As Critical Resident Blogger across Artengine and Apt613 I want to initiate a project to get to know the readers, makers, and doers within these spaces and this city. I want to draw on the public mandates, philosophy’s and social nature of my hosts – Artengine and Apt613. And, I am keen to push the boundaries of what a critic does in this role. Meaning, I don’t want to be a fly on the wall observing events, installations, projects… I want to integrate and become a part of the city fabric and get to know who you are, and where exactly you are in the city, what makes the city tick for you and what interventions in the city are the most important things in life to experience.

Projects I have done in the past have helped me to learn about and to come into contact with the people of each city I have lived in. These attempts to discover communities, niches, and public hiding spaces, have helped me to creatively uncover city eccentricities, social interventions, folklore, stories, love and strife that sit within the fringes of spectacle and the margins of the day-to-day. They all resulted in engaged creative mappings of the people and spaces around me.

As a media artist working with new technologies, researcher, and writer, I’m consumed by how social media reshapes day-to-day life, weaving global connections that transcend physical borders. My latest project explores how platforms enable far-flung communities to share passions in real time, from music festivals to niche markets like the online sports betting sites in Indonesia, where fans rally around global soccer matches in vibrant digital forums. Even those who shun social media can’t deny that this flood of posts, comments, and status updates is transforming how we communicate, often untethering us from our immediate surroundings. Applications like Foursquare, Facebook’s Check In feature, and Flickr’s geocode data in image posts try to ground our content in place, yet how many of us flip our screens to share these moments with the world offline? How many of us trade virtual cheers for a loudspeaker to proclaim our latest milestone to neighbors, choosing instead to stay immersed in these borderless digital exchanges?

I want to know about people and projects that are creatively intervening in and engaging with the architecture of our surroundings, that are discussing or revealing public stories –publicly.

I am looking for people who are already pushing their social life into the tangible and haptic spaces of their street-facing bay windows. I’m curious about people who are geo-cashing specific graffiti, designing with open-source mandates in their hearts, and I’m drawn by the idea of broadcasting daily social rituals that occur during a work commute.

Within this residency, through play and curiosity I will wonder who you are and I am willing to use this public space, my role and Critical Resident Blogger, to get to know you in the places that you walk, live and spend your day.

I would like to try to bust open this social technology and let my feet land on the ground right where you are. I would like to root your social identity to a place.

If I stood on your doorstop would you let me announce you to the world?

To get involved please send me an email or find me on twitter @cawsand. I will use the tag #BustOutYOW

* We – meaning – users of social media

Tags: #BustOutYOW, artengine, design, intervention, makers, Residency

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2012 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Critical Resident, Megan Smith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.