Towards the metaphorical transformation of urban space: digital art and the city after web 2.0
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5902/1983734824572Keywords:
Contemporary city, Network cultures, Digital art, Virtual urban spacesAbstract
The digital revolution has often been associated with the blurring of geographical boundaries, as it has led to new forms of territorial recognition and (un)differentiation. As physical distances have vanished, barriers have become more ambiguous and increasingly conditioned by digital reconfigurations of actual and fictional places. After the Web 2.0, geographical representations of cities were redefined by electronic connections, thus paving the way for new networked cartographies, parallel to, but not necessarily dependent on, their material reality. This metaphorical transformation of the physical space into images and information, permanently (ex)changed and updated on the Internet, promoted an unsteady dialectics between tangible and subjective dimensions. While some frontiers are tending to disappear, new ones are also being created, as the emergence of new digital (or digitised) territories with specific access protocols and cartographies has generated new forms of social and cultural exclusion. Focusing on Digital and Post-Digital Art, this paper discusses this recent situation, observing how contemporary artists have proposed alternative systems for the appropriation and representation of urban spaces.Downloads
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