Abstract
Can social engagement and reflection be designed through social touch in today’s smart city’s public spaces? This paper explores ludic, playful design for shared engagement and reflection in public spaces through social touch. In two Artistic Social Labs (ASL), internationally presented in public spaces, a radically unfamiliar sensory synthesis is acquired, for which perception of ‘who sees and who is being seen, who touches and who is being touched’ is disrupted. Participants playfully ‘touch themselves and feel being touched, to connect with others on a screen’. On the basis of the findings in the ASLs, guidelines are proposed for orchestrating social engagement and reflection, through social touch as play.
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Notes
- 1.
The Actors’ participation exposed to the Spectators [15] can be described as ‘performative’. Instead of referring to the notion on performance as a form of ‘role-playing’, performativity [3] is, in this context, considered to be a repetitive act designed for public spaces, to share reflection on social engagement.
- 2.
In this way, each Virtual Persona exists of data traces generated by many caressing acts. The last portrait layer contains 50% of the previous portrait, to enhance the Actor’s self-recognition and connection. Colours of skin merge, but the last colour is dominant.
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Acknowledgements
Saving Face (2012) was developed by artists-scientists duo Lancel/Maat (Karen Lancel, Hermen Maat) as an art work, artistic research and case study (http://www.lancel.nl/work/saving-face/). It was generously supported by Media Fund, Mondriaan Fonds, Festival aan de Werf Utrecht, MediaFonds@Sandberg, Cultural Consulate Beijing, BCAF Beijing, Beam Systems Amsterdam, Dutch Embassy Berlin, SICA NLTR 400 and technically developed in collaboration with Sylvain Vriens, Tim Olden, Matthijs ten Berge, Mart van Bree, Beamsystems, using Jason Saragih’s open source Facetracker library.
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Lancel, K., Maat, H., Brazier, F. (2019). Saving Face: Playful Design for Social Engagement, in Public Smart City Spaces. In: Brooks, A., Brooks, E., Sylla, C. (eds) Interactivity, Game Creation, Design, Learning, and Innovation. ArtsIT DLI 2018 2018. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 265. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06134-0_34
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