Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code

We are very happy to report that a paper that that Mark, Matt, and Andrew Boulton have been working has just been accepted for publication in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

The paper is titled Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code and the abstract is below:

With the increasing prevalence of both geographic information, and the code through which it is regulated, digital augmentations of place will become increasingly important in everyday, lived geographies. Through two detailed explorations of ‘augmented realities,’ this paper provides a broad overview of not only the ways that those augmentations realities matter, but also the complex and often duplicitous manner that code and content can congeal in our experiences of augmented places. Because the re-makings of our spatial experiences and interactions are increasingly influenced through the ways in which content and code are fixed, ordered, stabilised, and contested, this paper places a focus on how power, as mediated through technological artefacts, code and content, helps to produce place. Specifically, it demonstrates there are four key ways in which power is manifested in augmented realities: two performed largely by social actors, distributed power and communication power; and two enacted primarily via software, code power and timeless power. The paper concludes by calling for redoubled attention to both the layerings of content and the duplicity and ephemerality of code in shaping the uneven and power-laden practices of representations and the experiences of place augmentations in urban places.

Please send Mark an email if you would like a pre-publication copy. We would welcome any thoughts and comments you have about the paper.

(we'll leave it to you to work out what nyancat has to do with anything in this post)

we found love in a coded space: augmented realities, bots, and code/space

"I am longing, shocking and unequal. Also imminent and square. I am lost."

These are the words of @shipadrift - a virtual floating boat that navigates the intersections between the material and virtual palimpsests that make up our being-in-the-world. If you haven't yet seen the project, we highly recommend you check out both the ship's current material/virtual location and it's travel narrative published through a Twitter account.

The way the project works is that the ship's direction and speed are calculated based on a wind speeds in London: allowing the ship to always have movement and position in material space. This is supplemented by scraping all of the augmented layers of place that exist over the ship's particular location: Wikipedia articles, personal ads, photographs, etc. The project is simply brilliant and we can't think of a better way to visualise and explain the digital augmentations of our planet.

We actually learnt about this project recently thanks to a video sent to us by Martin Dodge. The talk, by James Bridle, discusses the 'shipadrift' project, but also delves more broadly into what it means to live in co-created spaces; spaces that we share with bots; hybrid spaces that are shared between our physical presences, our imaginations, and the broader network. There are a lot of parallels here to some of the work that Mark and Matt have been doing on augmented realities, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin have been doing into code/spaces, and Stuart Geiger has been doing into the lives of bots. Bridle nicely brings all of these themes together and we definitely suggest that you check out his talk below: