neonascent

The Experimental Society conference at Lancaster University has just happened, and it was a rich mix of different takes on the need for, danger of, and nature of experimentation of one form or another.

My paper was on Michel de Certeau and how we experience space (…and place/location/architecture), and how our engagement with it can take the form of experimentation. It travels via Heidegger and Deleuze and Guattari, and quietly stewarded by Bachelard, and Debord.

Annotated notes are in the second half.

Tactical and Strategic Experimentation in Space – Conference Presentation

 
Here in Sydney at the moment we are in the middle of Vivid Sydney, a festival of “light, music and ideas”. As part of the festival, a number of historic buildings are being “augmented” with projected animations telling their history in an intervention called Macquarie Visions:

Macquarie Visions casts a new light onto Sydney’s ceremonial street, celebrating in stunning and immersive light displays, the 200th anniversary and story of two great visionary leaders, Governor Lachlan Macquarie and his wife Elizabeth.

The Macquaries’ innovations are revealed with illuminating, theatrical and contemporary light displays in a family friendly free night…

These projections are effectively an analogue version of the sort of Augmented Reality applications we should expect to see in the next few years. (In fact, the AusWiki AR layer does a similar job of pulling up Wikipedia entries associated with important Sydney buildings.) Here, the City has a vested interest in presenting a specific version of history, for the sake of promoting Sydney. The “family friendly” narrative of Sydney space excludes a great deal from its account of history.

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