Performing Places seminar on media and embodiment in the urban environment is held in Helsinki, November 7-9, 2006.

The Performing places seminar will bring together researchers, artists and developers whose work touches on the experiential, affective and political aspects of urban and technological life, and who share an interest in inventive artistic and technical practices of the urban environment. The seminar addresses the current urban situation, where lived environments are undergoing major experiential and social changes, driven mainly by technical and economic pressures. Our aim is to create a forum for critical, transdisciplinary exchange by bringing to resonance a set of relevant themes:

1. Urban space, in its current versions, blends embodied and mediated forms, orchestrating everyday actions to an invisible score of signals and software. With ubiquitous computing, devices pervade our physical environments to trace and modulate behaviour, enabling new modes of service, surveillance and intervention.
2. Cities are increasingly shaped by the formation of ‘creative clusters’, according to innovation strategies which target an evolving experience industry and seek global competitiveness for a particular region or place. These strategies typically neglect embodied, affective or everyday aspects of the production of space – even if they often include programmes to advance citizen participation and social inclusion.
3. Artists and media developers have the possibility of addressing urban space in ways that prioritize its experiential, social and political contexts. Strategies of site-specific, community and performance art are complemented by the activity of media artists and designers, producing interventions and applications that can capture the collective dimensions of our experience and render them palpable.
4. Recent theories in human geography and the cultural study of technology highlight the affective and relational qualities of the urban/technological environment. In their focus on the performative and collective aspects of use and production, these theories challenge dominant views of representation and innovation, proposing more event-based and mobile accounts of inventive agency.

The seminar invites participation from all relevant disciplines, especially from practitioners and researchers in

• media, performance and urban arts
• IT design and and urban planning
• urban and media studies.

The aim is to build conceptual links and exchanges between disciplines, in order to produce a critical framework with real relevance for urban practice, research and policy. For this reason the seminar will take the form of parallel workshops, with short presentations and a collaborative development of issues. Project demonstrations are warmly encouraged – but the main objective is to move beyond presentation and arrive at a problematization of practices. Of special interest are contributions discussing, for example:

• Performativity and performance – embodied, affective and non-representational practices in media, arts and sociality;
• Ubiquitous interaction – collective, participatory agency in urban interactions;
• Affected places – art and media interventions in the physical and virtual environment;
• Urban media experience – audiovisual, mobile and network media in the production, consumption and experience of places;
• In/visibility – techniques and practices of representing and making visible, from infrastructures to surveillance to performance;
• Critical urban practice – critical artistic and technical practice in the urban sphere; perspectives on production, coding, design, planning and development.

For further information, contact Minna Tarkka: minna [dot] tarkka [at] m-cult [dot] org.