Mechanics of Place: Textures of Tophane + Interview, Statement, Artwork

Abstract

Place is always encountered as a flux of temporal and spatial transitions, framed by the past places we have just been and the future places we are moving towards. Augmented Reality through the smartphone constitutes a dual experience where participants can either submit or retrieve site-specific information. These projects can foreground the social, cultural, historical and geographic qualities of the physical location where they are embedded. As such, they suggest a desire to engage the ”˜placeness’ of place – the investment of personal associations with history as a means of layering situated meaning that is designed to enrich, amplify or contradict the experience of the location. Using an array of categories as a conceptual structure, Mechanics of Place engages the specific relational dynamics of a particular neighborhood, bringing to the fore the contradictions and conflicts inherent in the mixing of the cultural conditions that are present in a given urban location. Within this relational and multicultural space, situated augmented reality art works provide a new way to enact a hybrid relation to place.