The urban domain is being infrastructurally upgraded into a multimedia environment as digitization makes its physical mark on the cityscape itself.

Architecture is being endowed with medial qualities and equipped with everything from telematic furnishings to location-based services, elements that constitute interfaces between virtual and material spheres of communication. Creative confrontations beyond the realm of advertising messages and décor betoken growing consciousness of the mediatization of society.
The results of these encounters integrate themselves into their environment as subtle interventions, but also as the fulfillment of tasks on a mundane agenda. Media art’s manifesting itself beyond the confines of the museum-exhibition context as a component of a piece of architecture or in the form of telematic environmental design has been accompanied by the emergence of a new quality being exhibited by installations.
A criterion of particular relevance to this category of (in many cases interactive) projects is user involvement in a way that is as intuitive as possible: a mode of functioning that proceeds as a matter of course without in any way diminishing the expressiveness of the project itself.
At the 2006 Pixelspaces Conference, practitioners in this field will participate in an open discourse focusing on the challenges that (media) designers see themselves confronted with as a result of the emergence of the “real-time city.”


Panel I
Sat 11:45 - 14:00
2.9. St. Florian

The Graffiti Research Lab: James Powderly (US), Evan Roth (US)
denCity.net – augmented urbanism: Philipp Hoppe (DE),
Kai Kasugai (DE)
ShiftSpace – a public space on the web: Dan Phiffer (US),
Mushon Zer-Aviv (IL)
Ist Linz schön? Europäische Kulturhauptstadt 2009: Maren Richter (AT)
Moderation: Pascal Maresch (Ars Electronica Futurelab, AT)