School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemCapturing ambient participation: Indian Independence Day at Federation Square(Routledge, 2020)This chapter uses the concept of ambience as an analytical tool to explore the qualities of cultural participation in the outdoor public spaces of contemporary cultural precincts, and as a metaphor that speaks to a wider process of cultural transformation in communicative cities. Media-rich cultural precincts are now a common feature of urban developments and inform the major policy shifts in creativity-led urban regeneration. The ambient experiences afforded by outdoor cultural precincts resonate with significant shifts in artistic practice. Ambient participation is particularly difficult to account for in the instrumental frameworks and methods routinely used by cultural funders and stakeholders to evaluate the impact of cultural infrastructure. Frameworks designed to measure visitation numbers at a museum, the satisfaction surveys of audiences, or the segmentation and brand recognition indicators tested by market research frame cultural participation as an aggregation of individual experiences. Media-saturated environments make qualitative changes to the experience of being-together-in-public.
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ItemArchitecture, media and spaces of urban communication(Routledge, 2020)This chapter provides with buildings and material urban structures as symbolic resources that themselves “communicate” certain values, or about urban space as a “space of appearance” in which fundamental communicative processes of speaking and acting in public take place. The location of key buildings and their relation to each other gave material form to political hierarchy and social relations. The capacity for particular urban structures and material settings to endure over time has served to anchor social practices and political processes across generations, underpinning the assertion by architect Aldo Rossi that the built environment is a critical dimension of a society’s collective memory. The rise of urban planning as a profession, alongside the blunt force of developments in infrastructure engineering, transport and communication technologies, and, above all, the gravitational pull of profit-based urban development settings, all worked to reduce the capacity of architects to shape the modern city in practice.
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ItemSpaces of Communication(Routledge, 2020)This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores theoretical grounds of the “communicative city”. Gumpert and Drucker reconsider their formative definition and raise a series of questions and provocations concerning future research directions and approaches. The book focuses on the growing implication of digital media in contemporary practices of placemaking. Sun Wei explores the entanglement of embodiment and mediation in her account of the redevelopment of Sinan Mansions, while Christiane Brosius reflects on the complex urban ecology of Delhi through the work of two contemporary artists. The book focuses specifically on the communicative possibilities of a distinctive aspect of the contemporary media city, namely large video screens situated in urban public spaces. It also focuses more directly on the different ways that digital media platforms have become a new infrastructure shaping the contemporary communicative city.
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ItemAmbient culture: Making sense of everyday participation in open, public space(Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020-09-25)Unlike art and performance within interior spaces like the museum or gallery, the experience of culture in an urban and networked public space presents new challenges for cultural interpretation and evaluation. In this chapter, we draw on research conducted at Melbourne’s Federation Square to discuss how the concept of ambience helps make sense of both the production and experience of public culture. The first section introduces the changing settings for culture: from an almost exclusively interior presentation to an increasingly mediated, networked and outdoor experience. The second section situates this exteriorization of culture in terms of a shifting urban environment that is increasingly interwoven with media networks. The third section describes different forms of engagement and problematizes traditional expectations of cultural experience. Finally, we conclude with a reflection on these findings and draw out implications for the theorization, cultural programming and evaluation of cultural participation in public space.
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ItemYoung children's haptic media habitus(Routledge - Taylor & Francis, 2020-10-28)Young children’s engagement with digital media centres on their embodied relations, shaped with and through the interfaces, materiality, and mobility of tablets and smartphones. This chapter draws on ethnographic observation of young children’s mobile media practices in family homes to explore the embodied dimensions of digital media interfaces, while engaging with user interface and mobile app developer literature, and phenomenologically informed cultural theory. It reveals the emergence of a ‘haptic habitus’: the cultivation of embodied dispositions for touchscreen conduct and competence. Configured by both cultural and commercial operations, this habitus involves context, user interface studies, and the design of gestural input.
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ItemThe postdigital playground: Children’s public play spaces in the smart city(Routledge, 2020)This chapter examines the integration of children’s public play spaces into the infrastructures of the smart city. While prior research has focused on personal mobile devices, this chapter examines deliberate design interventions that digitally augment children’s play spaces. Drawing on perspectives from children’s geography and game studies to conceptualise childhood play in the smart city, the chapter highlights the sometimes-contradictory relations that emerge. These contradictions arise in the smart city through the digital augmentation of spaces historically and culturally designated as play spaces. We introduce the notion of the postdigital to emphasise the blurring of boundaries of digital and nondigital play in children’s playgrounds and conceptualise the integration of playgrounds into digital infrastructures in relation to the broader impact that the smart city has on the uses of public space. This chapter explores this ongoing integration of playgrounds into the smart city through two recent examples of interactive play designs that digitally augment public playgrounds and parks: HybridPlay and Disney Fairy Trail. These examples of postdigital play in public playgrounds are analysed in terms of their functionality, representation and online reception. Operating along a broader trajectory of smart city infrastructures characterised by the blurring of discrete spaces of sociality, these examples of postdigital play highlight tensions associated with the cultural sensibilities and historical meanings attached to public play spaces, digital technologies and childhood.
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ItemSenses and Sensors of Sleep: Digital Mediation and Disconnection in Sleep Architectures(Oxford University Press, 2021-01-01)
This chapter analyzes sleep technology products designed to mediate and modulate patterns of sleep. Products analyzed include sleep-tracking applications and wearable devices for customizing personal phases of sleep architecture, and “smart” bedroom systems that use sensors and Internet connectivity to monitor and automate sensory environments to optimize the architectural spaces of sleep. Drawing on theories of digital disconnection, this chapter highlights how historical and theoretical notions of sleep as a site of subjective, social, and technological disconnection are reworked by contemporary media technologies. The now ubiquitous use of smartphones in bed reflects ongoing demands for digital participation and productivity. Yet such arrangements are unevenly distributed, with disconnective sleep technologies operating as a form of privilege and distinction for those who have the resources to reshape the architectures of personal sleep rhythms and spaces.
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ItemAutomating Digital Afterlives(Oxford University Press, 2021-08-26)The question of how the dead “live on” by maintaining a presence and connecting to the living within social networks has garnered the attention of users, entrepreneurs, platforms, and researchers alike. In this chapter we investigate the increasingly ambiguous terrain of posthumous connection and disconnection by focusing on a diverse set of practices implemented by users and offered by commercial services to plan for and manage social media communication, connection, and presence after life. Drawing on theories of self-presentation (Goffman) and technological forms of life (Lash), we argue that moderated and automated performances of posthumous digital presence cannot be understood as a continuation of personal identity or self-presentation. Rather, as forms of mediated human (after)life, posthumous social media presence materializes ambiguities of connection/disconnection and self/identity.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCurating Dramaturgies(Routledge, 2021-04-27)This is further elaborated in the interviews with 15 diversely placed arts professionals who are at the forefront of rethinking and consolidatingthe ever-evolving field of the visual arts and performance.
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ItemNo Preview AvailablePerformance Community in an Age of Reenactment: Takao Kawaguchi’s About Kazuo Ohno and the Conversation with Ghosts(Routledge, 2021)Dramaturgies of Interweaving explores present-day dramaturgies that interweave performance cultures in the fields of theater, performance, dance, and other arts.