CCRN: Sense & Embodiment
The Future of the Communicative City and the Urban Sensorium
Prof Gary Gumpert
Urban Communication Foundation gary.gumpert@urbancomm.org
Prof Susan J. Drucker
Hofstra University
susan.j.drucker@hofstra.edu
Susan J. Drucker (Juris Doctor, St. John’s University) is a Distinguished Professor of Journalism in the Department of Journalism/Media Studies, School of Communication, Hofstra University. Gary Gumpert (Ph.D, Wayne State University) is Emeritus Professor of Communication at Queens College of the City University of New York and President of the Urban Communication Foundation.
The communicative city is a multisensory construct perceived and experienced in a mediated world. Each era is defined by sensory ratios both attenuated and extended by the extant media technologies. Ideally seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching allow for full multisensorial engagement with the urban environment. That engagement is simultaneously shaped and extended by technology and extrinsic events. Communication researchers have long explored how communication technology changes, alters, attenuates, amplifies our understanding of the communicative process. The concept of the “communicative city” was developed to examine these changes, along with notions of the city and community.
There have been those within architectural studies exploring the “architecture of the senses” calling for the need to explore the significance of sensing the city through multiple sensory modalities. The balance and ratio of the urban experience is subjected by extrinsic, sometime, uncontrollable events such our current pandemic experience.
The scholarhip of Sontag, McLuhan, Ong, et al link the realm of sense ratios with communication technology, but it is the architect Juhani Pallasmaa who applies shifting sensibilities to communicating structures and the role of the shifting senses in a urban realm altered by the impact of technology and catastrophe. One current effect of the pandemic has been the radical altering of experience and perception of place in the communicative city. The residual impact is unpredictable but probable. What is the future of the communicative city when our sense ratios are irrevocably altered?
The Future of the Communicative City and the Urban Sensorium
Mr Chris Parkinson
University of Melbourne
chriscbp@unimelb.edu.au
Chris Parkinson is a multi-disciplined artist whose practices are tethered to the street and the creative articulation of that experience across cultures.
This ethnographic project visualises the quotidian aesthetic rhythms of a boxed existence through abstract photography, exploring the locked down city as an aesthetic frontier. The project uses visual palindromes as a means of encoding affect to manifest a consistent rhythm drawn from the arrhythmic stutter of the now.
The approach to these rhythms is to raise themes drawn from Henri Lefebvre’s Rythmanalysis, offering a visual reading of everyday life where spatial and temporal considerations define the scope of the project.
In developing systems of visual ‘translations’ and ‘rhythms’ of place it connects to the visual and spatial politics and social practices of art collectives in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and Dili, Timor-Leste, two cities where colonial assumptions of art and its relation to urban politics become entangled in differential collaborative relations in their negotiation of the pandemic.
The presentation builds upon Rosalind Krauss’s theory of the grid and the impetus of the form to impose an “aesthetic decree,” seeking sanctuary in seriality while approaching the surreal translation of the vocabulary and architecture of emerging forms of urban publics into post-pandemic life.
Disinformation and Actor Networks in Taiwan
Ms Isabel Fangyi Lu
University of Melbourne
fangyi.lu@unimelb.edu.au
Isabel Fangyi Lu is a PhD Candidate in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. Her research sits at the intersection of place, technology, public and democracy.
The communicative city is a multisensory construct perceived and experienced in a mediated world. Each era is defined by sensory ratios both attenuated and extended by the extant media technologies. Ideally seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching allow for full multisensorial engagement with the urban environment. That engagement is simultaneously shaped and extended by technology and extrinsic events. Communication researchers have long explored how communication technology changes, alters, attenuates, amplifies our understanding of the communicative process. The concept of the “communicative city” was developed to examine these changes, along with notions of the city and community.
There have been those within architectural studies exploring the “architecture of the senses” calling for the need to explore the significance of sensing the city through multiple sensory modalities. The balance and ratio of the urban experience is subjected by extrinsic, sometime, uncontrollable events such our current pandemic experience.
The scholarhip of Sontag, McLuhan, Ong, et al link the realm of sense ratios with communication technology, but it is the architect Juhani Pallasmaa who applies shifting sensibilities to communicating structures and the role of the shifting senses in a urban realm altered by the impact of technology and catastrophe. One current effect of the pandemic has been the radical altering of experience and perception of place in the communicative city. The residual impact is unpredictable but probable. What is the future of the communicative city when our sense ratios are irrevocably altered?