remote sensations
Installations and Processes in the Urban Public Space

' Offenes Kulturhaus Offenes Kulturhaus

Remote Sensations is a cooperative project of the Offenes Kulturhaus Linz and the Ars Electronica Center. It is a compilation of artists' positions on, experiences with, and sensory perception of a culture undergoing a process of telematic self-organization. Remote Sensations was designed to focus primarily upon the highly charged interplay of forces between the urban lebensraum as a system of commercial activity and human behavior interlinked by a network of rules and conditions, an interface in the sense of a factor of perception of telepresent things or events, and the technological nature of that interface, upon which telepresence and network-linkage [globally speaking] is based.

Telepresence is a consequence of "remoteness" in space – also in the sense of obliteration – and of time which has been compressed down to the point of zero. Telematic technology is the means of achieving this. On one hand, these delineation's of individual positions are presented here in order to establish a model, as it were, of perception [online, on-the-air and by means of the senses] which is characterized by the technological structure which produces "remoteness" and/or the technological structure of that "remote" space itself, and – in contrast to the experience of telepresence – the experience, among others, of being telepresent oneself. On the other hand, urban spaces function simultaneously as projection surfaces; due to the fact that they are the object of images projected upon the public realm of the city, they ought to be recognized as a construction which has long been subject to the process of cultural reorganization.