Area/code - Kevin Slavin
Territory

Workshop May 26-30 2008
Public lecture May 26 2008 at 6pm

Press release

Comunicato stampa

Download "Territory" workshop booklet
(PDF file - 2Mb)

See and Download Kevin Slevin Lecture and Interview

Fabrica, the Benetton communication research center, continues its international workshop and lecture program. From New York, the award-winning game and media design company Area/code, co-founded by Frank Lantz and Kevin Slavin, will be at the institute from May 26th to the 30th to lead an intensive trans-disciplinary workshop. In addition, Area/code will give a public lecture on May 26th illustrating their philosophy, recent cross-media games and entertainment projects.

The workshop results will inspire a critical essay by Monika Parrinder, international design writer and co-founder of www.limitedlanguage.org a website interested in using the methods of contemporary digital practice and image making – open-source, open-ended, cut-and-paste etc. - to generate new ways of writing about communication. Monika has published articles in the design magazines, Eye, Blueprint, Print and ID. She teaches at the Royal College of Art and London College of Communication.

Area/code

Games and media define imaginary spaces that we enter into and explore. Area/code highlights the connections between these imaginary spaces and the world around them.
These connections can take many forms:

• urban environments transformed into spaces for public play
  
• online games that respond to broadcast TV in real time
  
• simulated characters and virtual worlds that occupy real-world geography
  
• game events driven by real-world data
  
• situated media that corresponds to specific locations and contexts

Area/code works with advertising agencies, media firms, networks, universities, and large consumer brands.
Clients include: Nike, Disney Imagineering, CBS, Nokia, MTV, The Discovery Channel, A&E, The History Channel, JWT, Cramer-Krasselt, Deutsch, SS+K, and the Carnegie Institute / Girls Math and Science Project.

Projects have been awarded at the Clios, the One Show, OMMA and the Future of Marketing Summit.
Area/code and its work have been covered in the Wall Street Journal, Creativity, The New York Times, Businessweek, The Chicago Tribune, MTV, Ad Age, and some of our favorite blogs including boingboing
and PSFK.

Kevin Slavin has spoken at MoMA, the Van Alen Institute, the Guardian, DLD, the Cooper Union, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and NBC, and together with Adam Greenfield he co-teaches
"Urban Computing" at NYU/ITP. His work has been exhibited internationally, including the Design Museum of London and the Frankfurt Museum fuer Moderne Kunst.

Environmental, Social, Relational, the title of this new program of research and education activities, is rooted in Fabrica’s heritage of cross-cultural creativity for social concern. Its precise
definition however emerges directly from a recent debate between Fabrica’s researchers that had the specific objective to identify common interest platforms for future studies.
Environmental, social and relational themes are central to human ecology, an interdisciplinary field using holistic approaches in the search for harmony between people and their natural and created
environment but mainly between people and their societies.
Along these lines Fabrica wants to investigate, experiment, catalyze, document and disseminate how contemporary communication, design and artistic expression can contribute to helping people solve
problems and enhance human potential, within near and far environments.
The workshop series will bring to Fabrica international artists and designers that in common have the desire to apply creativity and innovation to social improvement.
Area/code and Fabrica’s researchers, along with a selection of external participants from the center’s global think-net, will focus the 5-day workshop on today’s environment of pervasive technologies and
overlapping media to create new concepts of relational entertainment.

Workshop brief

Territory
Joseph Beuys: “The Berlin Wall should be 5 centimeters higher, for aesthetic reasons”
You can see the walls plainly in Treviso, from the ground, from the map, from Google’s big optics. For those of you who live here, your primary forms of engagement with these walls are probably aesthetic. You might think, like Beuys, that they should be 5 centimeters higher, or 2 meters lower, or you might find the stone lovely, or the forms well articulated. But every wall has a history, and cities learn to build them from their enemies, not their friends.
Cities have always dreamed of autonomy, and walls are one material for those dreams. Designed to withstand siege and to regulate immigration and trade, city walls were built only under the “right of fortification” granted by the nation-state. City walls are the archaic hardware of national territory; the Latin for city (urbs) refers to the wall’s stones.
With city walls, the territories are defined from the inside, as a line of defense. But some walls are defined from the outside, as when Venice drew the stone lines to hard-code the Jewish Ghetto. Sometimes territory is declared by its inhabitants, and sometimes territory is declared for them.
But walls are only the most obvious boundaries. Not all territory is visible from the ground or the map or the lens of the satellite. Sometimes there are only traces, one needs to learn how to read them. We’ll look at cases in which a thin roll of wire is enough, in the American West and in cities around the world. Sometimes it’s even thinner than a wire, maybe just a sticker, maybe just the layer of paint that marks gang turf. And sometimes it’s invisible altogether. A lot of territory exists only in the air or in the mind.
The territory in the air reflects the overall shift from the power of the visible (like a wall) to the power of the invisible (like a firewall). Consider the practice of “pirate radio” in which a signal is legal to transmit on one side of a border, but illegal to receive on the other. Radio waves have a territory all their own, with boundaries that are real but invisible, unconcerned with the lines on the map. Sometimes the invisible territories conform to geography (as a Chinese Google search will reveal) but more frequently they don’t.
When the Roman Empire expanded and congealed into cities, they were always based on a grid, always the same grid, always aligned to the very same compass points. The gridded cities embodied the endless terrain of the empire, even if the space between the cities was unarticulated. Some 2,000 years later, however, Roman citizens were panicked by a camera-equipped “Google Car” as it passively mapped the streets for Google StreetView. It’s one thing to impose an endless grid upon the world, and another thing to have a grid imposed upon you, even when the grid is invisible. Especially when it’s invisible. Territory is like this: you don’t have to see it to know it’s there.
For many of us, our first group social experiences were children’s street games. Red Rover. British Bulldog, Kick the Can, “Red Light, Green Light”. There was a lot to learn from these games: teams are arbitrary, and not, victory is random, and not, and it’s fun and games, and not. Beyond all that, however, these games are built around temporary “consensual hallucinations” in which we all agree that this is the center of the world, this is one side or the other, this is the goal, this is the jail. When the game is over, the territories revert back to whatever they were, a schoolyard, a basement, the sidewalk. Our early experiments in group socialization are built around imagining territory and then agreeing on its real-world boundaries, which will live on earth only as long as we imagine them.
In the end, most of the territory on earth lives only there, as the mental images in the minds of its citizens. When Korzybski first coined the phrase “The Map is not the Territory” in 1931, he was referring to the cognitive error of believing our abstractions of the world to be the world itself, mistaking the word for the thing. Territory seems to start with stone walls, but it starts with the plans for those walls, and it starts before those plans with the belief that the lines of that plan are meaningful. Territory really starts with someone reading those lines on the earth, or with writing them.
With 195 countries and 6.5 billion people, there’s more territory on earth than there’s ever been. In and around Treviso, we will find us some, learn how to read it, learn how to write it, how to work it through and play it out. We can write it with our minds and with the media at hand, material & immaterial. And just as surely, we can re-write it, with the same minds and the same media. For a few days, let’s read, write and revise Treviso, change the maps, change the territory.

Three steps.

• You will break up into small groups or individuals to identify the territory. Splitting up, you will spend some hours in Treviso looking for territory that is poorly defined, undefined, invisible, suppressed, forgotten, or otherwise somehow imperceptible to most everyone.
  
• Design an intervention around that territory. Demarcate, delineate, render, make visible. Foucault spoke of the “liminal horizon.” Bring the territory into some form of cognitive focus.
  
• Bring that intervention to life in such a way that is mostly legal, mostly impermanent, modest, sincere, funny, serious. Lenin issued a Soviet mandate that public monuments must be constructed as temporary. For this, they embalmed his body forever. And yet he was right.

Meanwhile.
Meanwhile, during the workshop, we’ll be playing “GoCrossCampus” which is an online game played using the map of the Fabrica campus. You will be divided into teams, and the winning team will prove that winning matters, and that the campus itself can be won and lost a thousand different ways.

Captured? World on the move
Monika Parrinder
London, June 2008

This essay was written as a response to “Territory” a Fabrica Workshops project (May 2008) directed by Kevin Slavin from Area/code. This is a new program of research and education activities based around the environmental, social and relational directed by Omar Vulpinari. With special thanks to the students whose work inspired this essay.

www.limitedlanguage.org

‘Joseph Beuys’ project to raise the Berlin wall by one centimeter for “aesthetic” (proportional) reasons [w]as a way to subvert it, to overcome it “with interior laughter”, to displace the viewer’s attention towards its conceptual dimension, beyond the physical wall.’ (Vincent Pécoil).1

Aesthetics and city space

Walls are built to define and defend territory – to keep people out or keep them in. Bridges are built, both literally and metaphorically, to make connections. Historically they have been one of the first targets of military attack. A compelling news image of recent years is of a Lebanese man bungee-jumping off Mudayrai Bridge, east of Beirut following Israel’s summer offensive on Lebanon in 2006. In the image, the man is minute against the bridge’s monumental pillars, with their bomb-blasted concrete splaying innards of meshed steel.

The Berlin wall, in Pécoil’s interpretation, was first internal and so it could also be overcome by the imagination. ‘Everyone is an artist’ is Beuys’ most quoted saying and the intention here was not that they should become practicing artists but that they could apply creative thinking in their own spheres. The Lebanese man’s gesture – reduced to the visual equivalent of a soundbite by its world media image - seems to tell us that this conflict too can be deflected with similar irreverence. Yet this time with the kind of exteriorised laughter thrown up by urban play?

From the 1960s ‘happenings’, we can draw a rough arc – including Beuys’ demotic and site-specific art – to a contemporary interest in the spontaneous and everyday both inside and outside of practice. The difference today is that technology has become pervasive - its networks largely invisible but the effects profoundly visible. How can we understand the dynamic behaviour of environments, people and networks as processes – both seen and unseen? Can artists and designers capture – and affect – a world on the move?

Poetics and augmented space
In 2003 a conceptual and technological bridge was built between two cities through the design of a ‘Big Urban Game’ (B.U.G) conceived by New York cross-media consultancy Area/code, co-founded by Kevin Slavin and Frank Lantz.2 Played out by the citizens of Minneapolis and St. Paul – twinned by state convention and linked here by internet and mobile phone technology – the game played out in the physical locale of each city with players pushing huge inflatable game pawns through the streets, with their co-ordinates reported in the local morning papers. Another game, ConQwest (2004) pitched high school teams against each other, armed with the first-ever mobile phone-cams able to scan optic codes. A form of treasure hunt, here the kids captured territories in order to ‘shoot’ the codes as treasure. Here, the metaphorical link to bridges (connecting territories), and the relationship to classic computing (gamer versus computer) stops. The computers are connectors. They connect people.

The twin cites project was commissioned by the Design Institute of the University of Minnesota to inspire in residents a re-interpretation of their urban environment. And yet, today we live in a world in which 10 million people spend an average of twenty hours a week involved in the “game”, World of Warcraft. What ConQwest brought home, was how the kids of Tucson didn’t even have a relationship with their city. Kevin Slavin, speaking at Fabrica, the Benetton group’s communications research center in Treviso, Italy, sheds light on their philosophy; ‘The Internet is about anywhere, computer games are nowhere whilst Area/code games are somewhere.’ These are like ordinary urban childhood games - just with computers in. Area code ‘…push computers out into the world to change the conditions you understand about the world. It’s a totally different idea.’

Area/code operate in the realm of “augmented reality”. Lev Manovich, a digital media theorist, explains in ‘The Poetics of Augmented Space’3 that this is physical space in the world overlaid with the data sphere. It’s not about escaping reality but, as Slavin puts it, folding what you are doing in the world – your sense of time and place and cognition – into a much bigger system. He tells a story of getting lost in the maze of Treviso streets and canals; as a tourist, he can either wing it, consult a map, or phone a friend and be guided home via Google Earth. Faded frescoes and peeling adverts remind us that the streets of Treviso – like other cities – have always been over-laid with information, be their mythologies biblical or modern. A difference today is that the data is dynamically changing – both multi-media and personalised. The bigger question then becomes: How does this change our phenomenological experience of ourselves?

Area/code’s name highlights both the connection between geographical territory (area) and its informational overlay (code). Slavin puts it more poetically; ‘There is always something on the ground and always something that reaches to the clouds.’ With the shift to mobile devices the area code no longer relates to geographical territory but a network provider. The phone no longer connects to home or the office but you. What’s more, as part of the arsenal of surveillance technology the phone tracks, via satellite, the exact spot you’re in.

Or, there abouts. ‘GPS Data Cloud’ (2008) is a civic sculpture in The Netherlands by Jeremy Wood developed out of the Global Positioning System co-ordinates of two park benches originally placed on a site in Beatrixpark. The sculpture itself marks exactly where the two benches once were. It comprises a series of park benches of different heights placed near and colliding with each other. This is, according to Wood, ‘where technology thinks it is in relation to where we are now.’ As Slavin writes in his essay on ‘Territory’, there has been a significant shift ‘from the power of the visible (like a wall) to the power of the invisible (like a firewall).’ Wood uses technology to ‘read’ the world and then, by making the invisible visible, re-writes it. It’s about technology and the location of place (or, its inaccuracy), but it’s also about the location of self. It allows the bench sitter to contemplate their place in this ‘expanded’ world.

Use
‘If previously 3-D space was reduced in practice to a set of surfaces – walls in the case of the built environment, flat paintings or gallery walls in an art environment – now it is finally used as 3-D space.’ (Lev Manovich)

Use – even individuated and dynamic users – have been central to interactive design and spatial practice for a while. Slavin points out that a mobile phone, equipped with the latest “pointing” technology, can become a mouse for the real world. This gives agency and yet he asks; ‘For what?’ Most technology is here to make the world more precise. Instead, Area/code aims to usurp technology to make the world bigger, more fictive, to tell better lies with, to augment the imagination and desire.

…A role, in the past, of writers, poets, movie-makers and admen more than architects and planners. Slavin finds frustration with architecture: Film has its audience, Advertising targets consumers and Interaction design pre-supposes users and yet there is no specialist term in the language of Architecture for its people. Le Corbusier imagined an archetype and contemporary architects speak of ‘flows’, but these can only ask questions about use and movement not how you, or I, feel and behave. Least of all, whose feelings or behaviour count.

Tactics
Can design draw greater meaning out of subjectivity and anecdote? Michel de Certeau, in his seminal book, ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’4 took the thesis that everyday life, for all its unconscious acts, can be understood as a series of practices. In ‘Making-do: uses and tactics’ he writes; ‘Just as in literature one differentiates between “styles” or ways of writing, one can distinguish between “ways of operating” – ways of walking, reading, producing, speaking etc… These “ways of operating” are similar to “instructions for use”, and they create a certain play in the machine through a stratification of different and interfering kinds of functioning…’

Strategies are for achieving specific goals. Tactics constitute the ways that others might intervene: they can subvert strategies; deflect them or use them to their own ends. De Certeau’s example is of a French immigrant in Paris who adapts his new ‘home’ and language with objects, phrases and actions from his first culture. ‘Without leaving the place where he has no choice but to live and which lays down its law for him, he establishes within it a degree of plurality and creativity. By an art of being in between, he draws unexpected results from its situation.’

In recognising personal utterances as ways of operating, we are able to act on and within them. Consider the private space afforded a kissing couple in public by the mere aversion of the gaze. During World War Two, such etiquette provided a foil for the French Resistance, whose members walked in twos, adopting the pose of lovers and hugging their papers between them, hoping the Gestapo would pass on by.

These are, of course, practices of the everyday – if we can call war everyday - not as reflected on through practice. Area/code allow us to think about ways of playing. ConQwest, Slavin notes, is more that a treasure-hunt – which is implicitly tactical because one thing is followed by the next and the next and the next. ‘What a good game does is give provide you with plenty of opportunities to make decisions – some of them extremely consequential – and feel the weight of that.’ Games involve strategy. Slavin draws our attention to a man who lost the game but still offered the secret of his strategies to members of other teams although there was nothing in it for him. Odd behaviour – so, how was he feeling? He had invested emotionally in the game and couldn’t bear to leave. But why should we care? – Because, this man’s behaviour (cheating) had the power to affect the nature of the game.

Relations

Another practice, which lays note to the minutiae of everyday activities in ways that draws them out of anecdotal experience into ‘script form’, is the 1990s art movement, Relational Aesthetics. This was a term coined by the French art critic, Nicholas Bourriaud in his book of the same name.5

Bourriaud asked if art can capture the world on the move. Like Manovich, he was interested in practice that moved away from finite objects and images – flattened and purely visual – to the ongoing process of human relationships. For instance, the way the bustle of a street is ‘fixed’ with the click of the camera or the video cut and edit. Relational Aesthetics creates scenarios or “spaces of encounter” that aim to foster more spontaneous human interaction. Post-Berlin wall, this art no longer holds out for utopian ideals or grand-scale aims of social responsibility. It looks, instead, to create “microtopias” – pleasurable moments in the here and now.

One example of a relational practitioner is Jens Haaring – from whom Vincent Pécoil drew a link back to Beuys. In ‘Foreigners Free - Biel swimming pool’, Haaring worked with the council to establish free entry for foreigners at a public pool. Like a park bench, it’s symbolic of “being-together” (although the reality is more fraught). ‘This being-together is problematic when it comes to immigrants, whose status is the object of violent debates ripe with racist undertones in most European countries… it is a question of borders, since racism has less to do with the fear of the foreign than with that of violation of space protected by a border. In addition, to benefit from the free entry one must also accept representing oneself as foreign. Who is foreign and who isn’t?’6 Are tourists or immigrants more foreign?

Is it enough to capture the world, albeit it on the move? Pécoil argues that Haaring is a “catalytic agent”. He effects changes in his and others behaviour and perception of their cultural, social as well as spatial environment. The measure, here, is the strength of change, not aesthetic judgement.

Folded planes
Like augmented reality, Relational Aesthetics engages beyond the 2nd and 3rd dimensions to capture how practices unfold over time. Yet in its purest scenario-building sense, this practice now seems limited in scope. Augmented practice can work across all media platforms, be they old-fashioned small ads or ocean-going, GPS-tagged Great While sharks.7 (…It’s true) What becomes interesting, beyond this, is how artists and designers will fold different media and spatial planes into one another.

Robin Rhode, a South African living in Berlin uses drawing and performance. In ‘Park Bench’ (2000), he sketched a bench on the white wall of the House of Parliament in Cape Town – a central place from which apartheid was legislated, all the way down to public benches labelled ‘Coloured’. Rhode then “performed” his drawing – he struggled to take a seat. Rhode, through his work, tries to re-draw the possibilities of architecture, city space and their politics of use. Subsequently, these performances are often displayed as a series of photographic stills like a time-lapse animation. Such an outcome refuses to fully document the event or condense it to visual soundbite. The work can only exist across media and spatial planes, across time.

The process is the medium, the user is the content.

To end, another news image of recent years – this time playing the media game. It is the spectre/spectacle of Banksy, tagging the Palestinian segregation wall with a window through which one can see an Alpine-scene. An old Palestinian who had been watching him all day, commented that the scene made the wall look beautiful. Then the sting; ‘We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home.’8

Instead, there is another arc we can trace from Beuys – a more relational practice that is not resolved before hand. It is open-ended, developing in and with the event. This fosters critical engagement with the world, not by combating it but, by inserting itself into it. It’s not about use and abuse of the city, but re-use. It’s not about replacing one monologue (of oppression) with another (of freedom), but dialogue.

Haaring’s pool is, in the end, of art. Area/code’s context – design – is different because they are commissioned by clients, be they Nike or the Girls Math and Science Project. nArchitects, are an American company who have developed a methodology for designing for an augmented world; ‘We re-write each program or project brief to simultaneously stage unexpected events as well as allow for the unexpected – neither pure choreography nor pure responsive interactivity.’ Their people, it seems, are “performers”. Indeed, elsewhere Max Bruinsma has commented of the digital world that; ‘Users are performers of the content.’9

What’s interesting here, and for communication design as a whole, is that they already work in “live” networks of communication. What remains to be seen is how these processes and performances can become media for future communications. Seen or unseen. Walls, wires or (wo)men.

1 Vincent Pécoil in ‘Hello, My Name is Jens Haaring’ (Les Presses du Réel, 2003)
2 http://www.playareacode.com/
3 Lev Manovich, ‘The Poetics of Augmented Space’, Visual Communication journal, June 2006
4 Michel de Certeau, ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ (University of California Press, 1984)
5 Nicholas Bourriaud, ‘Relational Aesthetics’ (Les Presses du Réel, 1998)
6 Vincent Pécoil in ‘Hello, My Name is Jens Haaring’ (Les Presses du Réel, 2003)
7 Area/code, ‘Sharkrunners’, designed for Discovery Channel’s 20th Anniversary Shark Week.
8 Banksy, ‘Banksy: wall and piece’ (Random House, 2005)
9 Max Bruinsma, ‘Deepsites: intelligent innovation in contemporary web design’ (Thames and Hudson, 2003)

©2008

This essay can be commented at http://www.limitedlanguage.org/discussion/

Kevin Slavin

ConQwest (2004-2005) -- Qwest
Big Game in 10 cities across the United States.
First use of semacode in North America. Includes also 20’ inflatable animals, 1000 high school students, real-time visualizations of the players in action.

Crossroads (2006) – Van Alen Institute
2-player mobile phone location-based game for “The Good Life” exhibition at the Van Alen Institute. Two players compete to capture intersections in New York City by running through the streets. They must also avoid Papa Bones, an invisible spirit who pursues them through physical space.

SuperStar Tokyo (2005)
Mobile game uses optical-recognition technology to recognize Puri Kura stickers in a distributed urban game through Tokyo. Players get points for seeing the stickers of other players, as well as by being seen.

Sharkrunners (2007) – Discovery Channel
Real-time flash based videogame in which players become marine biologists looking for sharks, in order to study them. The game runs in real time, so players are alerted to “shark encounters” by receiving SMS texts. In addition, the ships are controlled by the players, and the sharks are controlled by real sharks that have GPS receivers stapled to their dorsal fins.

Sopranos Connection (2006) – A&E
First ever game to synchronize between a live television broadcast (the Sopranos, on A&E) and a videogame in the browser. Depending on the players moves, and the events that happen in the real broadcast of the Sopranos, the board comes to life and scores points for players.

Parking Wars (2007-2008) – A&E
“Social game” for A&E on Facebook in which users “park” on other players pages, and ticket players who have parked illegally. Over 500,000 players in 2 months have produced over 200MM page views.

Chain Factor ARG (2007) – CBS
Alternate Reality Game for the show “Numb3rs” on CBS. Worked directly with show writers to construct the episode, and the real world that it extended into.
Images here are of the real-world media that contain secret messages embedded in the game system.