Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants

Katja Glaser (Siegen)

In-Between ─ Street Art in the Digital Road Network

Contact zones, interfaces, and trans(it) routes – in the course of ongoing globalization processes and mobile, portable, and digitally networked media technologies, one can detect significant changes in both the perception and production of urban spaces. Concerning urban art (or so called ‘street art’), one could even assert that it leaves the streets. Somehow.

Instead of languishing its temporary and ephemeral existence in the streets, street art is increasingly both located and situated in so called ‘hybrid spaces’ where real urban city space and virtual space (of the internet) are superimposing and overlaying each other. In this constellation, mobile phones, smartphones, and other digitally networked media appear as essential interfaces connecting both ‘layers’ in a) a media-ethnographically and b) a media-aesthetically significant way.

I will focus on one example – a specific street art-app(lication) for the iPhone – questioning how both practices and aesthetics of urban art need to be (re)conceptualized or (re)perspectivized in the course (#as an effect?) of new mobile and digitally networked media technologies.

My main concerns are: Which theoretical and methodological potentials (and challenges) emerge for both media-ethnographers and smartphone-users confronted with digitally networked media technologies like street art-apps? Do these apps contribute to the generation of ‘new places’ instead of associating them with the concept of placelessness? Can digital mobility be equalized with or compared to real-spatial, geographical mobility?

Katja Glaser studied Spanish Studies, Literary-, Art- and Media Studies at the universities of Constance, Granada, and Monterrey. Her Master thesis was titled “Banksy – semiological sniper with a spray can. Guerilla communication practices between subversion, aesthetics, and art market”. In October 2012 she started her Ph.D.-thesis at the postgraduate program Locating Media in Siegen, dealing with ‘street art’ in combination and/or (inter)dependence with new media technologies.

glaser@locatingmedia.uni-siegen.de

Recent Publications

2013: “Passagen: Ein Street Art-Spaziergang mit dem Smartphone,” in: Navigationen 12/2, Raphaela Knipp, Johannes Paßmann, and Nadine Taha (ed.), Vom Feld zum Labor und zurück (in preparation).

2013: “‘Tag that wall’: Augmented Reality-Apps am Beispiel der Street Art” (with Jens Schröter), in: Sprache und Literatur, 44/1 (in preparation).

2013: “Street Art vernetzt sich,” online article for the Goethe-Institute Prag, March 2013:
http://www.goethe.de/ins/cz/pra/kul/duc/kis/de10675905.htm