At Grandtextauto, Mary Flanagan writes:
There is a great set of posts readers may wish to check out at the IDC list about situated technologies, ubiquity, games, war, and the ISEA interactive city project. Insightful stuff & worth the read.
Quoting one post by Catherine D'Ignazio regarding ISEA 2006' s "Interactive City" theme:
The festival's imagination of the "Interactive City" seemed to be characterized by a spirit of play which feels increasingly oriented towards middle-class consumer spectacle and the experience economy...
my questions to the artists, the organizers, the attendees and everyone else is - is psychogeography/locative media work simply R&D for a new generation of entertainment spectacle? Or, what are we actually trying to do with these ideas of "play" in urban space? Who gets to play? And what about the interactive cities in Iraq and Lebanon and elsewhere? Why didn't we address war, security, militarization and terrorism as aspects of the contemporary interactive city? For me, running around making the city into a sandbox, a playground or a playing field feels increasingly irrelevant and irresponsible.
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