we can incorporate the unique perspective of the reader at a particular place at a particular time, letting physical reality (visual, auditory, olfactory) make immediate the sensory experience of an event in the narrative. αγοράσετε soma, Together, these elements create a storytelling environment that is extremely vital: Hundekopf invites us to experience the city as verbs, not nouns. Buy soma no prescription, A feature of the cityscape, though it might be objectified and cataloged
by postcards, understood by a caption or label or expectation, is in fact an invitation to act and imagine. Location-embedded narrative acknowledges history as an active thing, a persistent framework for re-experience. The
artistic and even soteriological goal is to let the actively creative mode of consciousness inspired by the context of the piece drift permanently into our everyday motions through the city.

Berlin by Chance — Posttourismus Büro and Glowlab

Whether a native or tourist, one typically only knows pieces of the vast area called Berlin, købe soma, as personal patterns or routes substitute for a real exploration of the city. Berlin by Chance is about fooling these patterns and experiencing the vastness of the city. Glowlab, a Brooklyn-based arts lab focused on psychogeography, was founded in 2002 by Christina Ray, buy soma no prescription. Given the emergence of new technology, Glowlab projects interpret traditional Situationist practices with mobile phones, wi-fi, GPS, Alaska AK , and computer algorithms to promote the collective evolution of the field.

For Loving Berlin, Gesa Henselmans, founder of Posttourismus Büro in Berlin, will be collaborating with Glowlab on the project Berlin by Chance.

Anyone who wants to join Berlin by Chance receives an expedition sent by a random generator. Explorers are asked to collect impressions of their journey and reinsert them into the system when they finish. Buy soma no prescription, A communal, pyschogeographic cartography of the city develops as these impressions accumulate.

To paraphrase Glowlab contributor Kanarinka: psychogeography is about rethinking the omnipotent perspective of the map, cheap soma online, where everything is generalized so as to be indistinguishable, and looking instead at the specificities of maps produced by actions and impressions of the transient realities of place. The algorithms of this project inevitably produce unexpected experiences of the real city. The participant's actual encounters in the live city are the primary element, and the virtual capability of the Internet serves as a reference point and space for documentation.

Conclusion

All of this work embraces the democratizing potential of new media, is fueled by collaborative structures, embodies a growing global community, displays an open and playful engagement with commercial culture, focuses on real world experiences, and utilizes the city as the ideal stage for interaction. Whereas the artists of the past focused upon the individual production of “works,” these groups and their projects illustrate a shift towards artists developing collaborative platforms that expand the artistic process into the public realm and open channels of creativity, buy soma no prescription.

Today, perception is the ultimate battlefield for power. In an age of pervasive mediation and the ever-decreasing production value of material goods (especially in the more industrialized nations), the conceptual space of immaterial valuation is the sweet spot for all those seeking change. Advertising and political propaganda aim directly at manipulating perception, going to any length of trickery to convince the individual of their message. Truth, never a genuinely solid concept, is now more fluid than ever. Buy soma no prescription, It is the aim of these projects to challenge the assumed truth in pervasive messaging and mainstream meaning. Perhaps they seek a change in their underlying pursuit of an old objective: revolution. Revolution not in the traditional sense of overthrowing the state, but in the steady, yet widespread transformation of perception. They are critical by nature, seeking to invigorate questioning. It is a new practice of a subtle politics of liberated thought.

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