Michelle Teran: Future Guides for Cities through Collective Mapping and Citizen-produced Media
Research Fellow at Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Dept of Fine Art
The ever increasing proliferation of media generated through the collective use of mapping and image-making platforms, like YouTube and Google Earth, are creating new ways of seeing and exploring the world. "Future Guides for Cities through Collective Mapping and Citizen-produced Media" proposes to artistically investigate the new reality created by the integrations of digital networks and the city, where place constitutes media and media constitutes place.
I intend to investigate the connection between media and place by describing a city through citizen-produced media, specifically video, and through some of the people who create it. By researching this connection, I will reflect upon the social and cultural issues around how and why people make and put videos online and how they are related to the places where they live. These explorations will take place over several cities in order to provide a comparative study of the similarities and differences in the ways that citymedia realities are constructed. The results of these investigations are envisaged as a compilation of various aspects of my research about emerging urban topologies and will be presented in an artistic form.
Michelle Teran (Canada) explores the different aspects of how urban space is defined, lived and mediatized. She develops urban interventions and performances such as guided tours, walks and open-air projections, participatory installations and happenings. She is the winner of the Transmediale Award and has received numerous other grants and awards for her work including the Prix Ars Electronica honorary mention (2005, 2010) and the Vida 8.0 Art & Artificial Life International Competition (Madrid).