NEW PUBLICATION
TEXT BY JULIANA WEXEL AND MIRIAN TAVARES INCLUDED IN GUIDE FOR URBAN STUDIES
“Performing the city from the cyberspace” was recently published in the book Repository: 49 Methods and Assignments for Writing Urban Places. The publication proposes a set of methods and assignments designed to stimulate new approaches in architecture, urban studies, and other fields of spatial development, and to invite creative, often embodied, and sometimes playful engagements with the material and immaterial dimensions of urban places.
The essay is the work of CIAC’s coordinator, Mirian Tavares, and Juliana Wexel – CIAC researcher, Ph.D. candidate in Digital Media-Art at FCT-DMAD, and member of the Research Group Methodological Framework, part of the Writing Urban Places project.
Repository is a field guide with inspiring methods and tasks for urban studies. It offers a practical and accessible introduction to urban engagement methods, contains practical and surprising tasks for the reader, and explores the special interface between architecture and literature. The full book is available for download here:
“Performing the city from the cyberspace” (p.123-124) proposes a dynamic method entitled CyberPerformanCity, applied to post-digital artistic practices involving the concept of hybrid space: the combination between physical objects and digital information communication networks; a combination of virtual and real space and between concrete physical space and ephemeral digital space (Tira, 2021). The aim is to suggest an experimental, unorthodox, disruptive, and generative methodological resource for creative processes based on digital media-art. This method, in turn, would enable the production and revelation of new narratives, as well as imaginative and visually aesthetic dimensions, using the urban space as a character, object, or stage of the artistic interventions. The task suggested in this method is inspired by the creation process of “Make me up!”, which was part of the ARTECH 2021 edition in Aveiro, Portugal. The digital artifact uses AR technology to create cyber-performative narratives between feminist street art from authorial filters created via Spark AR Studio and made available on Instagram.
The book is one of the outcomes of the Repository of Methods (RoM), an ongoing project that aims to bring together a wide range of methods, approaches, procedures, and tasks from diverse disciplines employed to capture, explore, experience, engage with, analyze, and understand European medium-sized cities. The outcome of RoM is not a single, comprehensive document, but rather an ongoing and iterative collection of methods, approaches, and tasks submitted by different members of Cost Action Writing Urban Places and presented in a variety of formats.
Writing Urban Places proposes innovative research by articulating literary studies, urban planning, and architecture and by valuing the specificity of local urban cultures in the European context.
The participation of researcher Juliana Wexel in the Writing Urban Places project, as well as the CyberperformanCity method, was circumscribed in the fieldwork for the research on cyberperformativity of the CyPeT project.
