public space

This is an open session designed to build understanding of evolving contexts and conditions for making and presenting creative works by drawing upon the experiences of those involved both with making works for arts contexts and with curating exhibitions and other arts-venue contexts. The session will invite current and past ELO arts committee leaders, including ELO members involved in the ELO new Media Arts Committee, and gallery curators to help lead the open conversation. The open forum will share knowledge and develop new ideas about making and staging works for the public sphere. The open session may confront practical, theoretical, and perhaps even ideological and political issues, conditions and their cultural paradigms.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

The participants of the workshop, experts from the field of IT and computer technologies, are acquainted with the concept and history of sound sculptures, learn about the technologies used in this field, and participate in a poetic media performance by Machine Libertine.

Art in public space shapes the character of the city, more traditional statues and public monuments in the city usually don’t have sound incorporated into them. Nevertheless, they are surrounded by a variety of sounds: noise from construction, talking, the hum of machinery, etc. – a steady stream of such sounds we call “sound pollution”. One of the ways to improve the climate of public spaces and to eliminate sound pollution is via sound design. Sounds of the city are included into the composition of the works, transforming them into a harmonious piece of music. A therapeutic oasis is formed around a sound sculpture, a special space for respite from the busy rhythm of the city. Interactivity is a central element of a sound sculpture: the sound parameters are determined by the audience, the data on the time of day, time of year, weather conditions, etc. Such multi-channel sound composition is designed to breathe life into static sculptural artifacts, as well as to create harmonious sound aesthetics for the urban environment.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

The interactive literary installation Ink (Accidentally, the Screen Turns to Ink, created by the authors in a collaboration with Roskilde Library, CAVI and Peter-Clement Woetmann) is a unique experimental public display created in 2012 for the library space and exhibited at more than ten Danish libraries, at conferences, festivals and events. Ink is unique in being a large, public, social and performative digital literary installation designed to give library audiences an experience of digital literature through an affective, ergodic proces. Ink has been presented at several conferences, including the ELO 2013 conference in Paris.

With this paper we aim to develop a post-hoc reflection and prepare for a new version of Ink by exploring a theoretical and conceptual framing of what we term "post-digital literary interaction" in order to propose a collaborative invitation for further experimenting with the infrastructure facilitated by the setup. Concurrently with the actual crafting of the installation, we have deviced a model for conceptualizing the dynamic processes of sensing and sense-making through a cycle of affective, material and ergodic engagement. This model offers a way to conceptualize how the form of interaction precedes and continuously modulates an increasingly active reading process, a form of literary interaction, which is carried out and can be understood performatively - both in relation to the interaction carried out in public space, the act of writing text through the interaction and the act of reading this text.

Based on a thorough analysis of the empirical material from the first version of Ink we aim to propose a re-design of the installation focusing on making the machine's reading and the material data generating processes underlying the infrastructure visible. We consequently aim to develop a critical interface, which demonstrates the perspective of the machine on the text generation - e.g. demonstrating the algorithmic text generation to the audience or how the machine controls the reading. Through this perspective we aim to explore new techniques of text generation, e.g. workshop-based collaborative writing processes, critical explorations of net-based textual dynamics and of post-digital literary culture. In general the aim would be to explore and create an installation, which will allow for a critical reading experience of post-digital literary culture and we hope to address the ELO conference audience in order to invite for collaborations on this with a long-term plan to exhibit the results at the following ELO conference in Bergen 2015.

(Source: Author's introduction)

Suppporting the critical reappropriation of a room of one’s own -Virginia Woolf, 1929-and contextualizing in the present Net Culture, this essay questions the redefinition of the private spaces transformed into nods of relation and inmaterial work in a Web-Society. With the hypothesis of that space conforms a new public public-private scenario for the reflection and self-management of the self, this book examines the new conditions and possibilities of emancipation and subjective construction of a connected home, the consequences of the production ways and online life from the intimate spaces and the redefinition of the new productive spheres.