app

Examples of everyday urban experiences with interfaces are numerous: TripAdvisor provides access restaurants, and other sights that are otherwise not clearly visible in the urban landscape; with Airbnb, any apartment in the city holds the invisible potential of a bed and breakfast, etc. In other words “every street corner and every local pub leads a double life.” (de Waal). The interface is however not just an interface to the city, but is a meta-construction that within itself holds a particular urban gaze (Andersen and Pold). This presentation focuses on the black box of the urban metainterface, and how the city is textualized beyond the street sign and the billboard; and how this produces a particular territoriality and perception of space. The urban metainterface depends on an ability to capture the user’s behaviors: the more the interface opens up the city – to diverse behaviors and signification – the more it needs to monitor the users and their milieu, and process these data. The more we read, the more we are being read. But what are the aesthetic mechanisms of seeing and walking in the city, whilst being seen and being guided? In the app Las calles habladas, or Spoken Streets, by Clara Boj and Diego Diaz, the user is offered a random map and walking path around their location. The app is an audio guide, but unlike most audio guides, however, the narrative appears fragmented. The audio track is an automated text-to-speech function where each user movement generates a search and is answered by the reading of debris from the World Wide Web’s enormous body of text: phrases from websites, Twitter feeds, or Facebook events appear together with symbols, numbers, and URLs. Sometimes there is a direct and visible linkage to the user’s location, as when the user is near a shop that also is listed on a website. At other times the relation is more abstract. The relation between sense and nonsense, between potential narrative and raving incoherent jabber, seems to be central to the literary experience of using the app and points to both how the city can be defined as a “semiotization” of space, and the ways in which this process is deeply intertwined with “how the web speaks the streets”. To unfold the grammar of the urban metainterface, the presentation accounts for how the city itself (according to Roland Barthes) functions as a process of semiosis that is structured around a particular, often-implicit, and unconscious way of seeing, and with Boj and Diaz as a starting point, but also with references to the literary works of Graham Harwood, the presentation elaborates the kinds of gazes the metainterface produces.

Memories are deeply rooted in the concrete: in space, gesture, and material objects. The cognitive processes of forgetting and recalling, the latter involving “action-oriented responses from a living subject to material triggers -- physical stimuli from external environment” (van Dijck 2007: 30), have not only been studied by neuroscientists, psychologists, and cognitive theorists, but have been addressed and examined by e-lit writers as well. Textual “instruments,” such as the app novella Pry (2015), which are activated by bodily gestures and manipulated like games (Luesebrink 2013), invite readers-players not only to trigger (through touch) the narrator’s, protagonist’s, or principal character’s interior thoughts -- thoughts which are verbalized and represented as the strobing words, or floating or stretched text. They also enable readers to experience, within the course of complex tactile interactions, the struggle of retrieving from explicit memory and from the unconscious, personal flashbacks (in Pry represented in the form of very short videos). However, these Bergsonian image-souvenirs, once registered by senses and stored in the faculty of the mind, are not fixed. Rather, while invoked, they are continually being submitted to (re)creation (Kordys 2006: 143, van Dijck 2007: 30). This paper focuses on memory (re)construction apps created within the field of new media art. The analysis will not be limited to the gestural repertoire used to interact with facets of someone else’s memory -- in the second half of the paper, the focus will shift to the reader-player’s own memory, which is subjected to the challenge of having to read a constantly transforming text: for example, the stretchtext technology implemented in Pry allows inserting phrases between already read ones, which changes the meaning of each sentence; similarly, readers of Pry come to realize that it is not possible to retrace sequences of already viewed flashbacks. In this context, I will address the question of whether the concept of haptic memory can be adapted to a ludosemiotic approach (Ensslin 2014: 53).

In the field of networks and big data, data visualization has become very popular in recent years. Scientists, artists, and software designers are working collaboratively using elaborate ways to communicate data, and visual design is playing a substantial role by making the language of science more accessible and comprehensible, through visualisations, in the form of infographics, sculptural objects, installations, sonifications and applications. But why this current outburst? Is it because of the availability of open data? The approachability of visual design? The need for new analytic methodologies in the digital humanities? Or, the fact that it is part of our collective consciousness?

This paper deals with the above questions and has evolved, as a practice-based research, in conjunction with the practical part, a mobile application designed to run on an iPad2 / iPad mini or later models. This work was created specifically for the SILT exhibition, hosted in Hamburg, Germany in June 2014.

I took this exhibition as an opportunity to research the city of Hamburg and discovered that it had one of the largest ports in the world; its name Gateway to the World (GttW) seemed like a great title for the app. The vast and busy port served as a metaphor for the immensity of the Internet, the flow of information and its meaning of openness and outreach to the World Wide Web.

The aim of the app was to use open data from the maritime databases to visualise the routes of the vessels arriving to and from the Port of Hamburg, as well as have the vessels’ names mapped to Wikipedia entries. As the vessels move they act as writing tools to reveal a string of text creating calligramatic forms of information pulled from Wikipedia entries about the name of the vessels.

The information gathered from these entries generates a remix of text going from presenting factual information about vessels (containers, cargo ships, tankers, high speed crafts) to describing their names connecting them to characters in literary works, plays and mythological stories.

Further questions addressed as part of the ongoing research process are: How is this current fascination with data visualisation to be understood? How can open data be used as the raw material for creative projects? How can graphic design, programming, and aesthetics be used to analyse databases? What contribution can design bring to the Digital Humanities in general and more specifically to the field where art, language, and digital technologies intersect, such as in electronic literature?

It is with projects like this that Electronic literature serves as a means to explore open data as cultural material, as a way to instigate new forms of communication to discuss social and political issues and bring transparency through hybrid forms of visual art, language and technological advances. GttW in particular explores new territories to develop electronic literature. These include the investigation of open data in the creation of data visualisation poetics, e-calligrams, new literacies, networked multimodal textualities and online and mobile platforms for writing, publication and dissemination purposes.

For documentation of the work see following Website: http://www.mariamencia.com/pages/gatewaytotheworld.html

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)