“Comparative Perspective on Situated Projects”

To prepare for this meeting you are required to read the following text and excerpt as an inspiration, to understand locality and site-specificity that entails an inherently comparative perspective on urban frictions. Keep in mind you will be employing the following readings as a lens to analysis the projects mentioned below.

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– “Curating the City: Urban Interfaces and Locative Media as Experimental Platforms for Cultural Data” by Nanna Verhoeff and Clancy Wilmot in Rob Kitchin and Sung-Yueh Perng (eds.), Code & The City. 2016. London: Routledge. (Find the pdf attached).

– Excerpt from Theatre/Archeology by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks:

“Site-specific performances are conceived for, mounted within and conditioned by the particulars of found spaces, existing social situations or locations, both used and disused: sites of work, play and worship: cattle-market, chapel, factory, cathedral, railway station. They rely, for their conception and their interpretation, upon the complex coexistence, superimposition and interpenetration of a number of narratives and architectures, histor- ical and contemporary, of two basic orders: that which is of the site, its fixtures and fittings, and that which is brought to the site, the performance and its scenography: of that which pre-exits the work and that which is of the work: of the past and of the present. They are inseparable from their sites, the only contexts within which they are intelligible. Performance recontextualises such sites: it is the latest occupation of a location at which other occupations – their material traces and histories – are still apparent: site is not just an interesting, and disinterested, backdrop. Such performance, in its themes and means of exposition, is not of necessity congruent with its site as when a sixth-century battle is enacted in a car factory. Interpenetrating narratives jostle to create meanings.The multiple meanings and readings of performance and site intermingle, amending and compromising one another.” (2001, p.23)

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You are also required to look into the following projects as teams – 100% City produced by Rimini Protokoll in coproduction with HAU Hebbel am Ufer and Body Movies by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Each team will be assigned to watch one video from each of the projects focusing on particular localities.