Social interaction triggered or mediated by interactive public interfaces

Urban screens are everywhere in our urban environment, including advertisment, information, global newsfeeds.The pubic encunters that had characterized the social life of an older urban form were increasingly displaced onto the electronic media. As Virilio sums it up: 'The screen abruptly became the city square'.[1] Media technologies and platforms are not only redefining architecture and urbanism, but the social life sustained within their domain.[2] This results to an  alienation of people from the public space of their city pushing them to isolation and increased use of social media for communcating.

Inspite of all these, digital interactive technlogies in the form of public installations and contrivances in urban space, can be utilized to trigger social interaction by mediating the communication between the participants of the 'performances' that emerge often intuitively. Around those interfaces the crowd negotiates the space to engage in the interaction and a crowd self-organaization driven by technology emerges in those digitally enhanced environments.

Liquid Light- L.Hesphanol, M.Sogono, G.Wu

The artwork stems from the concept of "familiar strangers" and represents people being connected by their glowing auras through shining energy halos gliding through ripples of water. Every now and then, glimpses of enlightenment about their shared condition are materialised in a burst of blinding white light, only to fade again, in an endless continuum. A real, physical mist gently falls at the back of the interaction zone, embracing the audience as a soft touch of realisation and awe. [3]

Liquid Light - Promotional Video from Luke Hespanhol on Vimeo.

SMSlingshot- VR/Urban

The SMSlingshot is an autonomous working device, equipped with a high frequency radio, hacked arduino board, laser and batteries. Text messages can be typed on a phone-sized wooden keypad which is integrated in an also wooden slingshot. After the message is finished, the user can aim on a media facade and send/shoot the message straight to the targeted point. It will then appear as a coloured splash with the message written within. The text message will also be real-time twittered - just in case.

 

SMSlingshot from THE CONSTITUTE on Vimeo.

Body movies, Rafaelo Lozano-Hemmer(2001)

Body movies, first staged in 2001 at the Schouwburg Square in Rotterdam, utilized large-scale images, comprising over 1000 portraits taken on the streets of Rotterdam,Madrid, Mexico and Montreal, which were projected onto the facade of the Pathe Cinema building using robotically controlled projectors. However, the potraits were rendered invisible due to the powerful xenon lights saturating them from ground level. It was only when people walked through the square that the silhouettes of their interposed shadows revealed the projected protraits. This emphasis on the physical prescence of participants; bodies plays an important role in limiting the works' appropriation as abstract spectacle.Perhaps the most striking aspect of Body Movies was the playful engagement it sustained among groups of erstwhile strangers who came together in public space and discovered that, by enacting a collective choreography, they could affect the visual ambience of that space. [5]

Through these examples I'm trying to highlight the use of interactive technologies embedded in elements of public urban space in order to strengthen social interaction and engage the crowd in public life in a performative way

References
[1] S.McQuire, The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space, p.140, Sage 2008
[2] S.McQuire, The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space, p.7, Sage 2008

[3] https://vimeo.com/25193248
[4] https://vimeo.com/55813349
[5]  S.McQuire, The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space, p.153, Sage 2008