What is it that ‘warms’ one’s heart to a particular place? When I first moved to Barcelona, the city’s array of repetitive blocks hummed a threat of alienation. There I was, after growing up walking the streets of Beirut where the total absence of big-picture planning amplifies the intuitional sensing of associations, invites engagement with the people on the street to able to navigate, and leaves one vulnerable to the infiltration of the endlessly multiple overlapping stories and traces of these streets into one’s experience. Hence I found myself searching for a sense of belonging in L’Eixample, the rigorously gridded urban plan of Barcelona, in all its single-scale monotony, the same historical era to which the larger number of buildings appear to belong to, the same species of obedient trees equally spaced along the blocks, the same amount of sky above the sidewalks and the profusion of arrows and zebra-lines dominating, or contaminating, its visual sphere. For a while, I felt the Cerdà plan haunting the city; in logos of the shops, on restaurant menus and on the bus seat fabric. Soon, with the inevitable force of daily life carving space for building relations, the city’s rigid interface started to give access.
 
My perception of the city was slowly liberated from the initial aerial view through quotidian activities; engaging with neighbors, and discovering small printing shops, Italian ice cream places, packed bookstores, naturally-lit libraries, and marketplaces with funny-sounding names. Wide-enough sidewalks and plazas shared the potential of becoming a field for father and son football games. Tourist-filled shopping boulevards flooded with occasional street protests. Clusters of nail-treatment shops operated by Asian immigrants defined the character of a small patch of one of the streets that run from one end of Barcelona to the other, while the dispersion of diverse restaurants between the monotony of corner cafes (all with the same metallic chairs, menu and opening hours) became active nodes engaging the senses with their high-end design, smell of fusion food, and sounds of laughter and conversation. Surprising little streets infused with artisan food, children’s playground and public gardens challenged the scale of the grid while peacefully settling within it, their engulfment provoking a sense of protection. The grid remained, nuanced into a navigation-friendly medium, and I was finally becoming networked to Barcelona’s multiple realities, opening up the possibilities of interaction with the city and developing a belonging.

Still, the potential of reverse trajectories persists. The control of the ‘ground-plan’ rises as I head home after 2 a.m. on a Friday night and become one of the crowd that has been kicked out of the pubs which as if by some force of magic close down simultaneously at exactly 2 a.m. The few remaining clubs that stay open after that hour have long queues of youths waiting in line to get in. Restricted in time and space, the city is no longer a product of daily activities but a direct product and prisoner of the same grid of governance that dictates the physical ‘urban fabric’, gentrification plans, opening and closing hours and eventually some patterns of daily life itself. The grid was a product of a specific political situation and directly reflects, facilitates and often dictates the shape of top-down governmental sponsorship of from-above planning of the city growth. Is it not the dominating logic of ‘reading’ the city as blocks that allows the erasure of complete blocks in degenerated areas? Much activism against gentrification plans in certain areas of Barcelona, while celebrated as counter-system actions, is mostly block-centered itself; localized neighborhood initiatives are, though unconsciously, persistently haunted by the grid in their constitution. The grid mostly stays clear of the accusations; it is the forgotten given, the silent background, the ever-innocent because the implicit effects of its prevalence are rarely called into question. What if we consciously call our reading of Barcelona’s grid as the dominant force in planning into question? What if we imagine the city’s series of interactive nodes overshadowing its dominant codes of infrastructure? What interfaces will we be able to engage the city through once we alter our dominant imagination of its spatial perception? Can we then become more conscious of how the city shapes our lives and how interchangeably our stories are contributing to its growth? Will it then be easier to belong?

Doreen Massey writes “sometimes you have to blow apart the imagination of a space or place in order to find within it its potential, to reveal the ‘disparition’ in what presents itself as a perceptual totality.’ Other times you just have to live in it.

 

From expressing intuition; to raising questions; to performing a sense of our embodied position in virtual space. This has been the journey of this workshop so far. Now it is time to physically contact the ‘site’, the SMEX workplace, and project in it a vision of how it can grow to become a space ‘where the physical and virtual meet to create exchange.’ In answer to this aspiration, the participants individually and then in two groups engage in a design process through two exercises. The first one is to physically relocate an object found on site and build around it, using post-it notes representing objects, microcosms of what makes up a space of exchange. This intervention takes place in the main workplace─ a double room with a set of operable panels that can separate or join the two rooms─ and in the corridor that links the entrance door to the main workplace to the kitchen and to the offices inside. A setting that three of the participants built expresses a flexibility that works as individual reflection space (with comfortable furniture, books, food, music, and different sketching, relaxation and entertainment tools), as well as an informal or formal meeting space (with chairs or bean bags, white boards and projection), and in both configurations, full connectivity via interactive virtual media and ‘access to knowledge.’ Another setup is about encompassing the full circle of accessible communication; expressing ideas/ visualizing them through words, images and videos/ projecting these expressions on the walls and sharing them with virtual communities/ receiving feedback and coming back full circle to building up increasingly richer ideas. Another setting is a ‘confession space;’ a corner to be alone hidden by a thick curtain and connected by choice through a video camera which can become a screen to transmit to the world. In the corridor, two interventions of a different kind happen. On one wall, an interactive map to display and update SMEX projects and events and their networked locations. It serves as an interface to inform SMEX visitors and community about ongoing projects as well as capture and transmit their impressions and graphically integrate them into the dynamic map. On the other wall of the corridor, strips of pin board provide a ‘continuous link to the creative process of expression’ while moving from one room to another. It’s a wall of informal expression and an inspirational source accumulating random thoughts and scribbles.

A focus area emerges in the middle of the space, connecting the two rooms around which various corners and spots were activated with furniture, devices and events. These setups create diverse types of individual and group visualization spaces and bring sound into the space so that ideas can come alive, reflecting on the walls, connecting the different spaces and resonating actions of exchange. Interactivity, connectivity, expressions, voices and story-sharing pervade the different settings. Someone wrote the phrase ’these walls can tweet’ on the board.

 

The last session was a 30-minute architecture charrette where the participants converge their design ideas to co-create and represent an integrated vision of the space and then share it with the other group. The important themes surfaced: high-tech infusion; echo and voice activation; expression and visualization spaces; chill-out; multiple settings; visible connectivity. The representations are diverse, some rather ‘architectural’ while others abstract, colorful and free-drawn.

 

I sensed that my role is that of an observer and from there, very sincerely, the view was rich and amazingly interesting. I saw a small spontaneous get-together of young active and open people pouring out their creativity, interacting at a very complex level. The following are some immediate impressions after checking out from the workshop:
- 'Virtual' space is seamlessly integrated into our everyday life. It is a place where we can be, that we can access and move in and out of easily and consciously.
- Social media can be tools with specific aims, and they are also places where we go to, move through and in which we 'position' ourselves and be consciously present.
- Many wrote at the beginning that interactive space is simply a 'space' or 3D. What I saw in the workshop is that a space where and when people willingly meet means instant interactivity.
- This is a point that Hala shared (thank you Hala): the 'physical' has a powerful presence and can take over the 'virtual' instantly; we all shifted seamlessly from talking about virtual social media into brainstorming the redesign of SMEX physical workplace.
- A place of creative exchange encompasses processes where ideas are visualized, shared, acknowledged and remembered. This places Plato’s concept of freedom at the backdrop of Auge’s definition of anthropological place.
Throughout OnlineOnsite, the participants shared intuitions, raised questions, and expressed themselves from within many places simultaneously, decentering and interrupting a structured logic of  place and time to reveal continuity: between virtual and physical, between individual and collective, between voiced/visualized expression and conscious co-creation; between imagination and manifestation; between place and representation; between interaction and space... 

 

To read the OnlineOnsite Proceedings 4/5- Take a Position, press here

To read about the flow of activities in this workshop press here

After the questions debate, it was time to take a position- literally! Each participant expressed with a body posture or movement their state of 'being' in online social networks.

(my notes in grey)

Rasha (photo 1) was the first to volunteer. She opens a window and looked out, describing the multiplicity of things that are happening and that she can see from her position. She simply stands there, conscious of her growing curiosity. The dynamic diversity of the internet intrigues us, inviting us to engage with it; the internet also allows us a position of strategic outlook, a stance where we can look out and choose where to go. A distanced pause with many reachable choices.

Assad (photo 2) next took the Johny Walker ‘Keep Walking’ position J He says that while he is navigating in this space, he is continuously exposing himself to many people’s opinions and thus knows what to accept as constructive criticism and what to ignore. And keep walking. It’s endless and there’s a sense of flowing from one place to another. The expression of mobility is very interesting; online, we can be very mobile and as we move, we are interacting with (or being bombarded) by multiple forces with can affect us (or not differently.

Hala (photo 3) then takes a position with her hands lifted one turning inwards towards her body and the other opening outwards. She tells us that she found it really interesting that her foot intuitively came forward. She says: “At first I when I started using social networks I was very very cautious. I’m still on the boundaries, not the center, I’m contained but I have an open hand and a step forward, getting more in. It’s because I noticed that I’m able to maintain connections and expand connections while keeping the containment.” Thus there is a sense of venturing into new places that open up opportunities for expansion and connection. I wonder if the containment is an intra-action, while stepping out manifests in inter-action and how much these two kinds of ‘action’ interweave to form a safe balance. I wonder how different is stepping making a step forward online to venturing out into society? We will see that Yasmine later expresses that she feels more ‘centered’ online. What does it mean to be in the boundaries or in the center? Does the sense of presence differ?

Naeema (photo 4) puts her left hand forward, rotates her palm upwards and keeps her other hand in her pocket. “The way I see it is you’re outreaching, giving what you have, and keeping some parts of you private so preserving yourself, outreaching and giving.” This simple perceptive gesture in my opinion expresses how we face society whether virtual or physical, thus sealing this often dramatically fetishized fissure between the two. Indeed, many of the gestures point to the continuity and integration between our (embodied) virtual and physical presence.

Yasmine(photo 5) turns her back and holds a small mirror through which she looks back at us. “For me as opposed to how most people would see themselves, part of ‘real’ society with their reflection in the windows of social networks ─ for me it’s more comfortable to be the other way around; to really belong in the virtual and have some reflection of me in the real world.” So being online can be a really comfortable position. Like sitting in your PJs drinking hot chocolate while actually doing something productive, that reflects who you really are. No pressure. Intimate privacy in an endlessly open space.

Jessica (photo 6) stands in the corner of the room ‘to have a wide angle from which she can see a whole landscape.’ She then moved forward, got down on her hands and knees as if in a digging position saying that at the same time the other part of her is working deep into the ‘garden.’ So she is constantly going back and then going down, getting the big picture and getting her hands dirty. The group seemed to resonate with this position right away. The combination of privileged overlooking position and a deeply immersive experience. A space that simultaneously offers to be the landscape and the garden. I wonder how often do we get this type of chance in the ‘physical’ worlds? And what does it add to our (well)being?

Vanessa (photo 7) tells us that she feels that social networks are a space where she can control everything in it. She then starts to move things around: “I can put this chair here; you over there (moves Hala) so I feel I can control it. I can control what I want to publish or not to publish.” She then concludes by saying that she sense the bigness of online space, and that gives her more space to configure. Again, the idea of intimacy in an endlessly open space. The ability to sense control and not be intimidated by the scale of it and certainly not the immateriality of it. Many of the positions reflect our intuitive ability to locate ourselves within or stepping in or touching and changing the virtual. It transcends a dream-like imagination of being in space, and almost becomes a tangible presence with a concrete sense of self-expression, action, control and reconfiguration, and socializing.

To read the OnlineOnsite Proceedings 3/5- Questions Express, press here

To read the OnlineOnsite Proceedings 5/5- Co-creation, press here

After a quick check-in where we each introduced ourselves through an object we happened to carry, and shared the feelings that some of us had in common, we sat down together on a large table that was entirely covered with a white paper with colored pens scattered on it. This was our visualization surface to share and link ideas, sketch out our impressions and hunches, and scribble if we get nervous or bored anytime throughout the workshop.

For this exercise, called ‘Questions Express,’ the idea was to have a debate around 'What are the questions that we should be asking about social media?' The process was simple and prompt. I started by asking a question and the participants briefly discussed it, moving into one question after the other, a question following each answer. We were all writing and drawing questions and impressions on our white paper surface. Soon, the whole communal paper space was filling up with colors and stories, the conversations were getting louder and the questions were resonating more and more with the group. This transforming paper was visibly marking our process of listening and contributing, and it opened up new possibilities of linking ideas (literally with lines and networks) and of identifying with each other through artistic expression. This was definitely a lesson for means of encouraging conscious co-creation.

Back to the main aim of the exercise, which was to find questions (rather than answers) and indeed some very intriguing questions and answers came up; I leave you here with a few:

(my notes in grey)

Where do you feel most at home online? What first comes to mind is ‘Facebook or Twitter?’ Or is it stumble-upon? Or reddit? It’s interesting that the question was automatically turned into in which website do you feel at home? This implies that we perceive websites as places, destinations that we go to and inhabit. Someone mentioned that websites we bookmark to go back to are ‘home’, not social media, which are more like public spaces. Another said ‘home is my own website, the website of the organization I’m in.’ Another answer was that it is not in one place; it is in us- our one heart being simultaneously in different places; Twitter, Facebook, Blog. So it is a place of self-exploration. Another answer was ‘it depends on where I’m using the internet’! And another idea that was implied later is that you can’t really be home because it’s a network that’s continuously growing and changing; you change, your location changes; your surroundings change, everything changes. According to Massey, this is true of all spaces. Just as we move, spaces and all their elements and inhabitants move. The stabilization of space, while at times creates a needed nostalgic imagination of ‘home’ can sometimes lead us into evading the challenge of space and limit our imagination of places.

In evaluating social media, is it all about statistics? Quantitative versus qualitative evaluation of our experiences. Some websites are very addictive, but our engagement with them is more distanced, while in others, we feel we are more actively contributing to shaping our and others’ experiences. 

What does the internet look like? What distinguishes the different social media? It’s like walking in a village, going from one place to another, one house to another. It is like a stage, but who is the audience? It’s like a dance floor; you don’t know the person dancing next to you, so much is happening. Isn’t it too crowded? Both inside and outside? It is a place where you can get lost, which can be a cool experience and allows us to stumble-upon new things. A place where there’s a lot of uncertainty and surprises. It’s like a university campus. It’s like a convent without glass, simultaneous place of individual reflection exposed to the world. Some places are like a living room, a comfortable place for informal chatting. The experience can be very physical. Is it alive? It is an active place, a complex network activated by technology and by our interactions.  It is a place of active expression. What is twitter? It’s a blue place! Facebook is the mistress, Twitter is the wife! So we assign different meanings to different media, and that shapes their ecological validity to us and affects how we choose to act in them.  

What are the boundaries of social media interaction? What are some of our rights as individuals? Most agreed that the boundaries are privacy and ownership rights, which is why Creative Commons is so important. How important are the quotation marks? Others felt that each one of us makes their own boundaries, deciding what and when to reveal certain things about ourselves. How much control do we really have?

What is more important, accuracy or authenticity? Accuracy is an individual perspective. Can you imagine we only tweet pure facts? Authenticity is more important than accuracy. The will to open up.

Who uses and how do we use social media? What purposes can it serve? Some choose to use it for their professional purposes, others to promote activism while others make money out of it- utmost commercialization.

Are we developing new skills and languages? We’re getting curioser and curioser. Sometimes we just want to go offline. We are becoming better at multi-tasking. We use tagging as connecting.

 What are some social implications on individuals and groups of social media? Some people get exposed to pressure from knowing that anonymous people are judging you and what you are expressing. Some media promote exclusiveness and bias. Some people get too self-indulgent, too self-centered. Who are you online? Who is your audience? Is online popularity real or fake? Who is your online personality? What about building relationships? There are many positive sides. We have online an opportunity to build up relationships through many channels and make mental friends, not childhood friends- friends that we connect to at same mental level. What kind of communities do we form online? This reminded me of this TED talk by Johanna Blakely that talks about how social media is changing the way the mass media and speculators think about classifying people from the classical demographics (age groups, income, ethnic..) into 'taste communities'. Another positive aspect is that social media reflect and expose us to diversity and equality; everyone has equal opportunities online and our engagement depends on how active we are. The more exchange, the merrier!

Do you ever think about how big the internet is as a space? No. It is more a build-up of relations, actions, people…  Interesting that despite the vastness and excess of possibilities, a certain intimacy or human scale persists. We are conscious of the specificity of our presence within this network and rarely, in our everyday practices, do we feel the need to make conclusions about the overall scene.

To read the OnlineOnsite Proceedings 4/5- Take a Position press here

To read the OnlineOnsite Proceedings 2/5- Post-it First press here

To read about the flow of activities in this workshop press here

Yesterday i had one of those experiences that made me pause and think. For no logical reason, i decided that break of dawn is a good time of day to learn a little more about some of my 'tweeps', people that i'm following and/or following me on Twitter. One of them turns out to be a brilliant, creative performance artist who had posted on her website (linked to her twitter profile) a video of her talking. It dawned on me that i hadn't really 'heard' her before, and that after this moment, her tweets started to sound different from before- somehow, now i could hear them through her voice. This got me thinking about through which voice was i hearing her tweets before that. Of course, the answer is mine. Yikes!
Tweets have sounds. That's for sure. When you tweet, whether to someone specific, no one, or everyone or everyone specific, you hear that voice in your mind tweeting louder than the keyboard clicks. When you read others' tweets, their short abruptness snaps in your ears, waking your mind up, summoning a voice. Unless you know the voice of the person tweeting, you give your own voice and all its sensorial, emotional and rhythmic attributes (intermission: literally as i'm writing this, one of my tweeps (whose real voice i don't know) tweets me this : '@linameow back withanotheroneofthose block rocking beats' ) !!!!
Of course, we always have voices in our head; it's called thinking. Except now we think other people's thoughts, not just our own. Not to mention that tweeting give us intense practice in thinking in short, snappy sentences, and allows us an esprit d'escalier not usually accommodated for in face-to-face conversations. So it's fast, and slower. Universal and personal. The resonance is inside and the meaning is boundless.
I will be writing about/comparing spaces that different social media create. I wonder if Twitter augments our consciousness of an internal reflective space through aural resonance. If i count as experiment subject, i can easily say ever since i started using Twitter, the voices in my head have become multiple(or multiples of 1) and louder. ok too much information.

Thank you @taniaelk for the inspiration + @textdump for the surreal moment :)

As the participants arrive and are customizing their name tags, they scribble down, on small pieces of paper, short intuitive answers to the question WHAT IS AN INTERACTIVE SPACE? We then posted the answers on a magnetic board to set the mood before officially checking in. If as you're reading, you have the urge to answer this question, pause. Scribble down and share your answers by replying below.

Since they are short, I share with you the answers:

Community Space Open Space

It’s a common ground for communication and mutual understanding

Space is something not defined and hence has no limits. Interactive means 3D

·          A space

·          A place to share freely

·         A collaboration

Connection Expression Possibility (all interconnected in one network)

It’s a place where you can work practically

Interactive space: open, colorful, full of new electronics, friendly

A place that facilitates the birth and growth of our ideas

The first image below is a wordle composed  from all the answers; the more frequent the word, the bigger it appears in the graphic. I love how the word that occurred most was SPACE. Actually, two of the answers directly state that interaction space is simply a space, any space; SPACE=INTERACTION. Other answers emphasize on the properties of such a space and/or what possibilities or actions it accommodates. What really fascinates me in these precious intuitions is that they span across a whole range of the realities of interactive space; that this space has emotional and physical attributes (can be described and related to), that this space is a ground that allows for interaction, birth and growth of ideas, sharing, and other actions and finally that it is an undefined amalgamation of background and foreground, where community happens. The Connection-Expression-Possibility network diagram is especially intriguing since it reveals a simultaneous multiplicity of perceptions of space; (physical?contactual?active?) connection, (mental?conceptual?representational?) expression and (open-ended?simultaneous?overlapping?) possibilities. You might wonder why i'm reading so much into these answers. Simple. I'm an adamant advocate of intuition.

On January 07, 2011, i facilitated an interactive workshop about space at Social Media Exchange (SMEX) in Beirut. The workshop was designed to hold conversations and individual and group activities to express 'being' online, as well as to share and build on insights that aim to reinvent, in the open spirit of community participatory design processes, the physical space of SMEX as a hub of virtual and physical interaction.
To give you a glimpse of the proceedings that i will be posting successively, here's a summary of the flow of the workshop:
Post-it First As the participants were arriving and customizing their name tags, they wrote on small pieces of paper their first impression responses to the question; 'What is an interactive space?'
Questions Express After a fun check-in to get to know each other, we sat down on a large table and had a debate about 'What are the questions that we should be asking about social media?'
Take a Position Each participants came up with and acted out a body posture that expresses their state of 'being' online.
Make Contact Moving towards sensing the physical space of SMEX, each participant constructed using existing furniture and post-its their miniature place in answer to the question 'Where can the physical and virtual meet to create exchange?'
Co-design After a yummy break, two groups sat down for a 30 minute interior design session to propose their vision of SMEX space. After sharing these visions, we checked out and ended the workshop... right on schedule :)

Many thanks to all the participants, the friends who helped, encouraged and inspired, and to all the readers; your energy is a constant motivation!
Stay tuned!

To go to OnlineOnsite Proceeding 2/5 press here

I've been thinking about the skills we're developing because of the most common everyday virtual spaces we spend much of our time in.. and one behavior that we're practicing more than ever is this: sharing partials, posting fragments, blurting out incomplete, unpolished itineraries. For example, here are the top ten retweets of this year (my personal favorite is #5) Ok.. what is going on? Is there a spatial dimension in this behavior? I will use the 'space' of this blog to irresponsibly jump into a philosophical argument that says yes, there is.

Doreen Massey argues that Western philosophy over the past century has reinforced the denigration of space vis a vis time in our imagination by attributing to space qualities of being static, structured (and hence rational), objective (background), and enclosed/bounded (local place versus the world out there.) Moreover, space is often represented as a frozen slice in time; time which means change, progress..exciting.and scary. and quite linear and singular if you ask me. She calls for the un-taming of space as 'the dimension of multiple trajectories, a simultaneity of stories-so-far.' Ok back to Earth. Social media are giving us the space to share multiple partials, freeing us from having to tell the complete 'single narrative.' At the same time(s), something about sharing partials is different from telling a story about our experience, which has to some extent always has some disengaged romanticism in it. Somehow, when we tell a complete account of our latest travels, it is somehow as if we're talking about a different person; just like when we show photos- true that we might be reliving the moment, but the distance and implied truth maintains a distance between us and the crudeness of the experience, as does the enduring presence of the past in our stories. Not with partials! We share partials to express where we are now, physically, in our thoughts or feelings. Their simultaneity engages us and others. They're about our basic states of being. That's spatial. In my head, its SPACE: 1  TIME: 0 in this one, hurray for space!
thoughts?