Psychogeography of the city of Aarhus

8/8/2019 Psychogeography of the city of Aarhus

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Communicating (in) the city of rhusPsychogeography of the urban landscape

Simona Conti

Communicating (in) the City 2010Prof. Lone Koefoed Hansen

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Table of contents

Foreword....................................................................................................Errore. Il segnalibro non definito.

Psychogeography: creating a loose space through mapping activity........................................................4

Augmenting the urban environment: Hidden and Hybrid..............................................................................7

Listening to the city ........................................................................................................................................................8

.walk and scripting the space......................................................................................................................................9

An rhus Mis-Guide ...................................................................................................................................................10

Conclusions.....................................................................................................................................................................11Bibliographic references: ........................................................................................................................................... 12

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Foreword

The main purpose of this paper is to understand and analyse what the concept of living and

communicating a city (and communicating in the city) is about. Lots of authors have treated

(and continue to treat) topics dealing with urbanism and its relationship with society and with

single individuals (or little group of them). They treated themes related to mapping the complex

and articulated space of a city, finding new ways of represent it, live the urban environment in

uncommon and surprising ways, etc What all these authors attempting such a discovering path

have in common is the purpose to extend the official and accepted meaning of city, enriching

it of aspects of unofficial, subjective and subversive. The common aim of all these authors

research is to reshape the term itself of city to give it a new, opener and more inclusive

meaning. This attempt to discover new ways of thinking and consequently communicating a

city grows mainly out of the fact that a city isnt a static, fixed and one-way reading book.

Instead it represents a pure block of clay that need to be modelled by citizens, tourists or just

passer-bys to acquire some significance. Society and mankind give sense to things especially

when they inhabit them. Vice versa without concrete spaces within which it is enacted, society

remains a meaningless abstraction (Lefebvre, 1991). It represents a natural process we simply

cant avoid: while wandering around a city, while discovering its hidden places or simply living

a urban space day-by-day, our mind naturally build a personal and subjective model of that city.

Several factors contribute to this complex and articulated process. The purpose of this paper is

to analyze some of those factors using a practical set of assignments I made during spring 2010

in the context of Communicating (in) the city course, that took place at the Department of

Aesthetic in Aarhus, Denmark. All of these assignments generated new perspectives around theconcept of living and perceiving the urban space. All of them together constitute a single,

complete set, a practical case study (whose main object is represented by Aarhus itself) rising

from and grounded in theory dealing with the re-conception of urban space.

I will try to explain what does psychogeography mean using terms like hidden, hybrid,

.walk, audiowalk and mis-guide, trying to constantly link practical assignments to a

theoretical background to generate an overall and inclusive new meaning of the cityscape.

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Psychogeography: creating a loose space through mapping activity

Lacking officially assigned uses, leftover spaces and abandoned spaces lie outside the rush and

flow as well as the control of regulations and surveillance that come with the established uses

of planned urban public space. [..] An abandoned railroad maintenance building in Denver

becomes and unofficial museum of graffiti (Karen & Stevens , 2007: 8).

Karen & Sevens analyse an explain what could it mean for a public space to become loose and

how people can affect this transformation towards a wider and more inclusive interpretation.

They assume that people, through their active participation to public and shared landscape can

reinvent and re-conceive the space in new and more creative (and even non-official) ways.

Looseness depends in part on the overall structure of the urban environment (Karen & Stevens ,

2007: 6). Affordances offered by the urban space can be reinterpreted and re-used (or simply re-

conceived without being physically used) by people and elements intended for one purpose can

easily serve another. This kind of re-thinking the urban space is something that can actually

have a lot to do with the activity of mapping urban landscapes. Mapping is one of the main and

strongest strategy of fixing geographical/political/social elements and in a way also of laying

down the law. Maps are preeminently a language of power (Pinder, 1996: 405) and they have

been used during the centuries as a way of embedding particular set power relations and

production and reproduction of social life. Contrasting the common assumption of the

objectivity of cartography (often considered as an absolute and exact science), during the recent

years a critical literature on the power of maps has emerged. Cartography, according to Michel

Foucault, has to be considered as a form of power-knowledge and it involves the exercise of

power through its procedures of classifying , categorising, hierarchising, normalising and

disciplining and therefore they represent a technology of power (Pinder, 1996: 408-9).

In 1950s and 1960s, the Situationist International, a radical art and political group based in

Western Europe together with its avant-garde predecessors in the Lettrist International

developed a theory of psychogeography and psychogeographical mapping.

Psychogeography tries to surpass the concept of cartographic objectivity introducing the

wider concept of subverting cartography as a means of exploring and trying to edit the urban

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landscape to give it new meanings. This use of non-official ways of representing and drawing

the urban landscape enable the spread and the discover of new and hidden facets of a city.

Guy Debord, one of the most important member of the SI (Situationist International) avant-

garde group affirmed that the principal aim of the his group was to break out the conditioning

official cartography and to quest another use of the urban landscape.

Debord created five psychogeographic maps of Paris, whose titles were so fancy to

immediately distance them to ordinary cartography: The naked city, Discours sur le passions

de lamour (also known as Guide psychogographique de Paris), Paris sur la niege, The

most dangerous game and Axe dexploration et chec dans la recherche dun Grand Passage

situationniste. These representations of Paris looked more like tales and adventures than

cartographic representations. They were more about atmospheres, scenes and events than only

about streets and buildings (Pinder, 1996).

Figure 1. Guy Debord "The naked city", 1957

The naked city is a graphic reorganization of Parisconsisting of 19 cut-out sections of the

city connected by a network of swooping directional red arrows (in figure 1 they are in black)

describing the authors attractions and repulsions. This representation of Paris is broken and

fragmented, totally different from the fullness of most cartographic representations.

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The fragments were plundered from existing plans of Paris through the process ofdtournement.

Along with the methods of psychogeography, this was another key tactic developed by the

lettrists and situationists in which objects, images or words were ripped out of their original

context and then juxtaposed carefully and deliberately, not randomly to create new meanings

and effects. (Pinder, 1996: 419)

And as Debord defined it the dtournement is the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a

new ensamble (Debord, 1959: 67)

Another basic practice of SI group is the drive:

(the derive is a) technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Drives involve playful

constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different

from the classical notions of journey and stroll. In a drive one or more persons during a certain

period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for

movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the

encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think:

from a drive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed

points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. (Debord, 1958:

62)

The artistic situationist strategy ofdtournementand the practice of the drivewere the logical

bases that inspire the creation of my personal and subjective map ofrhus (see assignment 2,

appendix). The aim of this task was to make visible something invisible, to open to the most

(through the mapping process) hidden and secret spaces of the urban landscape. Broadly

speaking, hidden is to be intended as something that is invisible to the majority, something

that the official representation of the cityscape doesnt show and in the most subjective

interpretation of the term, hidden is something that reside in our mind. Taken this as a general

assumption, my personal and subversive map ofrhus let emerge a facet of the City to which I

normally pay a lot of attention: urban art and urban forms of expression that take form as

painted house faades, stickers, labels and whatever urban artists creativity could invent. My

purpose was to fix in a map something that embody my interests and meanwhile I attempted to

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create something that is both personal and interpersonal, something that expresses my

subjectivity but that could easily be used by anyone, anytime.

The result is a reasoned repository of urban art forms I ran into while wandering around rhus

during a freezing afternoon in February 2010. I divided such art expressions in different

categories (house faades, MorMor art, installations, paper crafts). In doing this, my

subversive/subjective map of rhus as a public open museum, represents a form of discourse

which is actively involved in the social construction of reality.

Moreover, my personal representation ofrhus could be part of the everyday mappings area

of critical cartography described by Crampton & Krygier as whether performative, indigenous,

affective and experiential or narrative, (everyday mappings) creatively illuminate the role of

space in peoples lives by countering generalized and global perspectives (Crampton & Krygier,

2006: 25).

Augmenting the urban environment: Hidden and HybridLinked to the concept of hidden spaces to be discovered, there is also the concept of hybrid

spaces. Hybrid space is just one of the terms used to designate the same concept: authors use

also the expressions of augmented space, locative technologies, mixed reality, augmented

reality, augmented virtuality, wearable computing, ubiquitous computing, hybrid reality.

No matter what expression is used, the very core of Hybrid Space is the fact that different

perspectives of reality are offered. De Souza affirms that:

hybrid spaces merge the physical and the digital in a social environment created by the mobility

of users connected via mobile technology devices and users do not perceive physical and

digital spaces as separate entities and do not have the feeling of entering the Internet, or being

immersed in digital spaces, as was generally the case when one needed to sit down in front of acomputer screen and dial a connection(De Souza e Silva, 2006: 262).

This way, the use of mobile/portable technologies can influence the perception of urban space.

The adding of new layers that enrich the cityscape but that cant immediately be seen or

perceived make hidden and hybrid two sides of the same coin. For example, from a physical

point of view, an hybrid space can be considered also the electromagnetic field that surround

us everyday and that come actively from GSM, WiFi, Bluetooth and passively from everything

that emit electromagnetic waves (like household electrical appliances). Anthony Dunne and

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Fiona Raby, two researchers of London Royal College of Art, worked in a project concerning the

augmentation of space/reality through the discover of invisible territory of electromagnetic

fields (or hertzian space as Dunne called it): The Placebo project (see assignment 3, in

Appendix). Its main objective is exactly to create an hybrid space and to provoke and let people

think about something they often ignore, something that is not visible but that inhabit

continuously the surrounding space. The project consist of 8 placebo objects that react to the

presence of electromagnetic fields letting people see something that is apparently invisible. The

Placebo project define the Hertzian Space as a kind of hybrid space because, according to Usque

"[it] encourages us to think not of silent static structures that surround us but rather of fluid

dynamic fields beyond the edge of natural perception []" (Usman Haque, 2004: 1).

Disclosing what is commonly hidden to human perception, Raby and Dunne dealt with lots of

aspects already treated by situationist theory: both the English researchers and the avant-garde

movement attempted to create new perspectives of the space that we inhabit, trying to surpass

official, common and superficial interpretations with uncommon, surprising and even bizarre

representations and reorganizations of reality.

Listening to the cityThe realm of sounds is something people often forget. In spite of this, the urban soundscape is

an essential part of a city, something we cant avoid and that constitute the real nature of it. As

we are often really accustomed to sounds, they become part of an hidden layer of our everyday

lives. But if for just few minutes we stop and try to concentrate on the sounds the surround us

we can surprisingly find out a facet of the space that we inhabit. Murray Schafer analyzed how

the world soundscape has changed from the past to nowadays (with the increasing of human

and technological sounds) and how environmental sounds can be categorised according to their

intensity and occurrence. He distinguishes Hi-Fi soundscape to Lo-Fi soundscape:

A hi-fi system is one possessing a favourable signal to noise ratio. The hi-fi soundscape is one of

which discrete sounds can be heard clearly because of the low ambient noise level. The country is

generally more hi-fi than the city; night more than day; ancient times more than modern. [] In a

lo-fi soundscape individual acoustic signals are obscure in an over-dense population of sounds.

The pellucid sound a footstep in the snow, a train whistle in the distance or a church bell across

the valley is masked by a broadband noise. (Schafer, 1973: 24-25).

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Through her audio-walks, the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff plays with sounds and voices to

investigate the connection between the self and the city, between the conscious and the

unconscious, and between multiple selves and urban footsteps (Pinder, 2001:1). Her audiowalks

create a layer that overlaps the urban geography and augment it, relating it with subjectivity,

memory and representation. In doing so she create Hybrid Spaces that contribute to the

enrichment of focuses and perspectives on the City. In assignment 4 (see Appendix) I reported

my personal discovery of one peculiar soundscape in rhus (a 30 sec soundbite): that of the

RisRas Fillianganggong pub in Mejlgade, sited in the dynamic latin quarter ofrhus. This new

perspective of that particular place offered to me new ways of perceive it, live it and think of it.

At 18:30/19 of February 19th 2010, RisRas pub sonically appeared as a lively, cheerful and cozy lo-

fi soundscape!

.walk and scripting the spaceOne of the simplest and best ways of exploring a city landscape to discover hidden and

unknown places is actually to walk on it. Pinder describes the activity of urban

walking/exploration as a means of engaging with, and intervening in, cities (Pinder, 2005: 383).

In Arts of urban exploration he discusses some manifestations of psychogeography (like walks,

games, investigations) that contributed to develop critical approaches to the cultural geography

of cities. One particularly funny manifestation of urban exploration is the Human scale chess

game invented by Brooklyn-based artist Sharilyn Neidhardt in 2003. In this game each

participant plays the role of a human chess piece an the board is eight square blocks of a city.

Somewhere in the middle of the board, two expert players will play a game of chess and after

each move, the appropriate piece will be called via mobile phone and given instructions on how

to move. This performance represents a way to script the space, is to say to write something

on the space surrounding us. According to Andersen and Pold

a scripted space is experienced in many different ways, but an important aspect is the feeling that

something is going behind the faade and that there are powers controlling and structuring what is seen

and experienced. The immediate experience of the urban is disturbed by the feeling that there is

something unreadable, but still scripted, programming the space (Andersen & Pold, 2010: 4).

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In assignment 5 (see in appendix), I was supposed to perform in group a .walk (or algorithmic

walking) in rhus and swap my .walk description with another group and perform their .walk.

The .walk project has been developed by Wilfred Hou Je Bek and the Dutch group Social Fiction

in 2003. The classic version directs walking according to a pattern of turns such as first street

right, second street left, first street left and repeat. [] Namely, the generative logic (of .walks)

remove questions of goals, choice and habit in terms of route and in so doing opens space for

surprise and the discovery of hidden significance (Pinder, 2005: 397). What emerged from

the .walk I performed with my group is that, contrary to the drive concept, which is by definition

freer and opener and subjected to will, the scripted space embodied in the .walk instructions

transformed us in something like the chess pieces of Neidhardts human scale chess. Anyway,

like in the drive, the .walk made us discover hidden places we never noticed in rhus and we

where surprised to discover that some findings we made were noticed also by another group

that perform afterward our .walk. This convergence of interest points in the urban landscape is in

accordance to the definition of psychogeagraphy given by the situationist Guy Debord in 1955

as the study of the effects of the geographic environment on the emotions and behaviours of

individuals.

An rhus Mis-GuideThe final outcome of the course Communicating (in) the City 2010 has been a page that should

have contributed , together with the pages created to all the other students in the course, to an

rhus Mis-Guide (Assignment 6 in appendix). The main purpose of this final task was to

reinterpret the Situationist practice in contemporary urban environments (particularly relating

to rhus ). The Mis-Guide concept was originally thought and developed by Wrights & Sites , a

performance collective of five artist-academics (Simon Persighetti, Cathy Turner, Stephen Hodge,

Phil Smith, Tony Weaver), based in Exeter, southwest UK.

In 2003 a collaboration with the designer Tony Weaver led to the production of a quite beautiful

object, an alternative city guide book entitled An Exeter Mis-Guide. This promised to give you the

ways to see the Exeters no one else has found yet, incorporating among its 90 pages a journey

in smell, an angry walk, a walk for exhibitionists or reality-TV-show wannabes and a set of

touch tours. (Wilkie, 2007:108)

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Then in 2006 the collective create a more general Mis-Guide, the so called A misguide to

Anywhere. Instructions here, as the title suggests, could be performed by readers in any place

of their choosing. My final concept page for an rhus Mis-Guide is that of Tagging the city, is to

say to leave pieces of paper with a thumb-up hand printed on it (which can easily be used as a

thumb-down/in whatever direction hand). They can be used as "I like it/I hate it/I (.) it" symbols

which can be enriched with comments or colours and put in any place of the city: on the table of

a pub, attached on a wall, in the shelves of a supermarket etc... These physical tags have the

potentiality to enhance and enlarge the comprhension of the city, to suggest something to

other citizens and tourists and to create a physical open/editable layered museum and archive

of thoughts and feelings in the urban landscape. Just like urban artists silently do

ConclusionsIn this paper, I mainly tried to explain what was the aim of Situationists and their theory of

psychogeography. A set of assignments made during spring 2010 in the context of

Communicating (in) the City course, dpt. of Aesthetic, in rhus represented a way to practically

cover and explain many of the aspects of this theory. What Situationists attempted to do was to

create new perspectives on things and particularly on the perception and production of the

urban landscape, avoiding all sorts of official, pre-structured and rigid vision of the City. It is

impossible to think the urban space only one way, owning just one perspective on it. While

considering a city, we have to critically open our mind to a multi-perspective appropriation of

the space that embed history, politics, society and lots of others aspects. Waking through a city

following a set of weird instructions, paying attention to sounds, mapping the urban surface in

uncommon if not even bizarre ways, discovering hidden places, augmenting them and creating

hybrid spaces are just some ways I ran through (theoretically and practically) in this paper. The

clear refusal of what Debord called the passive Society of Spectacle represented by the

contemporary consumer culture and commodity fetishism, arose from the need to let people

actively engage in things, to have their own interpretation of the world and the space that they

inhabit. Having clear such a framework, an rhus Mis-Guide is a way to break the rules of the

known and accepted and to actively and critically rediscover the urban space ofrhus.

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Bibliographic references:

Andersen, Christian Ulrik and Pold, Sren (2010). The Scripted Spaces of Urban Ubiquitous

Computing, (Aarhus, in press).

Crampton, Jeremy W. & John Krygier (2006), An Introduction to Critical Cartography, ACME: AnInternational E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 4 (1), 11-33

Debord, Guy-Ernest (1958) Theory of the Drive in Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist Internationalanthology (Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets), 62-66

Debord, Guy-Ernest (1959), Dtournement as Negation and Prelude, in Ken Knabb (ed.),Situationist International anthology (Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets), 67-68.

De Souza e Silva, Adriana (2006), From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces ofHybrid Spaces, Space and Culture, 9 (3), 261-78.

Franck, Karen A. and Stevens, Quentin (2007), Tying down loose space, in Karen A. Franck andQuentin Stevens (eds.), Loose space: possibility and diversity in urban life (London: Routledge), 1-34

Haque, Usman (2004), Invisible Topographies, Receiver

Lefebvre, Henri (1991), The production of space (Oxford, OX, UK ; Cambridge, Mass., USA:Blackwell), pp 26-33.

Pinder, D. (1996), Subverting cartography: the situationists and maps of the city, Environmentand Planning A, 28 (3), 405-27.

Pinder, David (2001), Ghostly Footsteps: Voices, Memories and Walks in the City, CulturalGeographies, 8 (1), 1-19.

Pinder, David (2005) Arts of urban exploration. In Cultural Geographies vol. 12, no. 4. SAGE, 383-411

Schafer, R. Murray (1973), The music of the environment, Cultures, 1 (1), 15-51.

Wilkie, Fiona (2007) Review of "Mis-guide to Anywhere" PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.PAJ 86 (Volume 29, Number 2), May 2007

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Appendix :

Portfolio


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Assignment 1

Create a wiki profile of yourself

Hej! I'm Simona Conti and I was born on 22nd june 1986 inArezzo, Tuscanyin the very heart of Italy!

I would define myself an artholic and a cinephile. I likedesign, art, photography and generally doing creative

things.

I'm studying interaction design in a MA study course inSiena, Italy and from February to June 2010 I will be in rhus,

for an Erasmus program of 5 months. One of the reasons Ichose "Communicating (in) the City" course is that I found itfull of topics and contents relevant to my major (Interaction

Design) and I loved the course title at first sight. Myexpectations about the course are those of finding out new

perspectives related to perceiving the urban landscape,which I consider a mix up of lots of factors: humans as

individuals, human as groups of social beings that formnetwork of interactions, buildings, streams, ways full ofcrowd flowing everyday in different directions, voices,

sounds and lightsthat's pretty a complicated andcharming mixture of ingredients that I want to explore andanalyse better and better during this course.

Well, looking forward to start the games! :)

Hej Hej!

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Assignment 2

Make a personal and subjective map of rhus

Being the artistic expressions spread all over the urban area one ofthe main things I notice when I first visit a new city, I decided tocreate a map of rhus based on this "hidden" (in the officialcartography and to the eyes of many people) realm. I'm a realnewcomer of rhus as I arrived here about two weeks ago (authorsnote: I first came to rhus at the end of January and theassignment was to be made before the half of February). Therefore,working for this assignment has represented a very good pretext to

discover this cold (to me, as an Italian citizen!) Scandinavian townmaintaining a critical and analytical look, but in the same timeleaving room to emotions and subjectivity.

I took my reflex cam, my map of rhus to orientate (and to avoidwalking in the same streets several times) and I decided tojustfollow my instinct! Little by little, step by step, I found out plenty oflittle (or sometimes very big-sized) urban expression forms. Someof them excited me, some moved my soul, some surprised me. Andeven if the snow and the rigid weather tried to put me off, myinvestigation led me to impressive connections between all theselittle expressive footsteps of urban art.

As an open-air museum, all these pieces of art have beenvoluntarily spread into the city area. No ticket is required, just to bea very good observer. You could find out originally painted housefaades or stickers drawn by urban artist MorMor, paper-crafts andpoetical messages hung up on street signals, installations andstatues, strange benches (like those of Jeppe Hein) or maybe a Blu's(http://www.blublu.org/) work of art(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3245/2788795799_63b2c4e9bb.jpg).

There's no limit to art expressions. The real limit inhabits our mindwhenever we seem not to notice such surprising and charming art

expressions (or even the sum of them).

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Her er Aarhus!

I've participated to Kultursyge photo competition (the core of the competition was to take some photos of hiddenplaces in Aarhus) simply sending the photos that I took to make my personal map of Aarhus. Those pictures where

shown at the "Her er Aarhus!" exhibition (25th march-11th april 2010) that showed the planned urbantransformation of Aarhus as a candidate city as 2017 European capital of culture (the exhibit was sited at theRidehuset, Vester All 1, Aarhus). One of my photos was also published in one of the brochure distributed at theexhibition.

Here there are some picturesof my shown pictures!

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Assignment 3Find a place marked by a hybrid space

The Placebo project is a 2001experiment in taking conceptualdesign beyond the gallery intoeveryday life. We can consider it as akind of HYBRID SPACE because,using Usque words, "[it] encourages

us to think not of silent staticstructures that surround us butrather of fluid dynamic fieldsbeyond the edge of naturalperception []" and it make usacknowledge what has been called'hertzian space' is to say "a real (i.e.non-virtual) space that affects us butwhich we only know about throughuse of our instruments " (from"Invisible topographies", 1, UsmanHaque). Tony Dunne and Fiona

Raby (founders of the interactiondesign research studio at theRoyal College of Art, London)devised and made eightprototype objects to investigatepeoples' attitudes to andexperiences of electromagneticfields in the home, and placedthem with volunteers. The objectsare designed to elicit stories aboutthe secret life of electronic objects both factual and imagined. They are purposely diagrammatic and vaguelyfamiliar. They are open-ended enough to prompt stories but not so open as to bewilder.

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Once electronic objects enter people's homes, they develop private lives, or at least ones that are hidden fromhuman vision. Occasionally we catch a glimpse of this life when objects interfere with each other, or malfunction.Many people believe that mobile phones heat up their ears, or feel their skin tingle when they sit near a TV, andalmost everyone has heard stories of people picking up radio broadcasts in their fillings. Dunne and Raby are notinterested in whether these stories are true or scientific, they are interested in the narratives people develop to

explain and relate to electronic technologies, especially the invisible electromagnetic waves that electronic objectsemit.

Authors of the project: Tony Dunne and FionaRaby design works deal with the theme ofFutures and Alternative Nows and the subtlepsychological relationships between peopleand objects. They practice a kind of designwhose main objective is to provoke people andstimulate reflection, is to say critical design,which is often difficult to distinguish from artproduction because of its strong conceptual

content. As Usman Haque say "architecture,the design of spatial experience, and art, theproduction of cultural experience, have not forseveral centuries shared as much commonground as they do now. The overlappingterritories of art and architecture have comeabout in large part because of technologicaldevelopments that upset conventionalunderstanding of spatiality" (from "Invisibletopographies", 1, Usman Haque). We areinterested in using design as a medium, to askquestions and provoke and stimulate people,

designers and industry, has affirmed TonyDunne. We are exploring things that existsomewhere between reality and fiction, addsFiona, as they explain their philosophy ofdesign.One of the purpose of the project wasthat although reality can't be changed, itcould be changed the perception of it. Like amedical placebo, the objects in this projects donot actually remove or counteract the cause forconcern, but they can provide psychologicalcomfort.

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1.Parasite light

A light that feeds off the leaky radiation of household electronic products;it only works when placed in electromagnetic fields, near an electronic

product. It uses an electric field sensor to relate the intensity of its function(the amount of light emitted from 20 LEDs) to the strenght of field it senses.

2.Compass table

EM fields given off by electronic devices placed on thetable's surface (like mobile phones or laptop) cause the

25 compass needles to twitch and spin. This tablereminds you that electronic objects extend beyond

their visible limits.

3.Nipple chair

An electronic field sensor and an antenna are mounted beneath theseat of the chair. Nodules embedded in the back of the chair vibratewhen the chair is placed in an electromagnetic field and the sitter ismade aware of the radio-waves penetrating his torso, reminding himthat electronic products extend beyond their visible limits. It is up tohim whether he stay and enjoy the gentle buzz or move to a 'quiter'spot. As fields can also flow up through the sitter's body from electricwiring running underneath the floor, the chair has footrests so that youcan isolate your feet from the ground.

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4.Electro-draught excluder

This object is a classic placebo. Strategic

positioning of this device helps deflect strayelectromagnetic fields. Though the draughtexcluder is made from conductive foam, it is notgrounded and therefore it doesn't really absorbradiation, but it creates a sort of shadow/barrier orcomfort zone away from EM waves where you cansimply feel better.

5.Loft

A place to keep precious objects safe fromelectromagnetic fields.

6.GPS table

The table has a small display set in its surface which either shows the

word "lost" or its co-ordinates. It should be positioned by a cleanwindow with a clear view of the sky.

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Assignment 4Find a place marked by a hybrid space and make an audio-stand. Find a place that you find

sonically interesting and communicate it to the rest of us in a soundbite; max 30 secs. It doesn'thave to be from Aarhus, but you could use this assignment as an opportunity to listen to the city

you currently live in.

I recorded this 30sec "audio-stand" in one of my favourite places in Aarhus, the "RisRas Fillionganggong" pub inMejilgade 24. It's an intimate, woodish, "patch-worked", warm place where people can relax and have one (or more)beers. You can't order food inside, but you can bring your own (a kebab perhaps?)I found this really exciting! Iwent there (again) on Friday 19th march with two friends of mine, eating delicious muffins (just bought at the veryclose "Jeremy" bakery shop in Mejlgade 27) and drinking liquorice teas. It was 18:30/19, so it was full of peoplechatting, drinking beers and smoking narghils, as usualDefinitely feeling in a "hyggeride" place while thereI simply love it.

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Assignment 5Create and perform a .walk and swamp your walk with another group

.walk by Simona Conti, Chiara Artini, Alessia Vidili

In group, make and perform a .walk

(also described briefly in Pinder "Arts of Urban Exploration" and in Hemment "Locative Media". Both from the coursereadings). Thewalk must have exactly 3 turns (a sort of code with 3 strings).

Our .walk:

// + ticking heels .walkrepeat for 1 hour[2nd street right1st street left after you see an "" somewhereTurn over 180 after you hear some heel ticking

]

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.walk performed on April 8th from 16.45 to 17:30

Here it is the map describing our .walk. Each coloured line defines one of the three strings of code:- 1st string = pink line,

- 2nd string = blue line,- 3rd string = green line.

We decided to start our walk from the very downtown (Ryesgade), in front of the railway station.

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the code instructed us to turn right in Rosenkrantzgade

..there we saw an "" on a restaurant sign

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we turned left in Fredensgade and there we saw a Vintage and SecondHand clothes shop that we never noticedbefore that..really interesting :)

we crossed Snder All, but we immediately heard some heels ticking on the street. We turned over 180 andwent back in Fredengsgade

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then we turned at the second street to the right: again Ryesgade! There we see the second "" in an advertisingalong the street

then left in Rdhuspladsen and straight on in Vester All untill

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we heard some shoes heels ticking on the sidewalk near the AROS museumtick tick

we went back and turned right in Park All and we.

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saw again an "" (lucky us?!)

then we turned left in Banegrdsgade and in few seconds we heard again some heels ticking on the pavement

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we turned back again

and we turned right in Frederiks All

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immediately sighted an "" in a pub men

we turned left in Skt. Nicolausgade

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and we walked straight on along the Scandinavian Center

and on and on trying to hear someone with heels shoes passing

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but we finally came at the end of Gebauersgade, in front of the railwaysno way to go straight, no pretty womanpassingThis "system bug" ended our .walk after 45 minutes and almost 4 loops of code.

Second part of the assignment:

On Sunday april 11th 2010 from 15:30-16:30 we performed group 2b .walk. You can look to our map of the walk, see4 pics and read some observations here in group 2b page.

What do we do exactly?Create and perform a .walk.Swap your .walkdescription with another group and perform their .walktoo

Document your own .walkperformance on a map Document your performance of the other groups .walkin a map and 4 pictures

What to submit prior to Tuesday 10:00Make a seperate wiki-page for your.walk. On this page you write the.walkcode and upload your own walk's map.Write on the wiki-page of your partner group's.walk(the one you swapped with) below the groups own map: writea bit about your experience, upload a map and the four pictures.

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We decided to start the a.walk from the corner between Immervad and Lille Torv (close to Magasin and 7Eleven).

Graffiti wall and spring coming.

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A cool statue we never seen before.

Sun and shadow.

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The discovery of an other nice caf.

About our experience

1.We spent about 15 minutes going straight on Kystvejen because we couldn't hear heels ticking.2.We entered in a loop walking from Kystvejen to Helgengade and vice versa.About 10 minutes for 100 mt!3.We passed through the Arkitektskolen Aarhus because we didn't hear heels ticking.4.When we came out from the Arkitektskolen courtyard, we arrived in Paradisgade street. We were in front ofCafParadis.After 55 minutes, we couldn't hear that annoying sound, we couldn't go straight on, so we deicided to stopand have a coffee in the ca

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Assignment 6Create a mis-guide page that contribute to the creation of a full Mis-guide of Aarhus

Concept: Tag the City

Each place of the city can appear completely different to different people (and even to the same person, in differentmoments and parts of the same day) according to the concepts of "situation" and "drift/drive". The "When" and"Where" determine the "How". Just like the great impressionist painter Monet, who painted several times oncanvas the same cathedral during different moments of the day with different lighting (the series "RouenCathedral"), people perceive the urban space in a really peculiar and situation-based (or "impression-based")

manner.1. 2. 3.

1. Claude Monet "Rouen Cathedral, Facade (Sunset)"

2. Claude Monet "Rouen Cathedral , Facade I"

3. Claude Monet "Rouen Cathedral, Full sunlight"

This subtle and subjective kind of space perception could enrich and augment each place. People could externalizethese impressions converting them into forms of public(/artistic?) expressions just by tagging the city andadding little physical tags all around the urban landscape. Tags are simple and flexible (a thumb-up hand whichcan easily be used as a thumb-down/in whatever direction hand) "I like it/I hate it/I (.) it" symbols which can beenriched with comments or colours. They can enhance and enlarge our perspective of the city, suggest somethingto other citizens and tourists and create a physical open/editable layered museum and archive of thoughts andfeelings. Just like urban artists silently do.

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My own "Communicating (in) the city" experience

Some final thoughts about the course:

1. What is your most memorable experience from this course? It could be with regards to readings, artworksor your assignments.I think to have 2 most memorable experiences from "Communicating (in) the City" course: The double performance of the .walk in Aarhus The snow performance (the one regarding how people subjectively map the space that surround them) madeduring one of the first lessons of the course

2. Name the text that you liked the most (or that you learned most from)(or that provoked you the most).Why?A misguide to Anywhere by Fiona Walkie -> it has really been a pleasure to read it, especially after havingdeveloped a good knowledge of Communiting (in) the city and urban perception/mapping/building. I have reallyenjoyed it fully and to me, it represented a sort of summary of the whole course contents and a way to rethink on

issues touched during all the lectures.

3. Name one thing that you have learned from the readings (or, which text did you like the most). Why?I especially loved (and consequently learned from) the SI theories about how to re-conceive a city and a urbanspace: the "drift/drive" situationist concept, the "situation" as a way to actively live and re-shape the places weordinarily walk through. These lectures explore something I've thought about for a long time, a lot time beforestarting this course. I think to have always owned a good sensitivity towards the urban landscape and elementsconnected to it: this sensitivity has let me fully understand and enjoy the themes treated during the course.

4. Which artwork/ artefact/ performance presented in class did you like the most (or provoked you the most).Why?Both the Sound of Silence listening performance (by experimental musician John Cage) and the subjective

mapping experience made in the Aesthetic dpt. courtyard, during the last snowy days of February. Both theseexperiences have had a strong impact on my own way of rethinking something Ive been always used to (subjectivemapping and sound/absence-of-sound listening) but without paying too much attention to them.

5. What was your reply to the assignments? List them all and think about how to present them as a whole to the others; as a collection, what have they contributed to the course?All my assignments can be found here-> http://communicity2010.wikidot.com/simona-conti

1. Presentation of myself2. Creation of a subjective and personal map of Aarhus (in my case a representation of Aarhus as an open air

museum fulfilled with urban art)3. Description of a hybrid space (in my case the "Placebo Project" by Tiny Dunne and Fiona Raby)

4. Making of an "audio-stand" (in my case a recording of noises and sounds of the central RisRas pub)5. Creation of a .walk and (double) performance of two .walks through the city of Aarhus, following 3-lines

codes6. Creation of a page of an Aarhus Mis-Guide (in my case, the concept of my page was "Tagging the city with

physical tags")

All my assignments are presented as a sequence of pieces that dialogue together and contribute to build a"practical theory" of the thinking and re-thinking of the city of Aarhus and in general of any city. All theseassignments represent a way of "learning by doing" that made my knowledge stronger and open my perception ofthe urban landscape. Moreover, my assignments as well as the ones of the other students enrich the contents of thecourse using a peer-to-peer strategy that is really useful and has a lot of advantages (like finding out new and"fresher" topics to treat)

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6. Which assignment do you find most in line with the course content? Why?I think that the assignment create a subjective map of the city" was one of the most in line with the course content.It was a real way of let us all externalize and perceive the urban landscape as a new place to visit/live/understand.The concept of "drive" is in a way caged in everyone of us, but it is difficult to notice/methodologize it. Theaccomplishment of that assignment represented a solution to this ingenuous lack of attention on things generally

perceived as secondary/not-relevant to us. It was a way to overturn canons and standard ways of looking to the city.

7. Which of your assignment replies would be most suited a mis-guide? Why?Again, I think that my reply to assignment n. 2 ("create a subjective map of the city") is the most suitable for a Mis-Guide concept, being it the one that let me think the most on course theories and basic concepts.

8. What could be changed in order for it to become a better mis-guide?Maybe it could simply be opened to a wider public asking them to rethink to the city as an open art museum inwhich they act as actual artists that contribute to make the urban/exhibit space better and more beautiful.

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Psychogeography of the city of Aarhus

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