Tom Schofield

This article draws on a multi-disciplinary project based on the David Almond archives at Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The project combined archival research, augmented reality (AR) technology, Almond’s magical realist writing and experimental workshops to explore whether AR can enhance young people’s engagement with archives and literature. In the process it highlighted the extent to which Almond’s fiction is itself a form of augmentation that represents a particular geographical location—the North East of England—in ways that challenge official accounts of that place. This aspect of Almond’s writing corresponds to what Michel de Certeau describes as tactical spatial practice and is closely associated with some forms of AR.

At a time when it is particularly urgent to identify models of intersection across the digital and cultural sector to respond to an emergent funding and policy environment, this article contributes to a body of scholarly work around designing digital interventions for museums by identifying the role of cultural content in shaping design spaces for collaboration. The context of the article is a research project that brought together magical realist literature and the development of an Augmented Reality smartphone application realised through a public programme held at a museum of children’s literature. This process created an open-ended design space within the organisation embedded into the development of public engagement workshops around magical realism and place making. It investigates how the cultural content (from archival material) occupied a key role in shaping technological development and suggests strategies that could grant autonomy and sustainability to cultural organisations in engaging in digital transformation.

The default position towards temporality in designing for the web is to treat it as unfortunate constraint that negatively affects user experience. In contrast we look to the complex temporal interactions of networked technologies as a site of theoretical and aesthetic interest with the power to engage users in speculative and critical attitudes towards technical infrastructure. We argue that by valorising the temporality of networks and considering new forms of representation we open a range of creative possibilities with the potential to engage users in fundamental questions about technological infrastructure: who owns it, where it is and how it intra-acts. We provide examples of two artworks that treat with the subject of network time and discuss a basic guiding taxonomy to inform future work in design.

There are tensions, apparent to us now as never before, between the polished gloss of consumer technologies, their intuitive design, their smooth interfaces and the hard, angular and unforgiving infrastructures of programming, electronics and electrics which make them possible. Ongoing industry directions to cluster and integrate in services such as Apple’s iCloud present disparate agents as one unified object. This ideological project of gathering, abstracts users ever further from the affordances and techne of things in themselves. A gap is perceived then between image and canvas, between surface and depth.A short survey of the critical and philosophical implications of this dissonance will be undertaken with an emphasis on the discursive territories opened for artists and in particular the creative opportunities of directly using examples of ‘machine voices’: glitch, static, recordings or traces of magnetism as art making materials. It will be argued that such materials allow practitioners to collapse distances between image and object. Two recent artworks will be discussed which explore such possibilities in the context of screen-based art.It will be further posited that technological development has depended on a subjectivity distributed between humans and non-humans and that to acknowledge this is crucial in evaluating not only our own relationships with and attitudes to media but also outside the sphere of human concerns in the great outdoors of metaphysics.

Hoy en día son más aparentes que nunca las tensiones existentes entre la reluciente pátina de las tecnologías de consumo, su diseño intuitivo y sencillas interfaces y las rígidas, inflexibles y rigurosas infraestructuras derivadas de la programación, la electrónica y la electricidad que las hace posibles. El interés de la industria actual por agruparse e integrarse en servicios como iCloud de Apple presenta a agentes dispares como un objeto único. Este proyecto ideológico aleja a los usuarios de las funcionalidades y la techne de los objetos en sí mismos. Existe un desfase entre la imagen y la tela, entre la superficie y la profundidad.En este artículo se repasan brevemente las implicaciones críticas y filosóficas de esta discordancia, haciendo especial hincapié en los territorios discursivos que han introducido los artistas y, en especial, en las oportunidades creativas que supone utilizar ejemplos de «voces de máquina» –glitch (fallos técnicos), ruido estático, grabaciones o restos magnéticos– como material artístico. Se argumentará que estos materiales permiten acortar la distancia entre imagen y objeto. Se analizarán dos obras que exploran estas posibilidades en el contexto del arte basado en pantalla.Finalmente se postula que el desarrollo tecnológico se ha basado siempre en una subjeti-vidad repartida entre seres humanos y elementos no humanos y que reconocerlo es esencial para evaluar no sólo nuestra relación con los medios sino también para definir lo que queda fuera de la esfera de las preocupaciones humanas para adentrarse en el gran espacio abierto de la metafísica.