IMD _Institute of Media and Design
copyright _IMD
MEDIA DESIGN | The parallel city: multiple levels of reality through the focus of city notations
The reception of today's cities has developed into extremely complex and different experience processes. Some urban phenomena is available to the user using only specific, technical-media tools or applications. The parallel presence of very different levels of reality allows the cohesion of space, time and place to be split. Individual, usable dynamic positioning and communication media create a multitude of possibilities in the perception and use of urban space: Online maps and aerial photographs, such as Google Maps or Google Earth, navigation devices, mobile phones, iPhones, social networks such as Skype, ICQ, MySpace or studiVZ, interactive image and video databases such as Flickr or YouTube, but also film, television, or entirely digitally created parallel worlds like "Second Life" have become the media of the reception and production of city.
"The Society of the And" is how the Dutch theorist Roemer van Toorn names this state of multiple reality offers. The parallel existing locations and objects are mutually dependent, highly individualized and create self-sufficient user-islands or highly interconnected dependencies. The simultaneous presence of more complex realities of space leads to the possibility of a nonlinear and anywhere "use" of the urban rendition.
In the seminar "The parallel city" the participants will focus in one or more such medial city realities, in which they record, analyze, and carry-over this through a transformation-, abstraction- and translation-process into various real experienced or medially completed models.
Directed by: Philipp Reinfeld