Urban Sensographies

Urban Sensographies views the human body as a highly nuanced sensor to explore how various performance-based methods can be implemented to gather usable ‘felt data’ about the environment of the city as the basis for creating embodied mappings. The contributors to this fascinating volume seek to draw conclusions about the constitution, character and morphology of urban space as public, habitable and sustainable by monitoring the reactions of the human body as a form of urban sensor. This co-authored book is centrally concerned, as a symptom of the degree to which cities are evolving in the 21st century, to examine the effects of this change on the practices and behaviours of urban dwellers. This takes into account such factors as: defensible, retail and consumer space; legacies of modernist design in the built environment; the effects of surveillance technologies, motorised traffic and smart phone use; the integration of ‘wild’ as well as ‘domesticated’ nature in urban planning and living; and the effects of urban pollution on the earth’s climate. Drawing on three years of funded practical research carried out by a multi-medial team of researchers and artists, this book analyses the presence and movement of the human body in urban space, which is essential reading for academics and practitioners in the fields of dance, film, visual art, sound technology, digital media and performance studies.

Through its examination of five quite different art events in cities across Europe, Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe offers a compelling exploration of how public art takes place in the modern city. Roughly tracing a central horizontal trajectory from the western to the eastern edges of the continent, Nicolas Whybrow considers the Folkestone Triennial in the UK, Sculpture Projects Münster in Germany, the Venice Biennale in Italy, Belgrade's Mikser Festival in Serbia and the Istanbul Biennial in Turkey. Writing within the context of a thirty-year international 'biennial boom', Whybrow interrogates the extent to which biennial events and their artworks seek to engage with the socio-cultural and political complexity of cities, in particular the work that is involved in this relationship. With its focus on Europe, he also tells a composite story of continental difference at a moment of high tension, centering on issues of migration, political populism and uncertainty around the future form of the European Union.

Public art is on the urban agenda. Given recent claims about the importance of creativity to urban prosperity, opportunities for installing or performing art in the city have multiplied. As cities strive to appear culturally dynamic, the stakes of artistic production rise higher than ever. Exploring the interaction between art and the public in Canadian cities, Urban Encounters features writing by artists, architects, curators, anthropologists, geographers, and urban studies specialists. They show how people and places affect the structure and content of public artworks, what kinds of urban spaces and socialities are generated through art, and how to investigate and interpret encounters between art and its viewers in the city. Discussing a variety of art forms, including mobile cinemas, street improvisation, audiovisual investigations, and assembled objects, the contributors treat public artworks not just as aesthetic installations, but as agents that participate in the social and cultural evolution of cities. Using original, hands-on approaches, Urban Encounters reveals how art in the urban public space generates encounters that can transform both the city itself and the ways that people relate to it. Contributors include Alison Bain (York University), Robert Bean (NSCAD University), Lawrence Bird (architect, artist), Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria), Brenden Harvey (Dalhousie University), Wes Johnston (artist, curator), L ola Le Blanc (media artist), Brian Lilley (Dalhousie University), Barbara Lounder (NSCAD University), Mary Elizabeth Luka (York University), Sebastian Matthias (HafenCityUniversity), Christof Migone (Western University), Ellen Moffat (media artist), Kim Morgan (NSCAD University), Solomon Nagler (NSCAD University), Martha Radice (Dalhousie University), Nicole Rallis (McMaster University), Susanne Shawyer (Elon University), Shannon Turner (Aarhus University), Laurent Vernet (INRS Urbanisation Culture Soci t ), and Nick Wees (University of Victoria).

This book addresses the need for critical scholarship about contemporary dance practices in Ireland. Bringing together key voices from a new wave of scholarship to examine recent practice and research in the field of contemporary dance, it examines the excitingly diverse range of choreographers and works that are transforming Ireland’s performance landscape. The first section provides a chronologically-ordered collection of critical essays to ground the reader in some of the most important issues currently at play in contemporary dance in Ireland. The second section then provides an interrogation of individual choreographers’ processes. The book traces new choreographic work and trends through a broad array of topics, including somatics in performance, screendance, cultural trauma, dance archives, affect studies, feminist perspectives, choreographic process, the dancer’s voice, interdisciplinarity, and pedagogical paradigms.

Always the focal point in modern times for momentous political, social and cultural upheaval, Berlin has continued, since the fall of the Wall in 1989, to be a city in transition. As the new capital of a reunified Germany it has embarked on a journey of rapid reconfiguration, involving issues of memory, nationhood and ownership. Bertolt Brecht, meanwhile, stands as one of the principal thinkers about art and politics in the 20th century. The "Street Scene" model, which was the foundation for his theory of an epic theatre, relied precisely on establishing a connection between art's functioning and everyday life. His preoccupation with the ceaselessness of change, an impulse implying rupture and movement as the key characteristics informing the development of a democratic cultural identity, correlates resonantly with the notion of an ever-evolving city. Premised on an understanding of performance as the articulation of movement in space, Street Scenes interrogates what kind of "life" is permitted to "flow" in the "new Berlin." Central to this method is the flaneur figure, a walker of streets who provides detached observations on the revealing "detritus of modern urban existence." Walter Benjamin, himself a native of Berlin as well as friend and seminal critic of Brecht, exercised the practice in exemplary form in his portrait of the city One-Way Street. Street Scenes offers various points of entry for the reader, including those interested in: theatre, performance, visual art, architecture, theories of everyday life and culture, and the politics of identity. Ultimately, it is an interdisciplinary book, which strives to establish the 'porosity' of areas of theory and practice rather than hard boundaries.

Increasingly, choreographic process is examined, shared, and discussed in a variety of academic, artistic, and performative contexts. More than ever before, post-show discussions, artistic blogs, books, archives, and seminars provide opportunities for choreographers to explain their particular methodologies. Performing Process: Sharing Dance and Choreographic Practice provides a unique theoretical investigation of this current trend. The chapters in this collection examine the methods, politics, and philosophy of sharing choreographic process, aiming to uncover theoretical repercussions of and the implications for forms of knowledge, the appreciation of dance, education, and artistic practices.

To Henri Lefebvre, the space and 'lived everydayness' of the inter-dependent, multi-faceted city produces manifold possibilities of identifiction and realisation through often imperceptible interactions and practices. 'Art and the City' takes this observation as its cue to examine the role of art against a backdrop of globally rising urban populations, taking into account the more recent performative and relational 'turns' of art that have sought in their city settings to identify a participating spectator - an implicated citizen. In exploring how artworks present themselves as a means by which to navigate and plot the city for a writing interlocutor, Nicolas Whybrow discusses diverse examples, representing three key modern modalities of urban arts practice. The first, walking, involves works by Richard Wentworth, Francis AlA s, Mark Walllinger and others, the second, play, includes art by Antony Gormley, Mark Quinn and Carsten Holler. The third, cultural memory, Whybrow addresses through the controversial urban holocaust memorial sites of Peter Eisenman's memorial in Berlin and Rachel Whiteread's in Vienna.