In "IO_dencies", the challenge is to understand not only the new topologies of intervention and of presence, but to tackle the problems of agency and events in connective and translocal environments. The notion of a ‘connective agency’, of distributed and connective subjectivities, points us to the question of the possibilities of a new type of public sphere that may or may not be established in and by the electronic networks.

IO_dencies explores the possibilities of intervening and acting in complex urban processes taking place in distributed and translocal environments. The project creates a topological cut through the heterogeneous assemblage of physical spaces, data environments, urban imaginations, connective agencies and individual experiences, and forms a model for the complex way in which network topologies will have to be questioned.

IO_dencies looks at urban environments, reads the forces present in particular urban situations, and offers experimental collaborative interfaces for dealing with these force fields. The aim, however, is not to develop advanced tools for architectural and urban design, but to create events through which it becomes possible to rethink urban planning and construction. IO_dencies unfolds the potentials that digital technologies might offer towards connective, participatory models of planning processes and of public agency.

The challenge is to understand not only the new topologies of intervention and of presence, but to tackle the problems of agency and events in connective and translocal environments. The notion of a ‘connective agency’, of distributed and connective subjectivities, points us to the question of the possibilities of a new type of public sphere that may or may not be established in and by the electronic networks. This public sphere will only come into being if there are complex forms of interaction and of participation, that exploit the technical possibilities of the networks and that allow for new and creative forms of becoming present, becoming visible, becoming active, in short, of becoming-public.

URBANITY expanded

IO_dencies locates urbanity in a field generated by city inhabitants and by the city itself as an emancipated partner. Non-hierarchical electronic networks provide experimental fields for other ways of collaborative / connective ways of dealing with urban forces. Utopia is not the construction of a new city, utopia is the movement towards the potential of working together with the complexity of an existing big city in order to develop new forms of urban agencies.

The Tokyo IO_dencies project combines physical, local urban dynamics of the selected city quarter of Shimbashi with virtual network flows (the activities of the participants in the net). The movements towards ‘an other city’ will be generated by manipulating, operating and modifying the urban flows.

SHIMBASHI-local urban profiles

In Tokyo, the central Shimbashi area was analyzed in collaboration with local architects (Sota Ichikawa and others). Shimbashi, a huge empty area in the center of Tokyo which has, for the moment, been turned into an archaeological site (the remains of the Shidome Station) and which lies in the neighborhood of the Ginza shopping area, different motor highways, and the Shinkansen train line. Several ‘zones of intensities’ (these are zones where different urban flows come together, meet, collapse, break, enlarge, diffuse, etc., and where energies from different flows are exchanged) were selected: Ginza-Shopping Area, Imperial Hotel, Fish Market, Highway Entrance, Hamarikyu garden + Homeless Area, Shimbashi Station, Hinode Passenger Terminal, JR-Appartment House, World Trade Center.

Connective Intervention

In these zones, several qualities of urban movements (architectural, traffic, human, information, economic) were distinguished. These movements and flows and their mutual interferences are represented by dynamic particle flows which can be downloaded as an urban profile (each participant is only working on one profile of the 10 different areas) observed and manipulated through an Internet interface: in a Java-applet users can deploy a series of specially designed movement attractors, each of which has a different function in manipulating or modifying those processes. These are functions like: confirming, opposing, drifting, confusing, repulsing, organizing, deleting, merging, weakening etc. Participants can collaboratively develop hypothetical urban dynamics. As soon as one participant starts working on and modifying the urban profile by changing the particle streams with movement attractors, a search engine in the background starts looking in the IP-space for other participants with similar manipulation interests and connects to them. They become present for each other, the IP-address and the activated movement attractors of connected participants will appear in the applet. Some of these can be ‘absent’ users whose activities are remembered and reactivated by the system for some time after the intervention took place. If another participant or more are found, the characters of the data movements can be changed collaboratively in tendencies, they can be made stronger, weaker, more turbulent, denser, etc. Streams of urban movements can shift between dynamic clusters of participants, chains of events are passing through. Participants can develop new processes or react to already existing, ongoing ones. The streams of the manipulated movements are visualized in the activated segment of each participant, however, each participant will work on and experience a singular and different segment.

Action versus Behavior

The manipulative activities of each participant will remain in the system, but will lose effectiveness over time. The recorded activities of the related participant will act similarly to an active participant. Each single participant can only see the segment of the virtual flows he/she is engaged in. The experience of the expansion of the events will depend on the activity and engagement of the single participants. The IO_dencies environment will dissolve in fragmented dynamic clusters of activities. The emerging urban phenomena continuously adapt to the formulation and singularities of public interests. The software modules allow for the variation and transformation of data clusters by connective activities. KR+cF sees the project as an approach to a discursive object, where aesthetic and action-oriented interests occupy and reappropriate urban sites. IO_dencies proposes an experimental connection between the city and the electronic networks.

It constitutes ‘machinic situations’ which are connected to, but separate from both the city and the networks and attempts to initiate transversal activities between local and global forms of agency. The data networks enable the development of connected activities in which neither the city, nor the networks, nor the configuration of the machine can be the single determining factor for the unfolding of the events. Instead, each factor simultaneously contributes to and disturbs the impulses of the others.

IO_dencies is an ongoing project, the first part of which was shown by Knowbotic Research at the ArtLab7 in Tokyo in October 1997.

The recent development in São Paulo is produced by ZKM (eSCAPE research) and Goethe Institute São Paulo. The third intervention is planned for Moscow or Budapest. The choice of these cities is intended to confront different cultural environments which imply specific interrelations between traditional ways of building, economic and political conditions, and electronic communication structures. A close relation with the concrete city environment is maintained by working with local architects and urban researchers who deal with the problems and challenges of the local urban environment.

Special thanks to Yukiko Shikata, Kaz Abe, Siegfried Zielinski.

URL-Europe: www.khm.de/people/krcf/IO/
or URL-Japan: www.canon.co.jp/cast/artlab7/IO.html

Co-produced with Canon ARTLAB special support from Academy of Media Arts Cologne and Ministry for Research and Higher Education NRW realization together with Detlev Schwabe