Walking in the interface
The disruption of digital space, an opportunity or a loss of identity. The flows of information generated in the current context of globalization and technological networks transform our space, our relationships, and inherently the processes of identity building. Far from merging into a global village based on rationalism, the overcoming of place, culture or identity is not taking place, and the supposed liberal-style directions that were meant to lead us to a "flattening-out", or class indistinction, are heading towards a new context of resistance in which experience and the local acquire a new prominence (Serra & Ortiz, 2020). Following this logic, already described by Jordi Borja and Manuel Castells, it should be noted that: “… the global does not do away with the local but, on the contrary, creates the possibility for a much more active, much more decisive role for what is local. In strictly cultural terms the local, and places, are increasingly becoming the last ditches of identity” (Borja & Castells, 1998). The social alienation of the individual within the centralized, hegemonic and capitalist space (Harvey, 2006), is opposed to the individualized experience of time, a vindictive idea that we can note in the aforementioned situationist practices in contrast to the “modern experience” (Groys, 2010).
Fig. 8 — Capturing movements of human activity around the Jan Hus Memorial (stands at one end of Old Town Square, Prague in the Czech Republic). (Source: author's own compilation).
Fig. 12 — ‘Transimaginary’ landscapes. Top: Zelda BOTW Landscape; Bottom: Petra mountains, Jerash ruins (Source: author's own compilation).
Fig. 9 — Capturing movements of human activity. Brooklyn street crossing. (Source: author's own compilation).
If we approach the experience in current terms of space-network, expanded and informational spatial forms, time and space are transformed into transmedia accounts where the network community in the first person feeds a cartography of data (Fig. 8, 9), flows of a liquid society (Bauman, 2000) in which the virtual plane and the tangible plane are hybridized. A coexistence of territory and information (Fig. 10) that, with the development of technologies, have brought about the emergence of different locative media practices (Fig. 11): processes and products that involved technology, body and space (Hemment, 2006). Places become complex, densifying their informational load, and unleashing heterotopias[13] that appear within the places themselves. Along these lines, in the city of today, displacement, metamorphosis and constant mobility have caused city dwellers to become part-time citizens of multiple urban locations. People have become territoriants (Pellicer et al., 2013, p.123). Flowing that we can identify with Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of semionaut: “...but to make meaningful connections in the infinite text of world culture. In a word, to produce itineraries in the landscape of signs by taking on the role of semionauts, inventors of pathways within the cultural landscape, nomadic sign gatherers” (2009a, p.39). A form of artistic production, relational aesthetics, which has found the means to resist in precariousness and an unstable environment: “A precarious regime of aesthetics is developing, based on speed, intermittence, blurring and fragility. Today, we need to reconsider culture (and ethics) on the basis of a positive idea of the transitory, instead of holding on to the opposition between the ephemeral and the durable...” (2009b).
Hence we can visualize the action of walking as becoming living cursors, relational individuals that converge in a redistribution of time and space, and propagate a production of meanings through their act of bodily and virtual movement, feeding transimaginaries (Fig. 12), displaying small samples of resistance to monitoring and control, or dialoguing with spaces through the interaction between social subjectivities. In this sense, the hybridization between nature and technology describes a new contemporary landscape that, according to the ideas of Pierre Bélanger “is perhaps better understood as an infrastructure than in reference to former conceptions based on the dichotomy between the natural and the human realms” (Picon, 2013). A landscape that earlier in modernity, following Latour, had ontologically and epistemologically split nature from culture.
[13] Heterotopia is a concept in human geography elaborated by the philosopher Michel Foucault to describe places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions. They are spaces of otherness, neither here nor there, both physical and mental, such as the space of a phone call or the moment you see yourself in the mirror. (Stavros, 2016, pp.157).
Fig. 11 — Audio intervention in place (2013): 41.984213849525915, 2.824409893549673. Geolocated point of interaction through the GRpop[14] app (Serra, 2016). (Source: author's own compilation).
