Urban Interfaces

In this collection of essays we wish to propose the notion of urban interfaces as a lens through which we can explore how situated media, art, and performances shape, critically reflect on, intervene in, and reimagine contemporary, urban public spaces. We focus on contemporary cities as complex, socially dynamic and increasingly performative and mediatized infrastructures and environments. Rapid and radical transformations of urban culture and urban publicness are spurred by intensified (global) mobilities, the ubiquity and proliferation of digital information and communication technologies, and the spread of datafication and platformization. On a discursive level, these transformations are heavily debated in connection to themes like, for instance, participatory culture and civic engagement, urban governance, processes of social-spatial inclusion and exclusion, changes in ownership, or their invasive influence on urban public space through a relentless push of commercialization and privatization, quantification and so on. On a ’street level,’ these issues take shape within the variety of cultural practices surrounding media, art and performance. The contributions in this collection zoom in on the connection between these cultural realms.

The mobile apps The Architecture of Radio and White Spots are exemplary of a contemporary strand of media art that explores the relations between data, their infrastructures, and our physical or lived environments. In this article, we use them to investigate the ways in which interfaces enable engagements with our data-saturated urban habitat, demonstrating in the process how they extend definitions of the interface as a ‘boundary zone’ or ‘threshold’. We argue that interfacing always happens at different levels simultaneously; technologically speaking (in the sense of the different layers of a ‘stack’ of computer protocols) but also metaphorically. In this piece, we identify three levels of interfacing, that serve in turn as the lens through which we examine how the apps facilitate interactions, and what sort of relations between the user, the city, and data or connectivity this entails. In the process, we pay particular attention to the interface’s productivity: the role it plays in shaping realities or worlds, but also types of user agency and subject positions. The argument we work towards is, that in setting up specific encounters, interfaces are revealing not only of how we understand technology but also of how we imagine our social world.

What constitutes intelligence or ‘smartness’ in this age of thinking machines? What kinds of intelligence does, or should, a city embody? And how might we monitor, test, and modify those intelligences via urban interfaces? In our Spring 2017 “Urban Intelligence” critical studio at The New School, we addressed these questions by developing an ‘urban intelligence kit,’ an evaluative interface to the smart city that materializes the operative logics, intelligences, and values that are, or could be, embedded in smart cities and citizens. In the process, we demonstrated that ‘urban interfaces’ are more than the ubiquitous screens, apps, and dashboards we see in most smart city renderings. Interfaces encompass a wide variety of knowledge-producing tools, means of operationalizing urban ideals, zones of mediation, and sites of agitation or friction. If we desire a city that honors and accommodates multiple intelligences, it must also incorporate multiple interfaces.

This essay argues that scenography, or performance design, offers a valuable perspective on urban interfaces and architectural facades. It does so by discussing and analyzing a performative research project by the Dutch Platform-Scenography (P-S), a project that explored how we can engage with environments than on first sight do not seem very inviting. Firstly, the essay introduces the methodology of ‘scaling’ and ‘scoping’ (derived from Katie King’s Networked Reenactments), a mode of knowledge production that has specific relevance for a scenographic analysis of (urban) interfaces. Secondly, Platform-Scenography’s project is described, which took place at a thoroughfare in an off-center district in Utrecht, in the Netherlands. This project is the recurring starting point for scaling and scoping between a variety of urban interfaces and spatial performances, discussed through the lens of scenography. As a means of re-enacting the P-S project, a number of façades are explored, each time used to reflect on the relationships between interfacing as a spatial practice and the engaging potential of performance design. The essay demonstrates that the perspective of scenography generates a specific sensitivity for the mundane and occasionally trivial aspects of daily life and for the material, affective, and relational ways of engaging with (urban) environments.

The neo-liberal smart city bandwagon (spearheaded by IBM, Cisco, Google etc.) mainly advances the upsides of using technologies and data to make cities more efficient, competitive, sustainable, and ultimately, as they claim, livable. However, critics point out that achieving livable and attractive cities also depends on framing conditions for softer aspects such as social interaction and the formation of publics and local communities. In this paper, we propose the term Feedback Urbanism as an alternative perspective, one that highlights the (smart) city as hybrid assemblages of exchanges, circulations, and effects. Thus, we aim at a more literal understanding of what interactions and effects occur when technologies come into contact with citizens in the urban environment. To study this in detail, we focus on the Urban Interfaces of technologies, people, and places and their combined effects in two interactive installations in Denmark. We show how they augment and challenge experiences, meanings and the use of urban space and facilitate social interaction through playfulness. Finally, we discuss how small-scale interactive urban installations might provide new typologies for creating sensorial experiences and platforms for citizens to become involved in negotiating their everyday places and practices in playful ways.

The aim of this essay is twofold: first, it proposes a definition of performative urban interfaces as interventions in urban space driven by non-functional narratives that incorporate digital communication technologies as opposed to informational urban interfaces, which are described as systems that aim to provide efficient urban interactions of a functional nature. Second, it provides examples of urban art interventions as forms of performative urban interfaces, analyzing their participatory outcome through ethnographic research. This analysis unveils multiple forms of participatory engagement and interpretation of the narrative that can be defined as emerging performative interventions in urban space. Such interventions emerge through a collective of relational ‘actants,’ including: citizens, artistic narrative, urban space and digital communication technologies. The term ‘actant’ is borrowed here from Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), defined as a mediator capable of reconfiguring agency with unexpected results. The analysis of this collective and its participatory outcome is conducted through examples of urban art interventions, as we discuss the process of artistic narration and participant translation and the potential for performative urban interfaces to repurpose informational urban interfaces.

Humans have long ‘marked’ the world, cities included, augmenting their surroundings with traces of their experience. They have learned to read the signs inscribed on the world’s surface, whether in search of prey or precedent. And they have sorted out how to give those marks coherence, whether as narrative or insight. Publically deployed, discovery-based, or even personal, augmentation’s inherently dialogic character requires reality for its work. This essay considers today’s AR technologies in terms of these more deeply embedded practices of augmentation, particularly as they play out as interfaces in urban places. It explores underlying continuities between earlier augmentation practices and our own, suggests strategies that can usefully inform our deployment of AR technologies, and points to semiotic reciprocities that can help AR move from the gadget du jour to an ally in a profoundly human conversation.

Field Trip, released by Google/Niantic, is one of a growing number of touring apps available on phones, smart watches, tablets, and other mobile devices, that enable users to undertake digitally-supported exploration of (particularly) urban environments. Combining augmented reality, cartographic interfaces and geographic data, these apps offer situated, visual, and geo-locative urban experiences. While one element of touring apps is to connect users to local features, food, historical sites, and other typical tourist attractions, many vaunt their capacity to reveal the secret city, a capacity delivered by the triangulation between the visual, the urban, and the datafied, fostered through digital interfaces. Using urban theory and media theory, this contribution argues that apps like Field Trip reiterate a visual regime of navigation between screens, data, and urban interfaces.

The ability to gather, store and make meaning from large amounts of sensor data is becoming a technological and financial reality for cities. Many of these initiatives are happening through deals brokered between vendors, developers and cities. They are made manifest in the environment as infrastructure – invisible to citizens and communities. We assert that in order to have community-centered smart cities, we need to transform sensor data collection and usage from invisible infrastructure into visible and legible interface. In this paper, we compare two different urban sensing initiatives and examine the methods used for feedback between sensors and people. We question how value gets produced and communicated to citizens in urban sensing projects and what kind of oversight and ethical considerations are necessary. Finally, we make a case for ‘seamful’ interfaces between communities, sensors and cities that reveal their inner workings for the purposes of civic pedagogy and dialogue. We conclude with five preliminary design principles for a community-centered smart city.

This essay considers how mobile software applications for geo-locative touchscreen device might alter habits of interpreting place. It takes up Alexander Galloway’s The Interface Effect and Branden Hookway’s Interface as timely and useful theorizations of the interface as a site of mediation, relation, and address. However, the author argues that neither theory provides a particularly useful language for describing what real world politics ‘at the interface’ might look like. Rather, Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic and its accompanying theorization of habit-change better equip us to explain how social, political intervention might be accomplished at the interface, where the geo-locative touchscreen devices we routinely have in hand might provoke new ways of understanding and experiencing otherwise familiar public spaces. Ward One App, a geo-locative mobile application currently being developed at the University of South Carolina, serves as a point of departure for considering the usefulness of Peircean habit-change for a ‘politics at the interface.’

The soundwalk raises questions concerning the sensory and temporal dimensions of space as well as the social conditions of physical and virtual presence. Moreover, it prompts critical thought around relationality, especially insofar as it is inherent to both interfacing and also the publicness of urban space. This essay looks at the soundwalk as a spatially-designed experience and cultural phenomenon, one which specifically draws attention to the nomadic performance of the public and mobile technologies. In short, the soundwalk highlights the theoretical richness of conceptualizing staged events with and through mobility. This essay takes as its central case a soundwalk developed for the Wilhelminapier in Rotterdam. ThePoints of Departure (2015) soundwalk enabled participants to explore the history of the pier by listening to present-day stories of travel and migration through an app on an Android device. Unique to this soundwalk was the incorporation of the wind as an unpredictable yet determinate factor; by detecting the speed and direction of the wind, a sensor and an algorithm gave rise to permutations of experience.

This article uses the concept of interface to discuss the vertical surfaces of the built environment as interactive locations of spatial production and regulation. I use interface as a verb and a noun to define the capacity of urban surfaces to display the multiple making of urban space and various claims to citizenship, in the form of material surface inscriptions. Using examples from my investigations of surfaces in London, UK, I examine their occupation by inscriptions such as graffiti and street art, to demonstrate how these articulate the interfacing capacity of surfaces. The objective is to develop a discourse around urban surfaces as loci of spatial production and governance, by exploring the theoretical and analytical affordances of the interface. I therefore propose the concept of surface-interface, which I define as a site of spatial production which enables both the regulation and subversion of the image of the city, through a visualization of the power regimes that aim to control it.

Urban interfaces are often understood as straightforward media to foster a standardized customer engagement of citizens with and in smart city processes. In contrast, in this essay we take Johanna Drucker’s humanities approach to interfaces as a starting point to redefine the urban interface as a critical zone of relations between multiple frameworks and embodied users. Our aim is to explore the merits of this approach in an urban development project around an old railway track in Genk (Belgium). Here, a low-tech urban interface—a leather carpet—was gradually developed as different people and institutions gave shape to their surroundings, and a more embedded and critical urban intelligence was realized in a process of democratic participatory design.

In this article we propose the concept interfacing-with-difference to address how young refugees living in cities negotiate cultural differences in public spaces and through using their smartphones. These encounters involve culturally diverse bodies, mobile media technologies, past-present-future temporalities and on- and offline, local and transnational spaces. Media, urban, migration, and gender studies are brought into dialogue to understand better this relational and power-ridden process. The concept is grounded in empirical data gathered through qualitative interviews and photo-elicitation with 42 informants. Fieldwork was focused on informants co-researching their own smartphones as personal pocket archives. We take a situated, intersectional approach to data analysis, in seeking to understand how factors including gender, race, class, sexuality, age, nationality among others co-construct each other and altogether have an impact upon their transnational connectivity, digitally mediated encounters with local difference and memory-making in a broader context of becoming in(visible) in urban spaces.

This essay explores the intersection of play and performance to capture the relationality between the digital and non-digital that increasingly constitutes our urban environments. In Branden Hookway’s sense, it is suggested that the dynamic relation between digital games, embodied play and public space generates a performative interface or productive encounter that affords a different experience of urbanity. Through a series of workshops with young people focused on play across digital and material contexts, the chapter considers how innovative research interventions can themselves facilitate an ‘interfacing’ of playful media, embodiment performance and urban place. In particular, it considers how creative social practice effectively informs ethnographic methods and alternative modes of data gathering and knowledge transmission.

In this essay, I draw on cinema studies, with its legacy of theorizing forms of identity, subject formation, and the dispositif—or arrangement of the cinematic apparatus—to discuss the impact of urban screens. However, rather than exploring a stable, material cityscape into which an array of screens and their imagery are positioned, I posit that a better articulation of the contemporary mediated city is as a continuous, networked unfolding of cities, screens, and humans that together characterize a culture of computation and a form of posthuman subjectivity that I have dubbed ’screened urbanism.’ Urban dwellers occupy a Mobius strip of mutually producing and being produced not through representation so much as computation. The result is an experience of networked being, a continuous process of re-shaping the visual from the computational while navigating a media-rich space that is at once tracking, sensing, producing, and engaging.

Public urban screens are material interfaces for addressing the relations between urban inhabitants and the infrastructures in which they live and pass. This article reflects upon the relations between Shanghai’s state-entrepreneurial context for urban screens and the tactics of adjacency available to media artists and curators (and by extension urban inhabitants) for encountering them, particularly as they are linked to infrastructures of transit and mobility. Mainstream platforms and technological systems generate mobility within the city, as critics of infrastructure have argued, yet this mobility creates the possibility for other new movements to occur. Urban screen infrastructures are thus productively approached in the performative modalities of the interface, as they sit at the razor-thin line between competing articulations of ‘adjacency.’ Indicative of the potentials of expression, experience, and encounter that might emerge in the proximity of otherwise unlike domains – here among layers of urban infrastructure – adjacency is articulated by Out of Home (OOH) screen industries in recombinant innovations that advance us toward new technological and urban futures; media artists and curators, however, have opportunity to take advantage of the layering of urban/screen infrastructures to potentiate other ways of being to be recognized. Here, practices of adjacency can reframe the urban screen to make known the relations, encounters, movements, and sensations that might otherwise sit in the shadows or interstices of the state-entrepreneurial city.

This paper explores how urban media arts transform Singapore’s public spaces into an urban interface – one that allows people to discover different intentionalities towards an understanding of ‘place.’ Sociologists Nicolas Gane and David Beer conceive of interfaces not as discrete technologies but as cultural devices and mediators of everyday experience, power infrastructures and space. Public spaces are also inherently cultural devices and mediators but they are latent, waiting for activation. They are the hard, infrastructure of the city. What urban media art does is activate public spaces, transforming them into an interface for discovering different conceptions and critiques of ‘place’ or the soft, socio-cultural layers of the city. This paper examines how Singapore’s public spaces are transformed into sites for discovering an understanding of ‘place’ – one of belonging or alienation. It looks at how official and unofficial urban media art is used to transform public space into different narratives of belonging by examining the work of independent street artist Samantha Lo and the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s iLight Festival and related projects. Each transforms public space into an interface for understanding the relationship between the (social and cultural) soft city and the (infrastructural) hard city.