Title:

Urban texting - interactive fiction in the public space

The overall aim of this PhD project is to investigate the growing number of art and game projects using pervasive technologies for engaging the public urban space.

Specifically in focus is the still developing field of locative media art, often reduced to either an annotative or phenomenological type of mapping and frequently criticised for its appeal to commercial interest, dependency on Cartesian mapping systems and for being the avant-garde of the ‘society of control’. By viewing locative media art as a field exploring the frame afforded by the autonomy of art and play to encourage critique, this project aims to argue for a different reading.

It is the thesis of this project that locative media art through its renegotiates of the relations between art and technology, democracy and the public sphere, not only positions itself historically through the use of avant-garde strategies (e.g. strategies of defamiliarization), but also offers a conceptual framework for the analysis of the technological assemblage and it’s potential social and political impact. 

Main Supervisor: Søren Pold, Associate Professor, Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University.

Co-supervisor: Prof. Dr. Roberto Simanowski, Institut für Medienwissenschaft, Universität Basel