Articles

Mechanics of Place: Textures of Tophane + Interview, Statement, Artwork


Mechanics of Place, 2011, Hana Iverson and Sarah Drury. Mobile Augmented Reality, participating artist Cynthia Beth Rubin. © Hana Iverson and Sarah Drury, 2011.
Mechanics of Place, 2011, Hana Iverson and Sarah Drury.
Mobile Augmented Reality, participating artist Cynthia
Beth Rubin. © Hana Iverson and Sarah Drury, 2011.

LEA Volume 19 Issue 2
Volume Editors: Lanfranco Aceti and Richard Rinehart
Editors: Ozden Sahin, Jonathan Munro and Catherine M. Weir

ISBN: 978-1-906897-23-9
ISSN: 1071-4391

Mechanics of Place: Textures of Tophane
+ Interview, Statement, Artwork

by Hana Iverson & Sarah Drury

Place is always encountered as a flux of temporal and spatial transitions, framed by the past places we have just been and the future places we are moving towards. Augmented Reality through the smartphone constitutes a dual experience where participants can either submit or retrieve site-specific information. These projects can foreground the social, cultural, historical and geographic qualities of the physical location where they are embedded. As such, they suggest a desire to engage the ‘placeness’ of place – the investment of personal associations with history as a means of layering situated meaning that is designed to enrich, amplify or contradict the experience of the location. Using an array of categories as a conceptual structure, Mechanics of Place engages the specific relational dynamics of a particular neighborhood, bringing to the fore the contradictions and conflicts inherent in the mixing of the cultural conditions that are present in a given urban location. Within this relational and multicultural space, situated augmented reality art works provide a new way to enact a hybrid relation to place.

Full article is available for download as a pdf here.

Volume 19 Issue 2 of Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is published online as a free PDF but will also be rolled out as Amazon Print on Demand and will be available on iTunes, iPad, Kindle and other e-publishing outlets.