SOCIAL GRID Media Empowerment towards Online/Offline Participation in Artistic Projects Ana Velhinho ana.velhinho@gmail.com CIEBA - Artistic Studies Research Center, Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon 408 ABSTRACT Departing from the concept of ‘grid’ as a structural tool for organization, combination and location, this research focuses on the grid in relation to social participation within artistic and design projects. Participatory culture is currently framed as a product of a networked society powered by personal media and ubiquitous connectivity, conducting to a radical cultural shift that shapes the media system towards what people want it to be. The grid structure has become popular mostly by the web image-aggregators, web browsers and social media platforms that use it to present and navigate through content. Furthermore, the geographical grid-based location services, like the computing tools provided by Google, have been encouraging several practical and creative approaches based on digital mapping and media-navigation through physical world. These tools combined with augmented reality technologies, available in our mobile devices using common sensors such as the camera or the accelerometer, can also promote visual enhancement of perception by triggering contextual multimedia information and visual aids. Such practices, based on what is called ‘locative media’ (labelled as Locative Art whenever applied to geographically oriented artworks), allow the exploration of real-time context awareness using mobile devices as boosters to placebased storytelling that can be applied to education, art, gaming, engineering, architecture, tourism and heritage among other possibilities. CONTEXTUALIDADE/CONTEXTUALITY 409 Above all, the common feature of several artistic and design projects is promoting collaboration and engagement of communities within the contexts they are inscribed, based on media empowerment and social capital provided through the call for user participation, raising awareness to the creation of hybrid environments that can bridge from the screen to the public space. A sense of mixed reality, combining ‘high-tech’ and ‘low-fi’ approaches, can potentiate spatiotemporal visualizations and storytelling outputs that activate pathways/networks evocative of connections between people, places or even memories that feed – as raw material and found footage representations – our image-mediated culture. Keywords: Locative Art Mapping Networks Personal Media Social Participation 410 From the graphic and cartographic lens of the ‘grid’ as a structuring tool, participatory culture is addressed as a product of a networked society powered by personal media and ubiquitous connectivity, translated into a ‘social grid’ that is at the core of digital mapping and media navigation that blend virtual and physical worlds. Such locative participatory practices and creative visualization approaches constitute key instruments to better understand and perform in our networked and media-based culture and engage with communities, as they foster place-based storytelling and personal voices enabled by media empowerment, and act against persistent asymmetries, as the so-called “digital divide”. In this sense, the presented references support the ongoing research on the development of a visual and collaborative methodological model, grounded on the Internet’s technology and socio-communicative paradigms allied to the power of visualization grounded on social capital. THE GRID AS AN OPERATIVE TOOL CONNECTING VIRTUAL AND PHYSICAL SPACE The grid, as an operative tool, can be understood as a foundational device that intends to organize and provide structure to a given experience towards an object or territory. It has been used throughout the history of mankind, especially during the Renaissance, as a geometric, cartographic and urbanistic instrument to calculate, arrange, and make content navigable, based on the double take between the whole and the fragment, as well as the idea of construction and deconstruction. The same underlying concept of linked nodes, has been adapted to technological systems such as the computational grid, that relies on the robustness and scalability afforded by the distributed architecture of the matrix. Today, we can state that grid-like forms are mostly related to networks and information flows (like in web image-aggregators, web browsers and social media platforms) organized in data clusters that tend to be spatially represented, as a notational augmented space. The new geographies promoted by media and Geoweb – enabled in 2005 after the introduction of applications and services based on geospatial data, particularly those introduced by Google – define a new cityscape overlaid with contextual information, including tags assigned by the crowd where subjects constitute nodal points within a connected collective. CONTEXTUALIDADE/CONTEXTUALITY 411 Herlander Elias (2012:142) refers to this augmented version of the city as an “empowered geography” where the media grid overlays the urban grid of the city. Elias (2012: 179) identifies the need to recognize new types of users that are active nodes within the mob, labeling them as “trackers” or “navigators” close both to the idea of the videogame player and the Baudelairean flanêur that stroll through the city, returning to a pedestrian scale that promote the Situationist dérive. Within this context, according to Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie (2015), image acquires a new function other than representation, since image production is overtaken by image processing based on the mathematical matrix of bitmap format (pixels) and the algorithmic processing used for compression, circulation and storage. This fundamental change to an “operative” and “total image of the world” – being the world envisioned as a database – is underpinned by Google Street View, founded in 2007, as it embodies a paradigmatic change not only in the status of the image but mostly in our experience of the world. The concept of “image-screen” proposed by Hoelzl and Marie (2015) refers to the image as a collage that sews together physical space and data space and is no longer a representation but the visible evidence of the access to networks of exchanging data that support the new experience of the city. The artwork Postcards from Google Earth (2010) by Clement Valla exposes precisely the imperfections and discontinuities of the hybrid photographic and cartographic patchwork of Google’s endless and atemporal photomaps. In this point of view, according to Hoelzl and Marie (2015), images become software that provides programmable “views” of the world as a database, updated in real time. The processing of the world as a shared image reconfigures how representation affects the experience. In this way, the importance of open sharing and co-creation, provided by participation, are fundamental building blocks for today’s society, which demands new mediatic and participatory literacies. PARTICIPATION THROUGH MEDIA EMPOWERMENT Systematically since 2007, commercial tools, particularly the location computing services provided by Google, have been inspiring and encouraging several creative endeavors, based on digital mapping and media navigation through the physical world. 412 The artistic project MAP (2006–2013) from Aram Bartholl satirizes this sense of mixed reality using a ‘low-fi’ technic by placing life-size pin markers of Google interface as alien intruders on the urban landscape, raising awareness to the creation of hybrid environments that bridge from the screen to the public space. Likewise, in previous Bartholl’s project WOW (2006-2009), he explored such approaches when he had people strolling through the city with individuals following them carrying big physical name tags above their heads, just like what happens when you are tagged online. Nevertheless, effective hybridity can actually be accomplished by locative media, which allow the exploration of real-time context awareness using mobile devices as boosters to place-based storytelling, that can be applied to education, art, gaming, engineering, architecture, tourism and heritage among other possibilities. Within everyday life tools, the use of geo-location computing, including its application combined with augmented reality technologies available in our mobile devices using common sensors such as the camera or the accelerometer, can enhance visual perception by triggering contextual information, visual aids and complementary multimedia content through speech, gesture or image tracking. We can name as an example the Geocaching, asserted as the technologic version of the treasure hunt through gamification of real space, by using GPS data to connect a community of adventurous practitioners all over the world. Other example of ‘geo-entertainment’ is the social media global phenomenon Pokémon GO, launched in 2016, as a locationbased and augmented reality game that aims at finding and capturing virtual creatures, that are disclosed in the same space as the user through the screen of their mobile devices, drawing a more active and immersive experience as the gamers have to navigate through the physical space. In a more specific view, Locative Art branches from New Media and Interactive Art by the application of such locative technologies in the art field. Those tools can be used whether to implement largescale and geographically oriented artworks like the proclaimed “GPS drawing” practices or applied to more disruptive and politically engaged pieces. The Transborder Immigrant Tool (2007) developed by the EDT (Electronic Disturbance Theater) depicts such activist practices, consisting in a mobile app designed to provide survival instructions to help US/Mexico border crossers while also delivering them poetry. CONTEXTUALIDADE/CONTEXTUALITY 413 Reassigning imagery that we perceive as ‘computer-native’ to larger scales and off-screen contexts, accomplishes the ‘augmentation of reality’ provided by new media systems and the Internet, embodying the ‘overwhelmingness’ of the grid we find ourselves in. From the textual description of “cyberspace” in William Gibson’s book Neuromancer (1984) as a fluid and networked graphical data-scape, to the code and hacking-inspired graphics present in the ASCII works of Vuk Ćosić or the visuals explored in movies like Tron (1982) and Matrix (1999), we can observe some of the initial propositions for giving the Internet’s grid a shape. The contamination of large-scale physical spaces was a step further, also explored by Ćosić in ASCII Architecture (2000), which appropriated the urban façade of St George Hall in Liverpool for graphic screening. This media strategy of video mapping is currently used by the entertainment industry as a powerful cinematic technique to address large audiences in public spaces. Other immersive and interactive approaches can also be found on early works like the CAVE installation The Living Web (2002) by Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau and Roberto Lopez Gulliver, or in the panorama inspired concept of T-Visionary developed by Jeffrey Shaw in 1993, having several versions until 2015 using interaction and virtual environment technologies. Both pieces are focused on physical navigation through a massive amount of images, resulting, correspondingly, in audio and visual meshes streamed from the Internet or in 360 degrees grid-based stereoscopic clips of television recordings organized in a database allowing associative and affective browsing. Also connecting geographic and virtual space, Masaki Fujihata explores since 1992 time and space visualizations in works related to the reconstruction of collective memories using video indexed with GPS data, in a series he called Field-Works, originating renown pieces like Field-work@ Alsace (2002) or Voices of Aliveness (2012) which call for participation and provide navigation interfaces giving users access to linked video images, where the pathways are evocative of geo-connections between people. Connectivity is otherwise approached by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer who brought vital energy to Madison Square Park in New York with the interactive piece Pulse Park, Relational Architecture 14 (2008), using visitor’s biometric information as input. The output is a light and movement ephemeral performance fed by the network of participants, where each node contributes with its vital signs captured by sensors and shaped as light beams. Another direction on participation is Joan Fontcuberta’s photomosaic installation "The world begins with every kiss", created in 2014 for the Plaça d'Isidre Nonell in Barcelona. 414 This piece uses a classic format of urban art such as tiling to transport the grid structure of web image aggregators recreating a reminiscence of the public Facebook wall on the public street wall. With this approach the artist invites the passers to a double take on the image: a macro view on affection and freedom manifest in a provocative kiss photo as a result of a puzzle of 4000 photos, where each ‘pixel’ is a micro view of anonymous users that responded to the open call question “What is freedom to you?” posed by the photographer on the national newspaper El Periódico. Hence, this piece is extensively representative of participation based on user-generated content, reaffirming our democratic image-mediated culture. In the book Participation is Risky. Approaches to Joint Creative Processes (2014), participation is presented grounded on theoretical framing and empirical practices, towards citizen engagement, media and culture. Being aware of the existence of different degrees and quality of participation, and also the fact that only a minority of people are active contributors to digital and networked media (beyond the random clicking and endorsing), this publication acknowledges the role of both ‘low-fi’ and ‘high-tech’ media tools in social change, including mobile networked media which perform regardless of time and location, based on a commonality of sharing experiences (Huybrechts 2014:23-24). In fact, as stated by Henry Jenkins (2006), Participatory Culture rises as a new form of cultural production propelled by media, creating space for informal and innovative proposals by users, side-byside with the dominant industry. In this regard, the concept of “extended cultural industries” proposed by Mirko Tobias Schäfer (2011) is convoked in Participation is Risky (2014) as explanatory of the production of cultural products that allow different forms of participation, that range gradually from “Accumulation (re-mix)”, to “Archiving (structure)” and “Construction (create)”. Overall, the book Participation is Risky (2014) provides useful insights on frameworks for participatory Art and Design projects, regarded as open processes of thinking, characterized as “risky tradeoffs” concerning the conscious and unconscious negotiations between makers (experts), participants (non-specialized agents) and objects involved in undefined outcomes, or as the authors name it “things” – envisioned not as closed results but as “social-material assemblies” of people and objects gathered around “a matter of concern” (Huybrechts 2014:32). The term “things” is appropriated from Bruno Latour’s approach on “Action-Network Theory” evoking the product of a kind of prosthesis that allows us to grasp the full complexity of our surroundings that we usually are unable to see (Huybrechts 2014:59), CONTEXTUALIDADE/CONTEXTUALITY 415 and invokes the nature of co-dependent, circulative and transformative looping agency expressed by actors or ‘actants’ (term favored by Latour) within a network, as they can be human or non-human and hold equal importance within that system (Latour 1990). Across this concept, the risk and uncertainty are embraced as qualitative parts of any project, which mirror the complexity of systems intrinsic to our information and networked society. Hybridity is also being asserted as a key adjective in our mediated culture, alluding to more than a techno-human condition that merges man and machine. Instead, it is being considered in a wider sense of mixed environments (virtual and real) and products (mixed typologies and formats). Lev Manovich (2015) sees “hybridization” as the second stage of media that began in the 1970s when the seminal article “Personal and Dynamic Media” (1977) by Alan Kay and Adele Golberg proclaimed the computer as a metamedium, in the extent to which simulates all other media. For Manovich the “media hybrids” provide “new media gestalts” that merge together to offer a coherent new experience (Manovich 2015: 167): The new “global aesthetics” celebrates media hybridity and uses it to engineer emotional reactions, drive narratives, and shape user experience (Manovich 2015: 179). For Manovich it all derives from software that, according to him, powers and shapes it all in contemporary society – from media to networks and the overall globalization. Despite the ‘cold’ technicality of such argument, we should not forget that there is room for creativity if people use tools for their purposes and not the other way around, as alerted by Hoelzl and Marie (2015) when they state that we operate images but they also operate us. Applied to art and design participatory projects, the term ‘hybridity’ gains a very specific meaning that should be valued as an emerging mindset to approach participatory practices: We used the concept ‘hybridity’ to describe participatory projects that are situated on the border between participatory (participant-driven) and expert-based (maker-driven) approaches. […] These hybrid participatory projects form an in-between zone, a ‘gluing element’ or bonding agent that gathers disparate people, objects and contexts, stressing collectivism and shared ownership. At the same time, it is a marginal space, carrying traits of previously disconnected or incompatible fields or discourses that do not belong to (one of) the participants, leading to uncertainty. Furthermore, hybridity refers to a situation of ‘interpretative flexibility’, in which projects generate different or alternative meanings for different social groups […]. (Huybrechts 2014: 282) 416 Megafone.net (2004-2014) developed by the Catalan artist Antoni Abadi must be highlighted as a pioneer in what concerns the concept of ‘hybridity’ based on the experimental use of mobile phones in art (years before the boom of smart cities and advanced communication devices) within socially vulnerable groups. This project was praised in 2006 with a Golden Nica from Ars Electronica Festival in the stream of Digital Communities, for its interdisciplinarity and innovation. This online platform of collaborative webcasts operated, for over a decade, as an art and social communication project that provided skills and technical means of expression to local communities, using the Internet as a public space for literally amplifying their voice, as the name of the project suggests. This is a project focused essentially on mobility and designed for collective performances that act upon the geography of the cities where it is implemented. Organized by channels, dedicated to targeting groups converted into spokespeople (not only of their communities but of themselves), it encourages the spontaneous recording of personal experiences and opinions. Among those groups we can find taxi drivers in México (2004-2014), young gypsies in Leida and in León (2005), sex workers in Madrid (2005), people with limited mobility in Barcelona (2006-2013) later replicated to Geneva (2008) and Montreal (2012-2014), motorcycle couriers in São Paulo (20072015) and displaced refugees and immigrants from several places since 2009. Each node of this network represents simultaneously an individual and a group, as we can see in the grid-based presentation of the participants’ page available on the website. Although Abadi had innovatively developed and expanded technology to implement the Megafone.net using creative communication strategies, even before the current accessibility of social media, the key feature of his artwork is undoubtedly the social relevance of media empowerment of communities that otherwise would not have a voice or could not have access to technology. As important as the artist’s ethnographic and network research is the “production of services” core to his working methodology (Parés, 2014:18), having participant’s affordances in mind, thus preparing them to act autonomously. Beyond the access to tools and training provided by the workshops that precede the online publishing of the user-generated content, the participants continue to develop their skills through media appropriation. In this sense, this socially engaged public artwork stands out as a catalyst for action, deeply impacting on how we view these people and how they view themselves and use the tools for their own purpose. CONTEXTUALIDADE/CONTEXTUALITY 417 FINAL REMARKS From several perspectives and examples, the grid was used throughout this research both as a metaphor and an operative device to support the argument of hybrid and mediated connections that ultimately rely on people’s empowered participation, together as individuals and networks. More than ever, people’s actions, displacements and productions – as they become more easily tracked by media – have been fueling creations that allow the visualization of hidden layers of our everyday life that usually are only processed by computational algorithms. Far from wanting to encourage an exclusive technical take on our culture, my main objective was actually the opposite: to draw attention to the need for media and visual literacy in order to revert the computational language and frameworks of devices, that dictate our ways of looking and acting in the world, to our humanly ways of understanding and connecting with people, objects and territories by using media and visual tools on our behalf and on our own terms. 418 Elias, H. (2012). Post-Web. The Continuous Geography of Digital Media. Lisboa: Media XXI. Hoelzl, I., Marie, R. (2015). Soft Image. Towards a New Theory of the Digital Image. Bristol, Chicago: Intellect. Huybrechts, L. (ed.) (2014). Participation is Risky – Approaches to Joint Creative Processes. Amsterdam: Valiz. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York, London: New York University Press. Latour, B. (1990). On actor-network theory. A few clarifications plus more than a few complications. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/ files/P-67%20ACTOR-NETWORK.pdf (accessed 10.10.2016). Manovich, L. (2015). Software takes command. New York, London: Bloomsbury Academic. (1st ed. 2013). Bibliografia/References Abadi, A., (ongoing). Megafone.net. http://megafone.net/ (accessed 10.10.2016). Parés, R. (2014). Megaphone.net/2004-2014, in: Antoni Abad megaphone. net/2004-2014. Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), Barcelona. pp. 11 – 25. Schäfer, M. (2011). Bastard Culture! How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 419