CONNECTING CITIES @ URBAN LIGHTS RUHR
// 9 - 25 October 2015
// @ Urbane Künste Ruhr, Hagen
From October 9 to 25, five Connecting Cities projects will be shown in the framework of Urban Lights Ruhr festival staged by CCN partner Urbane Künste Ruhr.
Urban Lights Ruhr highlights the city of Hagen, which has been undergoing momentous change. Artistic interventions momentarily direct our attention to light and the city and offer new perspectives on the familiar. The installed works form a light course that invites viewers to stroll, discover, and to play an active part in shaping this multi-layered city.
Intelligent clothing is a promising future market. ‘Wearable Facade’ by Ricardo O'Nascimento connects high-technology clothing with the architectural surrounding. Through 'Wearable Facade', the city’s urban landscape appears as a medium and an unexpectedly rich source of information, mirroring social changes in the form of new architectural appearances. It reflects patterns, structures, forms and colours from its surrounding and offers a new perspective on urban architecture.
Ghana Think Tank has been 'Developing the First World' since 2006. They collect problems in the U.S. and Europe, and send them to think tanks they established in Cuba, Ghana, Iran, Mexico, El Salvador, and the U.S. prison system to analyze and solve. The network continues to grow… For Connecting Cities, their proposal is to develop a Ghana ThinkTank App that brings the entire process online. The App will be activated through 'hubs' in their partner cities of individuals who use the app together to submit problems (from the 'developed' world) and solutions (from the 'developing' world).
FALSE POSITIVE by Mark Shepard, Julian Oliver and Moritz Stefaner deploys text messaging, stealth infrastructure, street intervention, and data visualization to enact a surveillance conspiracy engaging the public in an intimate, techno-political conversation with the mobile technologies on which they depend. Engaging the subtle processes by which personal data can be exploited, and generating "data-portraits" based on social and spatial associations inferred from this data, the project probes the gray areas of both personal consent and statistical probability where a speculative association is established when there is in fact none.
Sweatshoppe’s 'Videopainting' is a multimedia collage of portraits of different people from different cultures on the walls in public space. Where physical bodies can't go any further, Sweatshoppe (Blake Shaw and Bruno Lévy) opens virtual doorways to a new public space with his interactive paint roller. During the artistic process, the portraits gradually blur into an overlapping collage and alter from their originals. Bruno Lévy's intervention at Urban Lights Ruhr will be networked to the parallel running intervention in Jena at CITY VISIONS.
'Particle Falls' by Andrea Polli is a real-time, environmentally reactive projection that allows viewers to see current levels of fine particulates. The project was first presented for as a digitally generated waterfall cascading down the facade of the AT&T building in San Jose California. Fewer bright particles over the waterfall mean fewer particles in the air.
More information on Urban Lights Ruhr festival
Images: © Ricardo O'Nascimento; © Ghana Think Tank; © Mark Shepard
