e-publicspace.net – Public Space Encyclopedia

As part of a research project entitled UrbansSystems/Urban Models (USUM) that brings together Laboratories of ETHZ (Studio Basel), Università della Svizzera italiana, and EPFL, a specific research on public space is being undertaken by the lab. Chôros (http://choros.epfl.ch). This research confronts theory and empiricism and attempts to analyze the complexity of public spaces in cities. Is public space a universal concept?

Creating e-publicspace.net : an Encyclopedia of public space
For this research, we are creating a website which will be an Encyclopedia of public space.  we are looking for documents and projects on this issue: texts (theory, anthology, bibliography), images (photographs, videos, maps, drawings) and sounds. If you are geographer, urban planner, architect, engineer, artist, sociologist, landscape historian, philosophers, political scientists, etc. you can contribute to e-publicspace.net.

Instructions

All documents are Royalty Free and should be sent by mail to the webmaster Annelore Schneider : annelore@collectif-fact.ch
Image format: one side of the image should be at least 1024 pixels.
Images and videos weight: if they exceed 6MB send them via ftp.
Languages of texts: English or French
Languages for images, videos and sounds (interviews): English, French, Spanish, Italian, German. No translation will be made.
Language for the legends of visual documents and sounds: English.
All documents must be dated.
All documents will be accompanied by a proposal for 5 keywords in English.
For more information, please contact Véronique Mauron, project manager at veronique.mauron@epfl.ch.

A friend introduced me to this interesting web documentary about coal mines which is essentially made of pictures and sounds/voices, and where you are a journalist who can choose which actions you want to do, where to go, and which questions to ask. Choices are actually not that many, but I still found interesting to have this interactive documentary. That could be an interesting way to use my records. We could even imagine more, and choose a few topics we would like to work on and think about how to illustrate them with pictures, records, artworks, etc. What is also interesting is that in every image you have the possibility to explore more information, watch the map, etc.

17 June 2009.

Zhang Shuo (a.k.a. Bobby) comes over asking to meet with his “foreign friend”. Oh! Could our little experiments in “cultural exchange” be working? HomeShop arranges a second live web chat between Mr. Bobby in Beijing and Fotini at our Berlin end of things. After playing the naming game again (“香蕉 banana”, “酱油 soy sauce”, “iPod”, and a few things that we didn’t know how to say), Bobby——feeling more and more comfortable with his new friends——decides that he’s had enough of “cultural exchange” and simply decides to play exhibitionist instead. “Take my picture!”

“Again!“