Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

“Our eyes see very little and very badly,” proclaimed Dziga Vertov, as he employed emerging technologies to reconstitute the body’s relationship with the built form. Almost a century later, we attempted to do the same through a series of community-led XR (eXtended Reality) projects in New York City. Through a co-creative process, we remapped a socio-economically vulnerable neighborhood’s relationship to traumatic public space. In doing so, we established the City’s first community-run XR lab for Brownsville, Brooklyn residents living below the poverty line. There, we generated XR city symphonies to foster connections in a community fragmented by real-world conflicts. The projects allowed residents to capture forgotten histories, create alternative economies, and share common dreams and goals through constructive dialogue. As a result, the lab’s co-creative process is now being adopted by the NYC Office of Technology & Innovation as an exemplar of informed civic design. In our presentation, we focus on themes of generative narrative-making inspired by Agusto Boal’s “Forum Theatre.” We hope to show how new definitions of the “smart city” have emerged from these ideas. Most importantly, we show how computational vernaculars from “citizen designers” are a powerful mode to reconstitute spatial histories and generate holistic urban plans for the community. One project in particular, Fireflies: A Brownsville Story, serves as our primary example to show how one hundred community members collaborated on a “docu-game” for the neighborhood. Enabled by emerging digital technologies, a multitude of city symphonies can now be composed by citizen-participants for socio-economic transformation.