Interactive Arts Commons^™

Expressive Cartography, Boundary Objects, And The Aesthetics Of Public Visualization, Patricio Davila, Dave Colangelo, Robert Tu

School of Film Faculty Publications and Presentations

Aesthetic visualization projects that incorporate users, community stakeholders, multiple modalities and technologies necessarily emphasize the way that an artistic visualization can be both an artifact and a process — a conceptualization of aesthetic visualization that is useful for thinking about visualization in general. In this paper, the authors propose the concept of the visualization as boundary object, a move away from the indexical claims of visualization and instead towards an acknowledgement of the entangled nature of social, political, economic, cultural, technological and environmental actants. Through a description of the In The Air, Tonight public visualization project, the authors suggest that …

Disrupting The City: Using Urban Screens To Remediate Public Space, Jean Dubois, Dave Colangelo, Claude Fortin

School of Film Faculty Publications and Presentations

For over a decade, human-computer interaction (HCI) research placed a great deal of emphasis on studying interaction, engagement, and appropriative practices in online technology-mediated social environments. Moving forward, however, we see computing systems increasingly designed to support digitally-augmented face-to-face interactions in public settings. As far back as the nineteen seventies, new media artists anticipated this interactive potential of digital public displays to foster new forms of situated interactions in urban space, quite distinct from mobile computing in that they altogether exclude online connections or exchanges. Drawing on examples of practice, this paper discusses and show-cases some of the key creative …

Curating Massive Media, Dave Colangelo

School of Film Faculty Publications and Presentations

The European Union’s media art initiative Connecting Cities and New York-based Streaming Museum are two recent examples of curatorial models that operate through large, networked, digital displays. This growing exhibition category combines expressive media architecture and telecommunication elements to engage ‘trans-local’ sites and diverse publics in complex media spaces. By investigating the confluence of exhibition making, public art and urban experience, this article explores the relationship between spectacle and criticality with respect to shifting notions of space, identity and ‘the common’.

Note: At the time of writing, Dave Colangelo was affiliated with Ryerson University.

An Expanded Perceptual Laboratory: Public Art And The Cinematic Techniques Of Superimposition, Montage And Apparatus/Dispositif, Dave Colangelo

School of Film Faculty Publications and Presentations

The use of the moving image in public space extends the techniques of cinema— namely superimposition, montage and apparatus/dispositif—threatening either to dehistoricize and distract or to provide new narrative and associative possibilities via public art. These techniques also serve as helpful tools for analysis drawn from cinema studies that can be applied to examples of the moving image in public space. Historical examples include the multi-screen experiments of Charles and Ray Eames; and contemporary public projections such as Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection, Robert Lepage’s The Image Mill, my own project entitled Workers That Live in the Mirror, …

In The Air Tonight: An Uncommon Interface For Common Concern, Maggie Chan, Dave Colangelo, Patricio Davila, Robert Tu

School of Film Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper is concerned with addressing social concerns with large-scale, multi-modal media art that uses digital networks, reactive architecture, and the city as semiotic resources. As artists and designers who are involved in socially engaged practice, we see an important role in foregrounding political and social issues through networks and architecture, negotiating and furnishing access to both while shaping compelling interfaces that allow people to contribute by amplifying an area of common concern. We discuss some previous work by Davila and Colangelo and focus on our latest project, In The Air, Tonight, which aims to visualize local wind patterns combined …

Light, Data, And Public Participation, Dave Colangelo, Patricio Davila

School of Film Faculty Publications and Presentations

As practices in reactive architecture and locative media converge and urban screens and projection technologies proliferate we are becoming increasingly able to interact with data in public space. This confluence presents us with modes of digitally mediated participation in urban space that highlight bodily and architectural relationships with data rich environments as well as new sets of problems and possibilities regarding aesthetics, poetics, and politics. The article will analyze works by Alfredo Jaar, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, as they respectively exemplify the efficacy of the key components of public data visualization: mapping, expanded presence through architecture, and the ‘incompleteness’ …

Public Data Visualization: Dramatizing Architecture And Making Data Visible, Dave Colangelo, Patricio Davila

School of Film Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper, we explore emerging modes of digitally-mediated participation in urban space that engage bodily and architectural relationships with data rich environments. We contend that the combination of data visualization, public space, and digital display technologies represent an important aesthetic and technical challenge that engage new dimensions of presence in a social and material environment characterized by net works and data.