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 artists working with new technologies, researcher and writer it is safe to say that I am obsessed with the impact of social media on day-to day life. While not everyone partakes in social media, even those that don’t can’t deny that the broadcast of daily posts, comments and status updates is having an effect on social exchange and communication methods. While we* push our statuses out through various social media applications to publicize our lives we are still relatively unhinged from our geography. Applications like Foursquare, Facebook ‘Check In’ feature, and Flickr’s integration of geocode data within it’s image posts all situate content, but how many of us turn our screens around to beam its contents to the world? How many of us actually restrain from status updates and instead pick up a loud speaker to announce to our neighbours our latest event?

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.