Keywords

1 Introduction: Mobilities in Physical and Wireless Networks: Urban Transport, Hybrid Space, and Mobile Communication

The INMobility project draws on the concept of “automobility” as an urban condition that helps understand ways of travelling in a big city. Following Urry (2004: 26) it “captures a double sense, both of the humanist self as in the notion of autobiography, and of objects or machines that possess a capacity for movement, as in automatic and automaton” [1]. The use of the car has proposed particular relationships between human and technological objects, and in some way, organized possible complex models of social and cultural organizational structures to approach the urban landscape. People use cars to move between work and home, leisure and work, home and leisure, and face lenghty commuting times in this process. As a “machine space” (Horvath 1974: 167–168) [2], people are able to change physical mobilities and social contexts across particular distances; this technological embodiment has spatially stretched and time-compressed ways of perceiving and constructing everyday life, by encapsulating people in a personal, cocooned, and moving capsule. For this art project it needs to figure out transformations of temporal relationships and visual perceptions, when, for example, people look at cityscape while driving in congested traffic; there are resynchronizations of current time-space patterns, with perceptive implications about signifying distances and occupying temporal intervals.

Second, it is necessary to comprehend mobility as users’ behavior between distinctive spaces – physical and digital – that have as many dimensions as interconnections. Mediated communication devices have configured a mode of existence, juxtaposing actions in physical domains and connections in the digital contexts simultaneously. The concept of “hybrid space” (De Souza e Silva 2004) [3] is quite important to comprehend the symbolic and aesthetic perspectives of everyday life. The term hybrid implies the combination of elements from distinct natures and the proposal of unexpected results when the author investigated cultural changes from the use of mobile devices. According to Santaella (2007: 224) [4], “interstitial space” is another theoretical term to understand users’ actions combining urban spaces and digital contexts through mobile technologies. The term interstitial points out the possibility of forming or occupying interstices – spaces in between, and defines the dynamic condition of behaving while dealing with distinct natures – digital and physical universes – during any mobile call. Lemos (2010: 4) [5] affirms that “place is now the result of a set of physical, cultural and economic characteristics: physical dimensions and a database”. These actual configurations have enabled a dynamic perspective on everyday interactions, combining face-to-face and mediated relationships through synchronous and asynchronous exchanges. People renegotiate space-time organizations as they circulate in the world. As a result, they deal with different modes of interaction simultaneously ‘to be on the move’ – to operate and produce within in-between physical and digital spaces and times. So, the mediated body combines “bodily zones” (Hall 1990a) [6] with possible presences established by online interactions - virtual borders of control and privacy. It can no longer only be sustained by an identity, or a physicality; it expands according to its ability to make connections, to access and to be accessed. The constant possibilities of interfacing with other networks have established a constant renegotiation of the body space’s boundaries.

Third, mobile devices and wireless communication can create some flexibility for people’s movements modelled by circumstances, producing multiple activities such as writing a text or sending a tip to the radio station about the traffic while driving, spatially desynchronized from each other, but integrated by the temporal dimension. This means that users can compose complex structures, contingent patterns of social life – self-created narratives – juggling fragments of time and actions. Thinking about networks and flows of information and bodies means to consider other perceptions and configurations of movements to perform daily life, and so, to perceive and comprehend the world. “Movement often involves an embodied experience of the material and social modes of dwelling-in-motion, places of and for activities in their own right” (Urry 2007: 11) [7], and people have articulated those organizations and systems upon physical and informational – data networks. Therefore, the world can be understood as a negotiation process among different actual events, according to different protocols of communication and networks such as telecommunication systems and wireless networks. Reality is understood as a dynamic process of flows.

The INmobility project is concerned with visualities of temporary physical and digital networks, juxtaposed by synchronous live messages and images shared. The proposal of narratives to be produced is to visualize daily actions as ways to perform everyday activities in big cities, and so, modes of perception and reading the surrounding space. Nowadays, mobile technologies have evoked from drivers other distinct behaviors, creating the condition of driving a car with a participative way of creating their routes in urban areas.

2 Everyday Life: Modes of Spatial Occupation

Motion and emotion – the car is a place to exercise subjectivity in urban spaces, a private cocoon in which feelings and experiences are released in behaviors and gestures; those movements are modes of perception, affecting ways of sociability - formal and informal attitudes. According to Featherstone,

The automobile is one everyday object where human beings regularly encounter new technologies in their everyday lives and learn to ‘inhabit technology’. More and more aspects of everyday driving becomes [sic] a mediated process in which technology ceases to be a visible tool or technique, but becomes a world in which the boundaries and interfaces between humans and technological systems become blurred, refigured and difficult to disentangle (Featherstone 2005: 10) [ 8 ].

As such, driving a car is a technologically ritual process, in which people nowadays perform their everyday life remotely while organizing unexpected physical displacements like being stuck in traffic jams. The vehicle is a ubiquitous object embedded with new features, for example self-parking, adaptive cruise control, and multi-zone climate control, which augment people’s actions, since being in the automobile is not only driving. In the context of drivers and mobile gadgets, symbiotic relationships between the object and the user improve those possibilities when accessing information remotely on the Web. They articulate different protocols of communication and modes of uncoordinated distribution of information, and they question other space and time relationships through the process of virtualization. So, it is related to potentialize modes of driving, transforming routines and activities of everyday life, and this is related to the INmobility project.

Information is flowing, dependent on cultural, economic, and political relationships, and it is globally structured; nevertheless, information is also structured as negotiation processes of local experiences. It means that “depending on the relevance of each segment for the dominant logic of each network’ there are ‘different geometries and geographies” (Castells 2009: 26) [9]. Social inclusions and exclusions are still present, reaffirming and creating individualized experiences in physical spaces – “differential mobility”, and developing other informational filters attached to them – “differential spaces” (De Souza e Silva and Frith 2012: 155–156) [10]. During periods of traffic jams in the city of São Paulo, it is quite common to share streets and avenues with people selling snacks, drinks and mobile chargers. Usually, areas occupied by cars in traffic jams or waiting for the traffic lights, such as main roads, are populated by both vehicles and an informal transient market of ambulant vendors – a situated space by an activity, nowadays even more common.

The densest parts of the city of São Paulo are the repositories of recent immigrants (Burdett and Sudjic 2011) [11], explaining the increase in informal jobs around those areas such as street vendors. “In Brazil and Mexico it is estimated that about one million people are directly involved in street foods and in India over three million” (Fellows and Hilmi 2011) [12]. Those activities qualify the modes of spatial occupation as fluid, with no defined period of time, and moveable, since street vendors change location easily. They can be on foot, on bicycle, or using a push cart. Finding an opportunity to sell emerges from the unpredictable condition of the congested avenue. Signing or creating displays, hawkers improve the way in which street and snack foods are displayed and sold, while walking between cars. Because they must share the streets, drivers find the streets congested with not only vehicles and motorcycles, but bikes and people walking in between. Those moments can be dissolved and created in another location of people’s routes, as temporary conditions of behavior. Assuming those spatial conditions and agents – drivers, riders and pedestrians – as a complex system, patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions among them.

Comparing the concepts of borders and boundaries in the natural world (Sennet 2011: 324) [13], dialogues among hawkers and drivers can be assumed as momentary borders, zones of interaction not fixed and determined dynamically. Those attitudes create spatial relationships – specific localities for occupation, able to exchange and influence both perspectives. While drivers are immobile physically and situated dynamically on digital networks – through email, Facebook, Skype, and SMS – local pedestrians emerge from nowhere developing strategies of living and being noticed – spaces of life. They configure other attributes to usual artefacts by remixing formal elements and material characteristics to design other functionalities. The practice of driving and looking outside through mirrors, determines another perception of the world. These other modes of seeing evoke a ‘fluid choreography’ (Featherstone 2005: 8) [8], but still suggest an effective private space. The mirrors enable drivers to experience other ways of perceiving the world. Blind spots such as the A-pillar (also called the windshield pillar), side-view mirror, and interior rear-view mirror can influence the visibility and the identification of the objects and people around the vehicle. So, when people and cars move, those visual readings are constantly changing and embodying different elements of the scene. Drivers and pedestrians engage in constant negotiation on those avenues.

Therefore, the everyday practice is the “investigation of ways in which users operate’ or ‘ways of operating, or doing things” (Certeau 1984: 474) [14] – an operational logic in which pedestrians and drivers can go through and organize places creating their own routes – spatial narratives. “It is impossible to discuss experiential space without introducing the objects and places that define space” (Tuan 2011: 136) [15]. According to Santos (1999: 181) [16], scientific-technical-informational objects have been created to work systemically, revealing inner discourse as modes of use, seduction and actions: “space is a system of objects and a system of actions”. From those perspectives, the space occupied by people, constituted by technical objects and actions, has transformed cultural entities and even created new ones. It is not possible to comprehend the full meaning of an object, without taking into account the intentionality of the human action that has produced the object and placed it in a location in space.

This process of movement and practice between ideas, intentions and actions, actualized by mobile technologies, has the possibility of expanding, and, even improving, the understanding of a certain urban order. The occurrence of those movements needs a previous order, determined by the functional cartography of the city – urban mapping, which nowadays has been superposed by singular experiences through distributed networks. As Simondon observed,

the individualised technical object corresponds most directly to the human dimension. The human individual is not dominated by it as he is in the mining or any other network. Nor does he dominate it, making it an extension of his hands or prosthetic device, as happens in component technology. He neither dominates nor is dominated but enters into a kind of dialectic (Simondon 1980: 9) [ 17 ].

Taking into account Simondon’s perspective, technological objects should be embedded into everyday life as a negotiation process, changing behaviors, rethinking values, and choosing other ways of life. Mobile devices create other possibilities for people being temporarily ‘on the move’, and in a way, create new possibilities for using these devices, demanding from users the comprehension to accommodate real-time choices and feedbacks in time and space. For Tuan,

Spatial ability is essential to livelihood, but spatial knowledge at the level of symbolic articulation in words and images is not. (…) Spatial ability precedes spatial knowledge. Mental worlds are refined out of sensory and kinaesthetic experiences. Spatial knowledge enhances spatial ability (Tuan 2011: 74) [ 15 ].

The author recognized spatial experience as a process of negotiating life and producing knowledge. Different from the knowledge elaborated on an iconic or a metaphorical mode, the enacting paradigm of cognition is centred on sensory motor dynamics –corporeal activities– and presents physical mediations between individuals and their contexts as fundamental and decisive for the production of meaning. According to Stewart (2007: 90) [18] “without action there is no world nor perception”. For the author, the action is a pre-requirement for the perception; the understanding of the surroundings can make sense as actions take place. So, knowledge can be understood as patterns of embodied experiences, which necessarily have to be culturally and socially shared.

Mobile technological context, based on distributed networks, generates a spatial structure with specificities dynamically adapted to the communicational demands and necessities from own nodes. As a result, for each new connection the network topology can be modified based on the existence of nodes/users’ mobile phones and their abilities for communication. Networks import not only the organizational structure with potential rhizomatic characteristics, but it needs to understand the production of information in dialogues, exchanges. The attempt to comprehend and incorporate the operational network structure is to formalize a social shared space as zones of fluxes, and not determined spaces of information distribution. As Gordon and De Souza e Silva (2001: 97) [19] affirm “information is not just something to consume. One’s awareness of nearby information (and people) can also be a context for performance”.

Space as material support for social practices has incorporated historical and technological characteristics, which constantly transform it through the simultaneity of uses and meanings. This dynamic and complex condition – the juxtaposition of distinct information and diverse temporalities of urban life, defines the contemporary urban space can no longer be exactly discerned because many activities can be carried on at the same time, thus configuring an overlapping construction of reality.

3 The INmobility Project: Textualities, Visualities and Narratives

The INmobility project is concerned with the organization and processes of visible structures and their meanings defined by computing languages and/or script that accesses data and creates media objects and physical environments – digital and material artefacts.

As Tuan (2011: 164–165) [15] wrote, “the art project seeks visibility, as an attempt to give sensible form to the moods, feelings, and rhythms of functional life”. Working with computational algorithms, the INmobility project creates visual interfaces to mediate modes of perception and everyday activities. The algorithm runs as mediator of distinct procedures and domains of information – computational objects, syntactic elements, and symbolic meanings – to configure the art context. The visual results of this project formalize human and machine relationships and models to present the sensible. So, understanding the ways that code is used in the processes of creation and production requires a general knowledge of how form is manipulated by the computer. For Manovich, working with software now is:

a layer that permeates all areas of contemporary societies. Therefore, if we want to understand contemporary techniques of control, communication, representation, simulation, analysis, decision-making, memory, vision, writing, and interaction, our analysis can’t be complete until we consider this software layer (Manovich 2011: 8) [20].

Manovich recognized computational language and its elements in contemporary methodologies of producing content and knowledge. It is not about symbolic meanings or metaphors translated to the digital domain; for the author, modes of behaving and thinking are interconnected and modelled by the numeric layer. Hayles (2002: 24) [21] had a similar theoretical approach when writing about machines and their textualities; according to the author the computational code can be counted as “an inscription technology because it is possible to produce material changes, read as marks”. Those models of formal creation and production evoke other attitudes, practices and methodologies in creative processes. One important difference, however, is that there is no systematic way to predict the behavior of a software application by inspecting it; actually, the only way to assess it is to run it. Its non-deterministic characteristic can produce non-controlled results, and thus, poetics validate the uncertainty as an experiential process.

Working with encoding and decoding processes, I use syntactic and semantic behaviors to actualize everyday routine by computing laws and their unpredictable visualities. Assuming those models of creation and production, some intrinsic conceptual elements of computing languages, such as repetition and parameterisation, elaborate other perceptions of the INmobility project visually as presented in the images bellow (Figs. 1 and 2). “Within the visual realm, repetition encourages our eyes to dance. Controlling repetition is a way to choreograph human eye movement” (Reas, McWilliams and Barendse 2010: 49) [22]. Repetition is deeply embedded into the language of computing as other visual art languages; therefore it modulates and creates sensations of depth and motion, as for example optical’s art proposals. Repetition can also be an important element within time-based work such as video, animation, and live software. In this domain, repetition becomes a form of rhythm and can be used to produce complex forms.

Fig. 1.
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High speed and more repetition of thinner slices, 2012, Luisa Paraguai, photographic media. (Used with permission.)

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Fig. 2.
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Low speed and less repetition of bigger slices, 2012, Luisa Paraguai, photographic media. (Used with permission)

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By modulating the slices and their repetitive composition in the INmobility project, the visual results recreate sensations of time spent and therefore the reading and perception of the outside context. The focus is on the instant, precisely used because it is recurrent. The MobMesh algorithm processes embedded iterations and repetitions as a contemporary aesthetic proposal to produce visualities. It emphasizes the way in which the interface presents the content – a metalanguage process. “It is the ‘infinity’ of the process that gives a new sense to the device of variation” (Eco 2005) [23].

The construction of slices determined by parameters is also important. “Defined broadly, a parameter is a value that has an effect on the output of a process; parameters can describe, encode and quantify the options and constraints at play in a system” (Reas, McWilliams and Barendse 2010: 95) [22]. For the authors, while transformation describes a parameter’s effect on form, repetition offers a way to explore a field of possible designs for favored variations. Both visualization and simulation require the use of parameters to define the system, and they describe how data or other inputs will influence the behaviors of that system. In contrast to using random numbers to explore a field of possible designs, parametric systems are under control to determine the final result.

In the INmobility project, each image, grabbed and uploaded is decoded and divided into vertical slices according to local values: distance travelled and time spent. Therefore, parametric control can make the management of complex and unpredictable forms possible, by connecting multiple elements. Modularity involves the arrangement of one or more elements to produce a multitude of forms; elements are not transformed, but simply repositioned. The new visual composition arranges each element in such a way that it occupies a unique part of the image space. In this way, parameters and possible values in conjunction with repetition are used to generate multiple versions – singular pieces into the complex system.

With this in mind, the INmobility project articulates mathematical relationships to determine the number and the width of the slices as well as their repetitions. The use of those elements as patterns to be repeated, according to the driver’s speed, considers the transformation from the semantic content – meanings of those captured images, to the syntactic dimension – to data visualization. The aesthetic exploration of variable elements and the range of possible values create relationships between repetition and transformation of those images, and consequently, the narratives.

In the field of art and design, the use of computing algorithms based on statistical methods translates mathematical abstraction into visible material results, and according to Martin-Barbero (apud Santaella 2007) [4], they “hybridise the symbolic density of the numerical abstraction with the perceptive sensoriality”. The Paulo Costa and Luisa Paraguai’s proposal is to think about the relationship between materialities and textualities in the digital context – mathematical models with possibilities of developing artefacts, not as a mimesis pattern but as a simulation model of behaving. According to Hayles (2002: 22) [21] “material metaphor” can explain the relationship between codes and visualities, defining a “term that foregrounds the traffic between words and physical artefacts”. The visual results are not totally predictable, but the poetic concerns with the cultural and social dimension of people behaving in big cities. In other words,

our contemporary society can be characterised as a software society and our culture can be justifiably called a software culture – because today software plays a central role in shaping both the material elements and many of the immaterial structures which together make up ‘culture’ (Manovich 2011: 8) [20].

The INmobility project explores images and narratives (Fig. 3), trying to track ad-hoc networks and to map those activities. The visual results create landscapes that expand or contract the passing concerns of people, aesthetically exploring their perception. The understanding of location can take place through the visual exercise of different scales. From those visual narratives, parallel dimensions are exercised in order to question the feeling of belonging to those metropolitan areas. The materialization and extension of a driver’s time spent can be clearly understood during traffic jams, admitting interventions as inscriptions from other dimensions of the information through remote data. In this context, the temporal dimension is considered a management element of dealing with the city. According to Urry (2004: 28) [1] “automobility develops ‘instantaneous’ time to be managed in complex, heterogeneous and uncertain ways”.

Fig. 3.
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Visual narrative 1, 2012, Luisa Paraguai, photographic media. (Used with permission.)

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The project intends to represent the tension between distinct materialities of space-time relationships simultaneously operated by people with mobile devices. The operational model transforms informational patterns – computational and bodily, electromagnetic and spatial – into shapes and visual spaces. The aesthetic choice for a recursive technique generates forms with multiple effects and patterns; the software processes embedded iterations and sequences as a part of its functions.

By understanding the visual narrative as a computational system, unpredictable operations turn to a method of writing. But, more important than creating representations through different visual characteristics, the intention of mapping the attributes of data is the topology of subjectivities. The poetic procedure based on mathematical operations can recreate, in some way, and question the relationships between public and private spaces, body and space contours, to express dynamic organizational practices of the city.

The visual discourse can be understood as negotiations about spatial orientations. In other words, the construction of situations, momentary ambiances, defines perpetual interactions between people’s behaviors and spaces, which gives rise to and transforms them, behaviors and actions in time contained in transitory visual arrangements. The narrative as a poetic object, according to Lefebvre (1960) [24], plays with moments to be repeated. The repetition is a law, modelled by possibilities of extending and condensing the perception of the time according to the traffic. It is important to affirm that the idea of movement, visually defined by the rhythm of the slices (Figs. 1 and 2), is related to different moments of tension and ease – day-to-day personal experiences while driving in the city of São Paulo. Considering the visual results of the INmobility project, when there is no traffic, people do not notice the outside and the contours of the cityscape become a blurred image with no definition. On the other side, the heavy traffic expands and potentializes other attitudes since drivers combine physical (brushing hair, doing make-up, writing any note) and digital (reading and sending emails, checking facebook feeds, taking pictures) domains. Behaviors are context dependent. The environment serves as an ever-changing mode of perceptions and actions. The artist’s intention is to evoke other cartographies for perceptions by the pleasure experience of recombination and reinvention.

The blur limits of compounding physical spaces and informational contexts evoke other dimensions for people’s daily lives; the narratives proposed here have pointed out mediated practices to create particular visual objects and subjects in specific localities. The concept of location, broadly dependent on organization of information, considers both geographical aspects (space and place) and social constructions (networked interactions). So “new interfaces such as mobile, location-aware technologies and mapping software make it clear that both places and locations are still important to the construction of people’s identities and to the development of sociability” (De Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012: 169) [10]. The authors connected locality and networks to identities and being social, but these connections need to change habits of seeing to criticize boundaries, to experiment with undisciplined attitudes, to try different negotiations between self and circumstance. The mobile condition of behaving can make the city more open and flexible, and stimulate a social difference.

The human sense of space is quite dynamic because it is related to “action – which can be done in a given space, rather than what is seen by passive viewing” (Hall 1990) [6]. Perception and action relationships present themselves as phenomenological experiences in which the individual and the ambient are included by mobile media. The understanding of mobile devices does not reside in the technology itself but it is determined by its ability to extend and model human activities and relationships over time and space. Locality and recognition define possibilities of inclusion in distinct social networks, and mobile gadgets augment opportunities of working, studying and living.

So, mobile users, technologically mediated, operate simultaneously in different, unrelated contexts and dimensions, like several folds of existence. Therefore, those artefacts do shape and “alter the way in which we engage with the places we move through” (De Sousa e Silva and Frith 2012: 45) [10], proposing other cultural constructions in which people interact with and perceive the world.

4 Final Considerations

More recently, people have incorporated mobile devices to perform formal and informal everyday activities, and now it is possible to observe the frequent repetition of behaviors everywhere, establishing other social bonds and borders – cultural spaces and zones of dialogues. By establishing those contours, people have expanded physical limits and reconfigured body spaces, mediated by mobile artefacts, determining other distinct comfortable distances already established (Hall 1990) [25], combining physical distances and informational connections.

The occupation of space is also important, specifically as modes of behaving aesthetically – the sensible (Ferrara 2007) [26], and their possibilities of redefining cultural attitudes. The experience of objects, surroundings, and/or people evokes an “aesthetic perception” (Seel 2005) [27] when a particular ordinary or extraordinary situation is created, a potential condition of transformation. For Ferrara (2007) [26], spatiality, visuality/visibility and communicability are categories of space, and phenomenological processes to enact (Noe 2008) [28] in the world; so they have been manifested differently, combining different structures and media. The actual spatiality, dependent on the hybridization of everyday practices, technologies and subjectivities, is a dynamic construction of a certain order – a manner of experiencing.

Mobile technology is a potential framework and people’s attitudes are combining the actual scenario with information during every day practices. Physical and cartographic maps usually offer defined routes, such as street and road networks, but the localities determined by mobile technologies have established other sources of information about the city; they function as a drivers’ live map about directions and particular ways between places, for example, where vehicles reduce their speeds because of flood area. The use of mobile devices creates cultural filters about how to walk and to drive in the city of São Paulo, attributing new significances to everyday routine. The intention of the INmobility project is to give visibility to personal experiences, including those of place. Thinking about relationships between visibility and spatial perception, the enactive approach is considered since looks are not mental entities, but environmental properties – contextual negotiations; they are relational, to be sure – relationships between objects and the location of users – an encounter between appearances and existences (Noe 2008) [28]. So, the visual proposal is to evoke other perception of topologies by the recombination and reinvention of images. It means that from visual narratives created by computational algorithms, patterns not usually perceived are evoked (Paraguai 2017) [29]. The binary logic can add information and abstract content in complex processes, and the project aesthetically evokes these symbolic messages working with numbers, such as the speed of cars. This aesthetic articulation between distinct texts - codes and images – can materialize and present some structure, not perceived before (Manovich 2010) [30].

According to Santos (1999) [16] the logic of the device proposes other spatial and temporal perceptions, and so affects human behavior and relationships. The INmobility project makes other connections possible, questioning location and awareness of codes and decoding processes, as modes of behaving and perceiving others and the world. Assuming the dialogue to comprehend machine and human relationships, the materiality of codes drives aesthetical choices as parameters to generate visual results.

The final consideration is about different processes of visualisation between humans and machines, and how an artist-engineer can appropriate that content as poetic proposal. The act of reading and understanding the world depends on the ability of recognizing its patterns, and human and machine approaches constantly reveal the differences in what is visible for each system. Working with computing means developing mental abilities of comprehending mathematical sentences in order to be figured in numerical representations. So, the narrative forms produced on the INmobility project can be defined as a process of “direct visualization” (Manovich 2010: 24–25) [30], understanding that the produced images spatially recompose their values, linking the captured image and its transformed versions to modes of living and behaving situated spaces.

In conclusion, the act of reading and understanding the world depends on the ability to recognize and signify patterns. Patterns reside in the domain of modules and interconnections to prompt rethinking attitudes, practices and methodologies in the process of creation. The INmobility project uses non-deterministic characteristic of software and their unpredictable results to validate uncertainty as a process to be experienced. The project embodies the poetic aspects of writing and creating visualities.