Structures of Participation

Martin Hendrijks show called Enough Room for Space about

“Displacement of residents, whether they are gentrifying artists priced out of Soho or the poor and unemployed excluded from New York altogether, is no random by-product of gentrification but its structural condition. Decay, disinvestment, abandonment . . .prepare the way for profitable reinvestment . . . Like all the social relations that art supposedly transcends, housing is one of the historical circumstances of its existence”. Rosalyn Deutsche, “Alternative Space”

“And howsoever oppositional we architects may be, as long as we fail to challenge basic elements of society, such as the concept of private property, nothing will improve. This is a great paradox for me”. Achim Felz, “IKAS: An Experiment in Extra-Parliamentary Architectural Opposition”

SCOTT BURNHAM is the creative director of Montreal’s Biennial (2009). He is working with Droog on Urban Play:

“Urban Play is designed to take back the street… to give us the tools that let us install ourselves, our friends, our families, our games and our desires in what should be the space we all own collectively. Urban Play is the most promising experiment in not urban design, but designing the urban I […]

Throughout almost every major city in the world, individuals are taking it upon themselves to change their cities in ways that make them more creative, interactive, personal and fun. From small interventions such as a series of stickers that turn the London Underground’s Northern Line map into an interactive game to bold projects that transform chain-link fences in Chicago into public message boards, these actions fall outside of traditional notions of urban activity, and are quickly relegated to the margins, often labeled as subversive, underground, or even illegal.

Urban Play is an international project that believes this street-level inventiveness, energy and innovation is a window into a new form of creativity in the city. Launching in Amsterdam in 2008, …

This case looks at the presentation of curatorial information through the traditional format of text mounted on the wall; the relatively recent genre of audio tours that have been introduced into the museum context over the last 15 years; and a located sound system Natalie Jeremijenko developed and implemented in a New York museum space, Art-in-General.

People read at their own speed, and the social convention dictates we provide silence for other readers. This inhibits the possibility of exchanges between spatially proximal viewers reading and interpreting the same information and subdues interaction between people. The museum maintains a hushed and quiet atmosphere without anywhere specifying or instructing viewers of this as the required or appropriate behavior.

In the animation you will note that people will move around the exhibition as if there are no others there. There is little shared and coordinated attention or information exchange. The absence of initiating comments means that conversations are rare.

The technological interface of the audio tour scripts the passive reception of the information museum staff have agreed is generally relevant, which overlooks the specific interests, and different approaches, interests and references people bring to …