Imageability
From REMAP
Los Angeles, 2006
Concept, design and media database: Fabian Wagmister
Interface: Eitan Mendelowitz - Sound: Jonathan Snipes - Collective display: Brian Mohr - Middleware: Jeff Burke
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REMAP recently unveiled IMAGEABILITY, a digital media installation at the Chiparaki Cultural Civic Computing Center in downtown Los Angeles. The piece allows visitors to draw maps of their Los Angeles on interactive screens and tablets, and then interlaces these compositions with contemporary sounds and historical images of the city. Analyzing each participant’s expressions about personal urban networks to pull from an original database of media, IMAGEABILITY is the first module of Remapping LA, REMAP’s long-term research effort to engage communities in designing technological systems that explore their own histories and identities.
Fabian Wagmister, REMAP’s Co-Director and an Associate Professor within UCLA’s Department of Film, Television and Digital Media, has built upon the vision of renowned urban planner Kevin Lynch to create IMAGEABILITY and introduce the upcoming processes of Remapping LA. As Lynch has described “imageability” as the quality an object possesses which enables it to evoke a potent image in an observer, Wagmister believes a city’s ability to create images is dependent on its citizens’ innate creative potential and the opportunity to use that creativity to shape an ever-fluid environment. Thus, IMAGEABILITYsets the stage for cognitive mapping to be utilized as a powerful conceptual tool for understanding and connecting with the urban environment, and as a platform for collective empowerment and social dialogue.
Remapping LA will move forward with a multi-year series of participatory workshops and exhibitions. In conjunction with community organizations and corporate partnerships, UCLA will enable members of communities throughout Los Angeles to map the city with personal digital technologies, such as mobile phones, global positioning system (GPS) devices, digital cameras and geographic information systems (GIS). Their discoveries- expressed in maps, photography, audio and video recordings, and written documentation- will continually feed the repository of media initially used during IMAGEABILITY, and generate and influence the technological development of indoor and outdoor installations, performances, and other cultural artifacts. By IMAGEABILITY grounding Remapping LA in a multicultural, place-specific exploration of identity, the project has begun to establish an exciting relationship between the design of emerging technological systems and the means in which communities unearth their surroundings.
