PublicSpace 2.0 - evolving spaces along network technologies

Since only a few years, fast spreading, participatory platforms on the web have evoked a major shift into the realm of social media. This was made possible by the convergence of free web platforms, inexpensive software that enables people to share their own media and access materials produced by others, the rapid fall in prices for professional-quality media-capture devices such as high-definition video cameras, and the addition of camera and video features to mobile phones. Social media are often discussed today in relation to Web 2.0, which refers to a number of technical, economic, and social developments. Besides social media, other important related concepts are user-generated content, network as platform, folksonomy (social indexing, tagging), syndication (web feeds make a portion of a web site available to other sites or individual subscribers), and mass collaboration. There are two main tendencies of Web 2.0: in the past decade a majority of internet users accessing content produced by a much smaller number of professional producers shifted to a growing number of users accessing content produced by other non-professionals. Second, if the web of the 1990s was primarily a publishing medium, ever since the 2000s, it has increasingly become a communication medium. 1 The number of people participating in social networks, sharing media and creating user-generated content is surprising: MySpace for example claimed 300 million users in the year of 2008.2 What do these trends mean for culture in general and professional art practice in particular? The new social media platforms reveal the particular features of individual subcultures. Users are given nearly unlimited storage and plenty of tools to organize, promote, and broadcast their thoughts, opinions, behaviour and media to others. Based on these recent developments, our application proposes to develop a strategic manual for social practices-oriented design in public space. New forms of public performance and social interplay are likely to appear, if we envision them to be fed by media-rich content created in an asynchronous, remote virtual manner in the everyday of public life. One important aspect of social media companies appears to be their strategy to design flexible platforms which continually change. Most Web 2.0 companies give users the ability to customize their online lives and to expand the functionality of the platforms themselves. 3 Customization and participation will be taken as key principles to initiate and enhance new self-organizing forms of public life. 1 Adrian Chan, "Social Media: Paradigm shift?", http://www.gravity7.com/paradigm_shift_1.html 2 see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyworld, http://www.pipl.com/statistics/social-networks/size-growth 3 Tim O`Reilly, "What Is Web 2.0:Design Patterns and Business Models for the next generation of Software", http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreillyim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=4

In the beginning of 2010 we were awarded a FWF/PEEK grant for the research project Public Space 2.0 - Evolving Spaces along Network Technologies enabling us to pursue artistic-scientific basic research in the general field of Public Space and Technology. After two years of research in cooperation with the Kunstuniversität Linz we published Public Space 2.0 a manual in June 2012. In the course of a yearly exchange procedure between libraries, the library of Kunstuniversität Linz was able to distribute our publication to many other libraries in Europe. Our printed publication mainly addresses necessary conditions necessary to generate and to experience public spaces of today. We propose to understand public space as a means of reproduction for language based phenomena as well as for those lingual acquisitions still to be transmitted. People participate in collective oral traditions expressed and translated into social practices and communication technologies, manifested in confirmed habits and rituals. Following this premise, public space is understood as a spatial equation to the ongoing social negotiation of everyday life in a city. Conditions relevant to the rise and fall of ephemeral social space and its practice of creating boundaries formed research categories of its own. Socio-political and technological conditions play a significant role in the processes of creation and transformation of public space. Our artistic-scientific approach is thus based on exemplary observations and seeks to make visible the boundaries of publicly negotiated spaces. We formed an interest group consisting of various disciplines urban planning and design, architectural theory and computer science set out to study various procedures of observing and visualizing. Joint basic research has been guided by creative leitmotifs so that varying methodological preferences could be accommodated. Phenomenological views were confronted with ideas of classic scientific development. As part of a phenomenological approach, our common thinking process was informed by evidence, radical arguments and analysis of paradigms; if necessary, such an approach sometimes even lead to a reversal of a specific path of investigation. The goal was to grasp observed objects as free of facticity as possible. As methodological instrument, reduction and free variation certainly met a general wish for impartiality in the context of interdisciplinary work. In addition to theoretical approaches, we opted for the accompanying development of technical prototypes. Functioning as a wearable device, the artifact broaches the issue of individual subjective experience of merely subconscious nature in public space with the aim to inform contemporary conception of urban space and design. im öffentlichen Raum.