Call for proposals for artistic scenarios, using new media/data visualisation/hybrid technology to intervene in / interact with cities across Europe and beyond for Visible City 2015.

Today's modern cities are hybrid structures in which technology is invisibly interweaved in the perception layers of our everyday lives. With the curatorial theme of InVISIBLE and VISIBLE Cities we want to develop an awareness on the changes which are hardly visible to the eyes and are underlying our nowadays cities.

Please submit your project proposal until 31 October, 2014 here

Introduction

In 1972 Italo Calvino wrote about his Invisible Cities a romantic love poem to the city, which has the variety and liveliness of overlapping stories and interdependences in it. Our today's modern cities are hybrid structures in which technology is invisibly interweaved in the perception layers of our everyday lives. These cities produce real-time urban data and introduce control mechanism. In a state of digitalisation, between surveillance and data collection, we look out for a tangible manifestation of immaterial structures.

Curatorial Theme

With the curatorial theme of InVISIBLE and VISIBLE Cities we want to develop an awareness on the changes which are hardly visible to the eyes and are underlying our nowadays cities.

The In/Visible City perspective aims to rethink the debate of visible versus invisible without falling in the trap of focusing on new gimmicks at the expense of content, where drones or QRcodes, VR, phone apps, GPS, Kinect, EEG interfaces, large urban displays, become the core of a discourse, which goes much further beyond its technological surface.

We call for artistic scenarios to visualise invisible, embedded 'smart' urban infrastructures and analyse their impact on the technological transformation of our society in a broad and public discourse. Open or hidden data should be provided a visible layer beyond the aesthetics of data visualisation. Different positions frame this discussion of our future cities within the urban challenges i.e. of climate change, energy consumption and transport systems. We want to approach the ‘In/Visible City’ through these three main questions:

Hybrid Cities: How can we read and interact with the urban space and which stories / processes are hidden within?
Digital Citizenship: How can citizen shape their digital urban environment and find new strategies for active / critical data collection processes and citizen's engagement?
Translocal Connectivity: How can we act physically in one place but mentally / emotionally appear in a different place through interactive urban scenarios and various interfaces?

The aim is not to represent reality, but to make a transformative/critical proposal with the question: Beside enhancing and optimizing (Smart City), empowering and improving (‘open source urbanism’), do we also want to explore other approaches, maybe less "useful" but as meaningful; more poetic, narrative, contemplative or situationist? The call wants to encourage projects that reveal new levels of perception to an invisible layer of our nowadays cities.

Visible City 2015 will take place in Berlin, Brussels, Helsinki, Linz, Liverpool, Madrid, Marseille, Montreal and São Paulo and Zagreb. The Connecting Cities infrastructure to be considered by the artists for this Call for Proposals corresponds to the permanent and temporary urban media infrastructures of these cities (see www.connectingcities.net/infrastructure). Nevertheless we also welcome proposals directed to other partner cities of the Connecting Cities Network. We will forward these proposals to the partner cities who might then decide to join our 2015 Connecting Cities Events.

The Connecting Cities Network is initiated by Public Art Lab Berlin in cooperation with 23 international partners in 21 cities: Ars Electronica Futurelab Linz - Medialab-Prado Madrid - FACT Liverpool - Foundation Bauhaus Dessau - Videospread Marseille - Marseille - Provence 2013 - iMAL Brussels - Riga 2014 - BIS (Body Process Arts Association) Istanbul - FACT Liverpool - m-cult Helsinki - Media Architecture Institute Vienna - Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb - University of Aarhus - MUTEK Montreal - Quartier des spectacles Montreal - verve cultural Sao Paulo - Federation Square Melbourne - xm:lab Saarbrücken - Media Arts Lab Sapporo - The Concourse Sydney - Etopia Centre for Art and Technology Zaragoza - 403 International Art Centre Wuhan

The Connecting Cities Network is supported by the Culture Programme 2007-13 of the European Union.