Untitled (Mechanics of Place) is a location-based work-in-progress accessed by participants using smart phones to remix live images captured in specific neighborhoods with video streamed from the web, via an Augmented Reality platform. The online video database is compiled by collaborators in multiple locations at different times, addressing the notion of “place”, grafted onto local surfaces via AR.
The title references Byzantine mechanical science, which conceived a unity of the real world and the ideal by understanding space as a combination of concrete elements and abstract concepts. Anthemius, 6th century mathematician and architect of the Hagia Sophia, used doors and windows to direct the rays of the sun geometrically with mirrors toward a single surface, thus materializing the relationship between structure and path of light. In Untitled (Mechanics of Place), doors and windows in a neighborhood trigger the capture and collage of local image and transmitted video, creating a mechanics of space through which the walking participant moves, opening up place uni-directionally to a matrix of connections. The participant/embodied agent serves as a “burning mirror”, accessing video streams stored in the datasphere and redirecting them to the surfaces of her current location, a camera phone composite of video and real place, distant narrative and current moment.
The project engages locative practices that approach the city as a dynamic interface, offering the user enchanted experiences while remaining emphatically “here.” A neighborhood such as Istanbul’s To-phane represents shifting cultural, demographic, political, economic, religious dynamics--the lived and projected images thrown up by layers of cohabitation, the forces of tradition and change, whether desired or resisted. Untitled (Mechanics of Place) brings the video works of online contributors, (whether imagined, projected, provocative, contemplative, informative, etc.) to the surfaces of the urban setting, collaged onto the walls of the city streets, as seen through the screen of the smart phone beholder. Subjects from one location (perhaps a distant one) are collaged onto another through video streams, mirroring shifting urban demographics, an instance of the temporal and spatial hybrid we currently experience as “place”. The project is a platform for visualizing unexpected relationships and new modes of embodied engagement, collapsing distance and difference between the familiar and unfamiliar, creating opportunities for unexpected encounters with familiar places and amplifying the possibility for civic engagement. The political and social subjects of multiple locations, who have been invited to contribute, will interface with the specific locality of the user through the aesthetic forms of the project. The “active forms” laid out in a neighborhood create an algorithm to guide the mobility behavior of visitors, who will follow a map that reflects the crystalline geometry of a dynamic form in the process of being charted.
The project will interface real locations in the city with a video network, investigating location and remediation. How does the compositing of physical place with multilocal video create a hybrid "place"? How do the volatile facets of these projected juxtapositions and collagings create an emergent space and place, containing the tension of local and global dynamics?
