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Experiential storytelling for shared spaces 

Esem Projects

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Published in Smart Cities News as [New Neighbourhoods, New Ways of Connecting](https://smart-cities.com.au/new-neighbourhoods-new-ways-of-communicating/#:~:text=Dr%20Sarah%20Barns%20is%20an,and%20City%20of%20Parramatta%20Council.) This article provides some of the strategic context behind our [STORYBOX](https://www.storybox.co/) platform.  

*Let’s rethink outdoor media as public space media. As Australian cities open up after COVID-19, let’s explore the potential to use outdoor media as a way to communicate important messages and provide connection within communities.*

The year 2020 has been a bumpy ride for the outdoor media sector. As cities open back up, it’s a good time to rethink the potential of digital out of home (DOOH) media to connect with communities in public spaces.  

Do you remember when outdoor billboards started to actually *move*?  First, the bus stop billboards began to rotate between advertisements – before there was one, now there were two! Then, more and more print-style billboards began to be replaced by digital screens. Suddenly, the space occupied by one asset could be sold to not just one or two buyers, but more.

A boom in advertising revenues quickly ensued. In fact, outdoor media saw a doubling of revenues between 2013 and 2019 – as the sector began to blossom into a fully-fledged digital ecosystem, known in the industry as ‘digital out of home’ (with the somewhat unfortunate acronym DOOH). 

By 2020, the sector had become a mix of hybrid digital-physical interfaces, intermediated by ‘supply side digital platforms’ (SSDPs) and ‘demand side digital platforms’ (DSDPs). Think of these digital platforms as the Ubers and Airbnbs of outdoor media, creating digital ecosystems that let buyers and sellers trade outdoor advertising space ‘programmatically’, based on granular, data-driven insights, including location, demographic data, time of day and more. 

There’s now more and more companies gearing up to play a part in this evolving digital ecosystem. Google sister company Sidewalk Labs has a stake in it via Intersection, a company on a mission to “connect digital and physical worlds” to elevate the urban experience. To put it a bit differently, Intersection uses data intelligence to more efficiently connect buyers and sellers of advertising space outdoors. 

After years of steady growth and moves toward data-driven optimisation, the Covid-19 pandemic arrived and hit the sector hard. Advertising budgets were cut, and stay at home measures saw consumer eyeballs locked onto screens indoors. Some billboards in major cities were empty – a rare sight indeed – while outdoor media companies like Ooh!Media populated their assets with advertisements about themselves. 

But as cities open up after lockdowns, there’s an opportunity for us all to rethink the role and potential of outdoor media in public spaces. Local governments are investing in ways to activate their public spaces, and bring people back into CBD spaces. The important role of public spaces as shared spaces – for creativity and inclusion – is stronger than ever.  

In this context, it’s worth considering an expanded role for our cities’ digital out of home (DOOH) infrastructure. If DOOH companies really do want to ‘elevate the urban experience’ through outdoor media, how can these services actually benefit communities in public spaces, rather than simply selling advertisements? 

Evolving the DOOH environment from one that is purely advertising-driven, to one that facilitates a mix of creativity, local content, and brands, offers the potential for an expanded ecosystem of publishers and audiences and can only mean good things for the reputation of the sector as being at the forefront of the smart city revolution.   

In Parramatta this year, the STORYBOX platform launched as a showcase for ‘public space media’ – a reimagined outdoor media offering that actively contributes to the quality and experience of a public space. 

STORYBOX introduces a partnership model between precinct partners, media and arts organisations to connect innovations in hybrid digital-physical design with an inclusive and collaborative approach to local storytelling and engagement. 

Here are some of the ways we’re rethinking the potentials of outdoor media as public space media:

**Connect with citizens, not just consumers**

As digital platforms transform the way outdoor media operates, it’s time to think more carefully about how citizens can be brought meaningfully into the equation. DOOH targets its audiences purely as consumers, using inventory to sell brands. But what if digital screen networks outdoors engaged with audiences as citizens, who are part of local communities? 

Working from home measures have seen more and more people work, shop and play locally – described by Neighbourlytics as the ‘New Local’. This provides an opportunity for DOOH companies to support more localised campaigns as well, but also to think about their outdoor assets as being a service that supports local community creativity and resilience. 

This might mean supporting more not-for-profit campaigns that facilitate community connectedness, or highlight local issues. As an example, STORYBOX invites two-way dialogue by inviting contributions from audiences in the form of ‘Tiny Stories’, short written work under 120 words that are animated for exhibition outdoors. 

**Let’s see data used for good**

Increasingly, data will be fundamental to how this industry operates. But can this data-driven revolution be engineered in ways that benefit local governments and citizens? 

Local data can be used for much more than targeted brand messaging. What about health advice, targeting local postcodes showing higher rates of obesity? Or what about using localised data to shape creative visualisations of things like heat mapping, or urban canopy? 

Clearly DOOH operators access wide audiences through their prominent public positioning. Let’s see this used to promote greater awareness about local environmental risks. 

**Innovation in business models for public benefit, not just screen resolution?**

Digital disruption means platform business models are reshaping outdoor media in fundamental ways. But as we’ve seen in the social media space, there is a need to think carefully about the ‘ecosystem’ impacts of digital platforms, particularly if platforms engineer their architectures in ways that mean profits flow disproportionately away from content creators towards platform owners. 

In the outdoor media space, the shift towards digital provides an opportunity for more public interest content to be showcased, supported perhaps by revenues from ad sales. This is essentially the model that has shaped the commercial broadcasting industry. Broadcasting regulation required commercial TV networks to reinvest ad revenues – the money made by occupying valuable broadcasting spectrum – back into local content and children’s content. 

Those regulations reflected the fact that broadcasting spectrum was essentially a ‘public good’ and therefore those who profited out of it should give back in some way to the public. That’s how Australia’s regulatory environment for television fostered a vibrant television production sector for many years. 

Now, as digital disruption reshapes outdoor media, it’s time for similar thinking to be applied to the way digital out of home networks occupy important public spaces. If we don’t do this, we’ll be left with a kind of commercial TV network occupying our cities, where the only thing on is advertisements. That’s a bit like what Shell tried to get up and running in Australia, when it toured the ‘Shellevision’ version of television in the late 1950s. 

We need to rebalance expectations of programming on outdoor digital screens, in ways that reflect the highly visible positions they occupy in public spaces.  

Ultimately, deeper engagement of the innovative potentials of outdoor media as public space media should spell better outcomes for cities, communities and creatives. Ooh! Media used their dormant inventory during lockdowns to showcase artworks during the Melbourne lockdown, showing an appetite for creative engagement one hopes will continue. 

In the months and years ahead, let’s hope there’ll be more creative collaborations like this. And let’s demand more from this exciting and quickly evolving digital ecosystem – ensuring local communities and diverse voices have a role to play in shaping the future of outdoor. ‘Elevating the urban experience’ should mean, more than ever, connecting and supporting those who are in need, leveraging the inclusivity of public spaces as spaces that enhance a sense of place and belonging. 

And while we’re thinking about new possibilities, it might be time to think up a new name for this DOOH environment. 

*Dr Sarah Barns is an urban media strategist with experience in smart city strategy, strategic design and digital placemaking. In 2020 she launched STORYBOX as a public space media platform with anchor partners the ABC and City of Parramatta Council. Sarah published her first book, Platform Urbanism: Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities with Palgrave in 2019 and leads digital design initiatives as Director of ESEM Projects.*

Imagining new approaches to outdoor media 

New neighbourhoods, new ways of communicating

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Esem Projects was born as a creative collaboration between urban strategist and interpretation artist Dr. Sarah Barns and visual designer Michael Killalea. 

We began to collaborate in 2011 when we realised we could take a bit of Sarah's work, engaged with storytelling and research around how digital platforms and experiences were changing the way we interacted with places, and connect it with Michael's visual design and production skills. 

We called ourselves 'Esem' as a fusion of Sarah and Michael. 

'Esem Projects' reflects the broad range of practice areas that our collective expertise and interests encompass, spanning interpretation and design, participatory storytelling, immersive and experiential design, and sustainable futures. 

When we began our first projects, we saw ourselves as experimental mavericks, prototyping and testing the potentials of different experiential mediums to share stories in public spaces. We quickly developed a love for working in public spaces. We loved the unpredictability of the encounters we had with so many different people and places. 

**Fast forward...**

Since our first projects in 2011, we've taken on many projects both big and small, temporary and permanent. 

What underpins all our work is a desire to experiment playfully and respectfully with the digital storytelling potentials of shared spaces. 

Along the way, we've acquired a lot of technical and programming skills, and experience in participatory design and engagement. We also manage a fair amount of our own hardware and digital platforms, which means we can now program a range of events and activations for indoor and outdoor spaces. 

We love challenge of sharing a story or idea in ways that can be experiential and immersive. But that doesn't mean everything we do has to be cutting edge from a technology perspective. 

Connection to people and places, while expanding knowledge and empathy with diverse people, remain core to the work that we do. 

Learn more about what drives Esem Projects 

Why we do what we do

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*Esem Projects Co-Director Sarah Barns is a columnist for Inside Story, where she writes on urbanism and technology. You can read her articles [here](https://insidestory.org.au/authors/sarah-barns/).* 

*Making Space was first published 30 March 2020, in the first few weeks of the Covid-19 lockdowns.*



Public squares and downtown shopping strips are nearly empty. The roar of traffic is subdued; neighbourhoods are left with birdsong and the sounds of children playing in backyards. Trains, trams and buses once bursting with rush-hour commuters are running close to empty.

Quite suddenly, doing one’s daily work no longer means long and frustrating commutes across sprawling metropolitan regions. Most offices are shut. The bars are shut, the clubs are empty, the city promenades are deserted. Many people find themselves out of a job, their gigs cancelled, their shifts gone, their employee status furloughed.

And so the dynamic rhythms of an urbane, social, inner-city life are suddenly and radically compressed — confined to a walk in the park, perhaps, a cycle around safer streets, a dash to the supermarket for essentials, and quite possibly many more trips to the biscuit cupboard.

This time, we know, will pass, but we don’t know quite when. In the meantime, how we see how our cities will need to change. Mapping and reporting a city’s rhythms over coming months will require a shift in how we think about the role and purpose of our urban spaces.

In recent years, cities have been powerhouses of the global economy. The “triumph of the city” — in Edward Glaeser’s famous turn of phrase — has been evidenced in the greater productivity and innovation that results from proximity and density.

But we now face an uncertain era in which many of the usual indicators — economic output, occupancy rates, congestion, employment — tell a story of sudden decline, precarity and isolation.

Density suddenly looks dangerous. Gathering may breed sickness.

Over the coming months, and perhaps even years, as we look ahead to uncertain recovery periods, the indicators used to judge how well a city is performing will likely stay dire. In the meantime, we can expect to see the emergence of different ways of living in cities together. Perhaps, too, we might even find better ways of valuing these things.

As the urbanist Richard Sennett reflected in his 2015 book Building and Dwelling, “the built environment is one thing; how we dwell in it another.” The urban economy has taken a huge hit: yet here we remain, in densely packed neighbourhoods, dwelling together.

Many of us find ourselves living much more locally. Gone are the frenetic dynamics of a centrifugal city that sees office workers from across a metropolitan region journeying in and out of central business districts.

At the same time, parks are busier than ever, for now, as many of us have been forced to trade regular trips to the gym for a jog, a bike ride or a skate. The search is on for local walks with not too many people, a secret beach or river run — staying away from popular places and looking for the least-worn tracks.

Cyclists find themselves on much safer streets; air quality is improving. With urban traffic down by a quarter or more, the opportunities for active transport are greater than ever. Der Spiegel reports the German government recommending cycling in order to maintain safe social distancing but also to strengthen lungs, lower blood pressure and clear airways. Perhaps governments can accelerate this shift in Australian cities too?

Dwelling together, while maintaining social distancing, provokes us to discover ways to congregate in novel ways. Residents of an apartment block in Waterloo, Sydney, gathered on balconies to join two opera singers in a rendition of “I Still Call Australia Home,” no doubt inspired by similar scenes on balconies in Italy. In the coming weeks we’ll no doubt see more experiments in community singing.

Some people are trading hectic travel schedules for closer observations of home lives. As one suddenly stranded-at-home sociologist posted on Twitter: “Things you notice on a medium-density housing balcony in #partiallockdown: bubbles floating by; a man dancing with his toddler in a bedroom; a woman skipping with rope on her 7th floor balcony; the smell of delicious food being cooked.”

Sound enthusiasts are trading novel recordings of their neighbourhoods quietened under lockdown; gardening stores report spikes in seedling sales as neglected vegetable patches are tended to with new vigour. Kind-hearted neighbours are doing letter drops offering to assist the elderly with shopping errands.

Local governments have begun to play a critical role in supporting community resilience. Major city councils and arts-funding organisations have launched new grant programs for artists who have lost gigs, reallocating future initiatives and reprioritising spending.

Can local governments follow this lead to free up funds to support vital new community initiatives? What might these initiatives look like, in a world of social distancing?

Place management and placemaking — the creative programming of public spaces that has flourished in recent years — can’t be “activating” spaces to bring a crowd, but perhaps other methods can be used to forge connections between people living together in neighbourhoods. This is a time when community resilience is vital.

In a Covid-19 world placemaking may mean helping neighbours congregate and connect digitally, curating community events online, or using public spaces to promote the services being offered by local businesses.

Combined with digital infrastructures and tools, social-distancing measures have accelerated our migration into virtual spaces. Call volumes are up 50 per cent in recent weeks, broadband demand up by 40 per cent. Dropouts are common as telecommunications demand skyrockets.

Social distancing has left us hustling on the information superhighway like never before, alt-tabbing IRL over to the URLs — especially to videoconferencing via Zoom, Houseparty, Skype, FaceTime or Google Hangouts.

Our social media platforms have become vital digital public squares, places for gathering and sharing news of the day. All-night dance parties are planning upcoming streamed events. Yogis and Pilates instructors are streaming one-on-one and group classes. Digital platforms like Slack are seeing spikes in new paid customers unlike anything seen before. Coronavirus will no doubt act as an accelerant for new habits for remote working. Will the sudden pivot towards teleworking take hold?

Likewise, new digital tools and apps enabling citizens to report symptoms and track local coronavirus cases are springing up. Stopping the community transmission of coronavirus will require more vigilant tracking of cases, and tools like bluetooth and mobile GPS allow those with suspected symptoms to report their cases, and where they are, so community members can better judge their risks when out in public.

Will such efforts at sousveillance — which essentially turn surveillance from a top-down activity to one enacted voluntarily, from below, by citizens — encourage a move towards more community-based, crowdsourced care, facilitating greater awareness of those who are struggling with health or accessibility issues in your area? Or will we see more acceptance of data-tracking by authorities for health-related, or insurance, or other disciplinary purposes? Time will tell, but perhaps we can be hopeful about how localised data might be used for good, not only for the benefit of multinationals.

Perhaps, for a brief spell, we can also wonder what a world of slow cities might look like. Environmental activists have long argued for limits to growth in order to protect vital ecosystems and to slow rising carbon emissions.

As city productivity measures plummet, we can also look to the ideas of “degrowth” activists, who see in the topography of the Australian suburban form abundant opportunities for slower, more sustainable cities. While material wealth may be less abundant, can communities learn to adapt existing public spaces for local needs like agriculture, food waste or sharing cooperatives?

During the second world war, “victory gardens” sprang up across Australian cities to increase the volume of local food production. Even after threats to agriculture supply dissipated, home gardens and gardens in parks were maintained and supported by local governments to support community morale. We might envisage similar changes to our urban fabric over the coming years.

In these past weeks, we’ve witnessed how vulnerable our densely populated cities are to sudden shock. Coronavirus may not only force us into domestic isolation for months; it may also leave our cities poorer, and growth rates lower.

Perhaps we can start looking for ways to better value the role played by city spaces in supporting measures of health and wellbeing. If this global pandemic reminds us of anything, it’s that imaginative and creative responses to crisis will always emerge — and maybe even thrive — at the local level, in a park or street or community space near you. Perhaps this is a time for us to discover the art of dwelling, not just building. •

Making Space: What does the coronavirus mean for Australian cities?

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*To mark the 50th anniversary of Hugh Stretton’s Ideas for Australian Cities, Inside Story commission me to write a piece on digital technology in Australian cities today. Many thanks to Inside Story, and to CAL, for the opportunity to reflect on the relevance of Stretton’s work to today’s digitally infused urban experiences.*

This is an introductory excerpt below.  The full article can be found at [Inside Story. ](http://sarahbarns.me/writing/2020/3/15/you-me-data-and-the-city)

It’s time to head to the airport. Bag packed, call the cab. Better make it an Uber — at least you know exactly when your car will arrive. And your driver’s behaviour is being graded out of five stars, which I’ve found means the trip is more likely to be convivial. I often find myself deep in conversation with Uber drivers, in a way that’s rare in a taxi. Perhaps we’re both performing for the algorithm, or at least made to feel safer in the knowledge that each of us has a stake in the conversation going well.

I wait seven minutes before the car arrives. My driver this time is Australian-born, and we get chatting pretty quickly. I learn he’s driving Ubers on the side while doing his MBA. While we talk, we also negotiate with the digital map that lurks on the dashboard, giving us instructions on where to go. I have my own favourite routes through the local streets that get me to Sydney’s airport, but the map, fed by data obtained from all of us going about our daily business, has its own ideas. I tell my driver about a photographer friend of mine, also an Uber driver on the side, who likes to run two versions of Google maps when he’s driving, one within the Uber app and one straight from Google. My friend says the Uber route is just slightly longer, and therefore more expensive, most of the time. That seems hard to be believe, my driver told me, but yeah, maybe.

My driver and I get to talking about Uber’s opening up to public shareholders earlier this year, which saw the company attract a lower sharemarket price than was anticipated, mostly because of revelations by the company that it was struggling to make a profit from ride-sharing. My driver was pretty well informed about all this. “For Uber, long term, it’s about the data, not the ride-sharing,” he explained to me, not knowing quite how obsessed I was with the company myself, and with the rise of data-driven urban platforms more generally. I nodded and agreed. Yep, it’s all about the data.

We’d probably been reading similar stories about Uber in the news recently. Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive, seems to be running a PR campaign about the company’s ambitions to become the “broker of human movement” — specifically, of “people, food, and freight” — in cities. Kind of like the Amazon of transportation, he has been saying. When it was first launched, Uber created a new marketplace for ride-sharing by better connecting people who needed a lift somewhere with people who could trade some, or most, of their spare time for extra money. Uber Eats, launched in 2012, has likewise provided a simple way for people to order takeaway food, by connecting these people with others in their city who would happily deliver it to them for a small fee without having to be tied to one particular restaurant. Uber Freight is coming too, an app that “matches carriers with shippers” in a way that presumably will aim to beat systems people use now to get their freight where it needs to be.

I wonder aloud, to my driver, what kind of “broker” of human movement Uber is. Is it really so “data-driven’? Isn’t this still, really, about human capital, and how it’s being put to use? Uber spends a lot of money on incentivising drivers, “shippers” and food deliverers to use its platform to generate their own income, perhaps swapping what they’re already doing for this gig, or perhaps squeezing it into their spare time to make some extra cash. The amount of money Uber spends on marketing and user incentives is why they don’t yet make money on their ride-sharing business, despite the considerable fees they charge drivers, food deliverers and restaurants to use the platform. Being big, being part of more and more urban interactions taking place across every city around the world, is what matters most here. I put it to my Uber driver: Isn’t that just classic rent-seeking behaviour?

The difference here is the data, he explains to me. He says “dayta,” like an American, not “darta” like most Australians. You can’t work in tech or business these days and get away with “darta.” Uber can make all kinds of uses of the dayta created by users — which means, he explains, their brokerage service is not non-productive, in that classic rent-seeking sense. They’ve accelerated into self-driving cars, and they can also use all that dayta they’re generating to capture a granular sense of how cities really work.

*Yes yes, that dayta.*

It’s one of those conversations that pokes around some big topics, but won’t jump fully in. My Uber driver and I know we’re only going to be speaking for a few more fleeting moments before I jump out of the car with a cheery goodbye, trying not to slam the door too hard lest I damage my rider rating. Good luck with everything! I say.

Once out of the car, the Uber app hits me with a rating request. How was your ride today? I enthusiastically tap on the five-star option, and choose “Great conversation” to describe why my trip was so great.

The experience I’ve just recounted is not quite true — it’s more an amalgam of many different Uber trips I’ve taken over the past few years, and the conversations I tend to strike up with drivers. During much of Uber’s life in Australian cities, I’ve been reflecting on how platforms of this kind have been affecting the way we live in cities together.

Despite all kinds of misgivings about the kind of company Uber is — a massive, US-based outfit that fleeces the very people it seeks to “partner” with to sell its technology, and puts taxi drivers like my neighbour out of a job — I’ve become fascinated by the kinds of interactions it and similar companies have introduced.

There’s a sense of heightened sociability between strangers that seems to occur, perhaps because we’re protected by that threat of algorithmic-generated banishment if either party takes a misstep. Or maybe it’s the kind of people who have been quick to take up Uber as a transport option. As an iconic company of the “gig economy,” Uber often attracts people who aren’t looking to drive cars for the rest of their lives — which means you get to chat with people like my Uber driver, who also happened to be studying for an MBA and thinking about the future of data platforms.

Uber is also, in many senses, the realisation of a quite radical idea advocated for many years by sustainability planners. What if we could get people to stop thinking of transport through the lens of the privately held motor vehicle and instead encourage people to share their driving experience? Couldn’t this cut the number of cars on the road, and free up space for other kinds of uses?

Like the car-sharing company GoGet, founded by sustainability advocate Bruce Jeffreys, Uber advocated its way into our cities as an innovative way to get people to move around them differently. Assets once considered purely private could become shared resources. Instead of ownership being the goal, we could reduce consumption and shift towards an economy based on access.

Apart from GoGet, these companies haven’t focused on creating cities that use fewer of the planet’s scarce resources. For Uber, creating a technology platform to improve human movement was more a way to grow a company quickly — really quickly, faster than any company before, generating huge benefits for its business leaders, investors, and shareholders.

For a company like Uber, the future of cities, and how we live in them, is primarily about the possibility that digital infrastructure built today will stick around as a foundational platform for future generations, in cities all around the world, to use as their first choice. Time to go to the airport? Better Uber it. Getting people around the world to use your company name as a verb to describe some of the most basic things we do in cities is, really, the ultimate, multi-billion-dollar goal. Want to know where you’re going? Better Google it.

Those who think about cities and digital innovation are often people like my Uber driver, busy coming up with start-up business ideas in this brave new world of tech-driven urban interaction. Many, it seems, focus their minds on new ways to do takeaway food. After all, people are time poor, but they also need to eat. Why not better service the needs of those who not only lack the time or wherewithal to cook, but would also prefer not to have to actually go fetch their order?

The success of digital food delivery apps has probably caught your attention. Australia is, it seems, becoming “an Uber Eats nation,” as one journalist puts it, with online food delivery services now worth 12 per cent of all sales in the $44 billion cafe, restaurant and takeaway food industry, and one in three adults living in Australian cities reporting use of food delivery apps.

No wonder, then, that moving around our major cities now seems to involve a lot of interaction with bike-riders carrying large square boxes of food to the time-poor customers. A relative of mine has told me that university campuses, like University of Sydney and UNSW, are hotspots for these delivery services, as many overseas students prefer the ease of using an app to order their lunches rather than having to negotiate campus food options.

Australian digital entrepreneurs are hoping to cash in on the trend. Two founders of a company called Kloopr have created an app that allows anyone travelling from point A to point B to become a delivery driver. Just think: you might be able to earn a bit of money on your way home, just by checking if one of your neighbours has ordered take-out. Others, like Bring Me Home, let you buy and pick up discounted surplus food from nearby cafes, restaurants, bakeries, groceries and supermarkets. This company is targeting Australia’s food waste problem in a way that’s also attractive to those who would prefer not to cook tonight or go out.

In other words, today’s digital platforms have made Australian cities attract spaces for disruptive new ideas about how to connect people differently. Most Australian citizens are now equipped with their own GPS receiver, bundled into the shiny, glowing, advanced computational device they carry around with them everywhere, otherwise known as the smartphone. On that phone are likely to be abundant maps, apps, recording devices, listening devices, maybe fitness trackers, maybe also air quality monitors. The phone many of us are carrying with us may also be listening to us in various kinds of ways — whether through the tiny microphones used to listen in on conversations (who knew?!), or by “listening” in the sense of analysing the information we churn through as we go about our daily business.

The translation of myriad kinds of urban interaction into data points for more sales is what attracts the brightest and the wealthiest to thinking about all kinds of new ideas for Australian cities. How can all this information be used to build new businesses, sell more, but also make our cities “smarter,” more responsive to infrastructural breakdowns, “closing the loop” between human interaction (or malfunction), infrastructure, services, and utilities?

Those people who come up with the best and brightest ideas for using data to make Australian cities work better are showered with investment money to help them scale as fast as possible. One such company, Neighbourlytics, offers “the data you need, to create cities people love.” Founded by two Australian women, this urban platform offers “simple ways to collect and understand rich digital data about what makes places thrive” by using social media data to capture community sentiment about a place. It’s particularly useful for real estate companies and city leaders who want to “see places through local’s eyes.”

Countless other digital platforms are also vying to change how we learn about, manage, govern, experience, connect and interact with each other in cities. For each, it is the data — the dayta — that drives innovation and new ideas about Australian cities. If data is the new oil, cities are the new goldmines, ripe for data-mining machine-learning, behavioural nudging and, ultimately, value-extraction.

[Read more](http://sarahbarns.me/writing/2020/3/15/you-me-data-and-the-city)

You, Me, Data and the City

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*This article was originally published in Future West (Australian Urbanism) Magazine in Nov 2017, and subsequently republished in The Conversation in December 2017. [View the piece here](https://assemblepapers.com.au/2018/03/08/from-url-to-irl/)* 

Picture the scene. 

You’re on the train on your daily commute, head bowed, peering at your phone. 

A cavalcade of news stories, friends’ holiday snaps and random promoted images of trending slippers pops up on your social media feed, which you idly push along in search of something fresh. You look up. Most of the people around you are doing something similar. Connecting intensely with their smartphones, and not with anyone near them.

It’s a scene repeated across Australian cities every weekday morning. More and more of our daily lives – how we work, how we navigate, how we learn and how we entertain ourselves – take place through the interface of glowing rectangular screens. There is concern about what smartphones are doing to our attention spans, our capacity for random human interactions and our self-esteem.

But what does the age of the smartphone mean for our cities, and for how we design our public spaces?

It’s a question that has intrigued tech futurists for decades. 

Australian-born architect Bill Mitchell trained a generation of digital urbanists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to imagine and plan for the coming “city of bits”. In his 1995 book City of Bits, he likened the impact of the infobahn to that of Haussmann’s 19th-century Parisian boulevards, in their capacity to radically reshape the city.

Unlike Haussmann’s network of avenues, parks and water infrastructure, the “invisible city” of the 21st century would, Mitchell argued, be shaped more by the logic of networked data. Places would be “constructed virtually by software instead of physically from stones and timbers”.

Mitchell wasn’t the only one who believed our digital future would dramatically reshape our cities. Media futurist Marshall McLuhan speculated in 1964 that the coming “global village” would mean that “the city as a form of major dimensions must inevitably dissolve like the fading shot in a movie”. Our need for groups of people to be near to each other, he believed, would become redundant as more and more of our connections would occur virtually.

Of course, the future didn’t quite turn out that way. Vibrant, productive physical places still matter. Architects and designers are still building places of “stones and timbers”.

Smartphone-equipped citizens need not be tethered to their desks to surf the infobahn. The Internet of Things (IoT) entails more and more urban services and infrastructure being connected via tiny distributed sensors. The virtual space of the internet has become increasingly interconnected with our urban fabric.

**Experimenting with the city of data**

The city of bits has become the city of data. The millions of daily interactions and transactions in cities – volumes of energy used; movements of people, traffic, water and waste; social media interactions; emails; financial and retail transactions; and multi-modal transport flows – are generating huge volumes of “data exhaust”. These data are increasingly being put to work in an attempt to better manage the pressures and challenges our cities face.

Many hope this age of big data will lead to smarter, more responsive cities. Australian cities have begun trialling smart technologies – parking apps, smart lighting trials, public Wi-Fi – to improve basic city services. The Australian government’s A$50 million Smart Cities and Suburbs Program will help scale up these investments to allow for more ambitious trials.

Many smart-city technologies are designed to help local governments better monitor services such as waste collection and roads maintenance. For example, the Western Australian city of Joondalup is partnering with Telstra to test IoT technologies to better monitor environmental factors like temperature, humidity, pollution, light and noise levels in real time.

The recently released Smarter Planning Perth (SPP) map allows government agencies and utilities involved in infrastructure works to better collaborate, share costs and co-ordinate timetables. This is a platform designed to minimise works congestion and cut project time frames, so the city’s road networks run more efficiently.

But what kinds of places will these smart technologies and services actually create? With a focus on data analytics, efficiency and automation, there is no guarantee that the latest data-driven technologies will necessarily help our public places thrive.

As the digital urbanist Rick Robinson wrote in a 2016 article, commercial agendas for smart cities are:

> *just as likely to reduce our life expectancy and social engagement by making it easier to order high-fat, high-sugar takeaway food on our smartphones to be delivered to our couches by drones whilst we immerse ourselves in multiplayer virtual reality games.*

**Places of ‘stone and timber’ still matter**

Data-driven technologies may make cities work more efficiently, but that may not always be the only thing we want out of places. One of the great lessons of the past two decades is that, despite our growing dependence on digital platforms of communication, spaces that enable us to connect and mingle in real life still matter. Our enduring connection to places of “stones and timber” surely reflects our all-too-human desire not only for seamless interfaces and swipeable apps, but also for places of disturbance, delight, random noises and chance encounters.

As the US urbanist Jane Jacobs observed many decades ago, good places are nourished by diversity and difference, not uniformity and efficiency.

*Further reading by Sarah Barns: [ What might Jane Jacobs say about smart cities?](https://theconversation.com/what-might-jane-jacobs-say-about-smart-cities-58278#:~:text=She%20saw%20the%20modernist%20vision%20of%20cities%20as%3A&text=The%20ballet%20of%20the%20good,planning%20would%20become%20its%20orthodoxy.)*

We need, therefore, to ensure the new-found insights generated by all of our cities’ data works in the service of good places. How can this be done?

For a start, putting data to use may lead to a very analogue solution. For example, more fine-grained urban data that alerts us to temperature anomalies in different places should be used not only to monitor, but also to cool. This means more trees, not just more sensors.

Many cities have begun to design smart bus stops equipped with heat-responsive water misters and blinds, so these become places of respite and shelter for weary travellers. This approach uses digital technologies to artificially “switch on” natural services like water-cooling and shade in places that have, as a result of the use of materials like bitumen and concrete, become urban heat islands, exposing some of our most vulnerable to extremely hot conditions.

Digital technologies can also help us navigate and experience places through the events and characters that have shaped their unique identities. Digital overlays, soundscapes and augmented media can provide us with interactive experiences of the the built environments of today and their past “lives”.

Digital lighting technology allows residents of a building slated for demolition to express how they feel. Jessica Hromas, Author provided

These uses of technology allow for different, perhaps more intimate, interactions between people and places. Crucially, augmented experiences of the history of a place can help us recover what has been lost through decades of urban transformation.

Digital technologies can also be used to disrupt official narratives of place. At Sydney’s Waterloo public housing tower, slated for demolition in a new phase of urban renewal, community artists worked with public housing tenants to create a large-scale digital artwork that expresses the residents’ emotional connections to their homes.

Embedded digital technologies were used to subvert the usual mechanistic processes of community consultation managed by development agencies. The spectacular piece of digital art worked to highlight that residents should not be forgotten in the renewal process.

Clearly, the possibilities of digital technologies can be used to confound and enlarge our experiences of and connections to place.

As McLuhan and Mitchell would no doubt have realised by now, with the rise of digital technologies public spaces have become more, not less, important to the experience of cities. As we design the digital interfaces and data-driven services to support our places and spaces, the evolving possibilities of place and digital publics will no doubt continue to surprise.

*The Conversation is co-publishing articles with Future West (Australian Urbanism), produced by the University of Western Australia’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts. These articles look towards the future of urbanism, taking Perth and Western Australia as its reference point, with the latest series focusing on the public domain.*

*Image: Feeling blue: Waterloo towers resident Fiona in her apartment. Nic Walker, Author provided.* 





Article commission for Future West / Assembly Papers 

From URL to IRL: Reflections on urban digital design

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During 2015 and 2016 Esem Projects worked with the Arts Centre of Christchurch to establish a curatorial vision for a reinvigorated science museum in the heart of Christchurch.

The museum redesign has formed part of the $290 million restoration of the Arts Centre precinct, following widespread damage to the Centre's 23 heritage buildings as a result of the devastating 2010 and 2011 earthquakes. Formerly the site of Canterbury College (later University of Canterbury), it was here, in a 'Den' beneath a lecture theatre, that the eminent scientist Ernest Rutherford first conducted his electrical researches as a young student.

The space is steeped in history, story, and potential. 

The curatorial vision established a framework through which to connect the historical story of Rutherford's scientific impact with the new strategic vision for the Arts Centre as a vibrant hub for creative entrepreneurs. This allowed us to really emphasise the enduring relationships between art and science, including the role of music in shaping scientific breakthroughs, and the role of early twentieth century physics in shaping our modern society.

Perhaps most of all, what I loved about this project was the chance to reflect on what makes us curious - and how curiosity and experimentation has played such a decisive and yet undervalued role in shaping scientific genius.

For the project I managed a multi-disciplinary team of designers and architects to deliver a new design concept for the interior refit.

Having delivered a new strategic direction for the Den in June 2015, Esem Projects were subsequently selected by the Arts Centre of Christchurch as lead Curatorial and Design consultants during the project delivery phase.

During this phase I led the commissioning of project teams to produce a set of immersive and hands-on interactive displays relating to the site itself, and the story of atomic physics and its quest for new sources of energy to fuel the modern world. 

Some of the exhibits featured in the Den are here below. You can learn more about Esem Projects and their work on Rutherford's Den here.

**Creative & Design Teams**

Design & Curatorial Lead: Esem Projects (Sarah Barns and Michael Killalea)
Exhibition Design: Sago Design & Blac & Co
Digital Design: Lightwell Studio (Rutherford Wall)
Digital Design: Code on Canvas (Radiant Matter)
Sound Design: Gary Sinclair, Tactile Music
Animations, Visual FX: Mike Daly



The art of the scientific imagination: Reflections on the redesign of Rutherford's Den

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This collaborative physical interactive invites visitors to reflect on their own journeys of learning and discovery. It asks visitors to ask a basic question: 'How do the spaces around you change the way you think?'

The interactive is positioned inside the entrance to [Rutherford's Den](http://www.esemprojects.com/project/rutherfords-den/), a place where acclaimed scientist took refuge to do his electrical researches as a Masters student in 1895. He would then go on to join the Cavendish Laboratory and change the course of physics forever. 

Visitors can reflect on how different spaces make them feel, choosing from the options: Creative, Focused, Distracted, Bored. 

Each emotion has a corresponding colour magnet to attached to each space. 

The spaces to chose from include 'A busy cafe', 'The library', 'My office', 'My bedroom', 'The classroom' and so on. 

As visitors responses combine throughout the course of a day, new visual patterns emerge, based on the combinations of magnets and their colour profiles. Each day generates its own set of colourful patterns created by visitors. 

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A new physical interactive by Esem Priojects 

Thinking Spaces: A physical interactive by Esem Projects

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*A reflection on the immersive audio artwork [The City of Forking Paths](https://www.cityartsydney.com.au/artwork/the-city-of-forking-paths/), by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.  Commissioned by the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014) as a City of Sydney legacy artwork as part of the City Art Collection.* This article was written by Sarah Barns in 2014 and appears on her personal blog [SitesandSounds](https://sitesandsounds.net.au/forkingpaths/)


So this is how it goes.

You are at Customs House, down at Circular Quay, at dusk, or shortly after. You must be there, at Customs House, at dusk, or shortly after, otherwise the whole thing won’t work.

Janet Cardiff has been here, at Customs House, before, and you are now using your smartphone to see what she has filmed for you to see. What she saw, what you see through the camera view of your smartphone, is quite a lot like what you see, although what she saw was different, too, because it was at another time, though not another space. So different people were milling about in the foyer, they were peering down at the giant model of the city sunken below the surface of the glass floor, pretty much like people now are doing. The model, quite a spectacle, is always itself intriguing and slightly unnerving, with or without a smartphone to look at it through. Janet thinks so too.

Janet is talking to you, she has constructed a soundscape for you to listen to while you follow the journey she has made from this point, around dusk or slighly afterwards, into a city of forking paths. Janet wants you to turn around, to walk towards the building exit, paying particular attention to a man in a dark jacket, leaning by a column, who she saw and she filmed when she was here, before you were here, she wants you to look at the same column and see where the man who is no longer there was standing.

She takes you outside, to the steps of Customs House where a great wide expanse of grey windswept tiles will always be there to greet and confound you. The great wide expanse of grey windswept tiles confounded her too, when she was here. You are now standing on the steps of Customs House, holding a smartphone up and looking through it as though about to take a photo, with headphones on.

The soundscape you are listening to features Janet’s voice, but also the sounds of the space you’re in, when she was here, which she recorded binaurally, in order to sound life-like. A crowd of kids passed Janet by when she stood here, surveying the expanse, they pass you by, too, aurally that is, from the top right of your vision to behind your right shoulder. You can hear them so clearly, and the life-like sounds of these chatterers passing makes you want to swivel around and catch them. But of course they’re not there.

Janet plays these tricks for you. She uses the gaps in time between her being here and you being here to knock at the surfaces of what we see, loosening the tightness of reality into something that might be recomposed just a little. 

Is it time, or space, that she’s unravelling? A bit of both, perhaps.

This is her art of ‘physical film’ making: using the space of the city, your passage through it, as filmic substance. This is different to making a film about a city, about a place, about a person; her medium is the physical inhabiting of a place as filmic substance. The trick here is that what is mostly making this film is not so much what we see but what we hear. It is the sound that sculpts our physical film, just as a film soundtrack will always establish the dramatic pretext of a visual narrative.

Janet conjures from this space here a performance. What could be? 

Rollerbladers spinning in action, street musicians, perhaps? Let’s see them. They come, they go. Edits in the filming are not smooth. Time and its possibilities are sliced up, orthogonal. Your intimate space is part of this too: a man is seen approaching, he comes a bit too close, he is close to your field of view now, his voice is close to you. It is time to move on. Janet tells you it is time to move on, to follow her steps, keeping the view you see through your camera view matched as much as possible to your own position.

You wander slowly, stiltedly, like a person idiotically trying to walk with a smartphone held up in front of their face, towards Circular Quay, now amongst the flocks of people going about their business at dusk, or slightly afterwards.

You have Janet telling you she’s an artist, she’s alone here in this city, she tells you she’s always an artist alone in a city, somewhere, trying to find some place to eat. She sounds lonely, a bit bored too. She’s seeing tourists here, this is a tourist place, she’s wondering about the networks of travel and mobility that could be mapped here, lines of flight fanning out from this point to many myriad destinations across the globe.

Talking to you, she’s your fellow traveller, we’re both here together, we can share this space, this space fractured by time but knitted back together as filmic space. We encounter the man again: he is the antagonist she created for this physical-film, he is speaking to us now about multiple realities, the multiverse, he asks what if all this was only one sliver of reality? What if there were many more?

We are now becoming the trick. The time in which we’re standing here, at Circular Quay, slightly after dusk, watching this man, through the camera view of our smartphone, listening to Janet tell us to walk to the harbour master’s steps, we’re only one of these slivers of time, too, with no greater claim to know this space than any other of these characters, past or present.

We are standing at the very place where Europeans first settled in Australia. Janet tells us this. The harbour master’s stairs, so different in scale to the ferry docks, the city skyline behind us, feel like a trace from this other time of early settlement. She takes us down the stairs, the stairs are covered in water from the harbour. Is this allowed? Can we get wet feet? She takes us down to the bottom of the stairs, so we stand below the promenade. We can’t see him, but we can hear behind us the man we encountered before getting agitated now, then suddenly somehow Janet has fallen in to the harbour, he has likely pushed her, for a second, in our camera view, there is only water, a view back up to the Quay, to where we are standing. She quickly recovers, it seems, and we are asked to move on.

And so there is real drama in this city-film, but only a little. The falling-in incident goes unremarked upon for the rest of the walk. We are led into the Rocks, taken down some of the more enchanting little streets and alleys one can encounter in this oldest part of Sydney town. Janet knows how to pick a route.

She lets us look with new eyes at the work of historians, curators and landscape architects who have crafted little enclaves within the city here that let the past speak for itself; the little colonial house with no walls but a door and a frame, wooden furniture left to mark the former uses of spaces, we hear the echoes of tour guides as we step gingerly down the uneven sandstone stairs, we hear torrential rain falling, as is so common in Sydney, though it is not falling as we walk this evening.

We encounter more performers: people who make music out of the textures of the alleyways, the bins, the rock faces, discarded metals, steps. Our antagonist continues to visit us, threatening and slightly agitating. He is a loose canon.

We hear residents of Millers Point whose public houses are now being sold off. We hear Janet’s co-creator George talking to Janet sometimes. He says: “think of what we could play here – all that stuff we listened to while researching for this piece” and we here a selection of random old recordings that must be related somehow.

Janet loves the little old terraces that look down on Pottinger Place, so enfeebled in their domesticity against the dramatic sandstone rockface they sit upon. They prompt her to remember the nightmares she experienced as a child; she looks up at the windows and wonders what deeds of wrongdoing could be placed there, in a spooky film.

There are generations of families going back in time here; the alleys are layered by memories of childhood, kids swimming out into the harbour from the wharf. We depart the scene, the forking path takes us away, back to the Harbour Bridge, Janet is noticing the tree roots in the standstone rocks as we clamber up stairs, then she leaves us at the entrance to the foot tunnel under the bridge.

We are left alone, with our smartphone. The smartphone is still playing the film, it takes us now through the illuminated fluorescent walkway, the view tips upside down, perhaps we are the ones underneath the harbour now, alone here, with our smartphones, in the city, at night.

The work of Janet Cardiff and George Bueres Miller has spanned cities and continents, forests and galleries, small boats and abandoned filing cabinets. These artists are in the business of making magic spaces.

They come from the line of Borges, they return again and again to his stories, his metaphors, this city of forking paths is a map that has become as big as the world. For this Sydney project, Janet and George worked on and off for about a year, commissioned by the City of Sydney as the ‘inaugural artwork’ within its ‘permanent art collection’.

How strange for a work such as this to be classified a permanent artwork. Whether an app is a permanent thing is one thing. But the experience conjured is also the very antithesis of what we would ordinarily describe as a ‘permanent artwork’: an experience of time, fractured by spatial passages, layered and forked and stacked without end.

The work is also described as ‘Augmented Reality’, aligning with the tech-boom taking the ad world by storm. We are all going to be augmenting our realities all the time, soon, likely not with clunky smartphones but watches, glasses, earpieces. How quaint all of our glowing rectangles will soon become!

This artwork riffs of our curiosity with what augmentation might feel like, but this is not really ‘digital art’ in a technical sense, there is no geodata underpinning it, but there are loose references to its conventions. You can only access the app that drives the tour at Customs House, from dusk. Any other time or place and you are locked out.

The artists seem to be tricking up the technology conventions here: augmented reality is not only about space as code, it is also about space as a remembered, fractured, haunted territory. At one point we see in the crowds only people walking, looking at their glowing rectangles, talking on them, for Janet this feels ghastly, you know she wants people to see beyond them, just as she uses the device to show you this.

In 1996 Janet made a soundwalk for London’s Brick Lane called The Missing Voice and you could listen to it using a walkman; you had to borrow the tape from the library. She’s added video now and the sound is better but her tugging at the possibilities of space and time plays with the same basic toolset: the re-sculpting of embodied experience using the ultimate augmented reality that is sound, using her voice, urging intimacy, speaking loneliness, placing the strangeness of our urban natures back into our immediate view.

We here in Sydney will know our streets to be a little bit different now that Janet’s been here.

http://www.cardiffmiller.com/

This is the first of two pieces reflecting on The City of Forking Paths

Reflecting on A City of Forking Paths by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2014)

A wrinkle in time, a City of Forking Paths

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*When you walk the streets of central Sydney today, you’ll see what a difference the 1960s made to the city. The AMP Building at Circular Quay, the MLC Centre at Martin Place, Australia Square on George St; countless more, all built during a decade that lifted the city skyline to dramatic new heights. It was a golden age of property speculation and reinforced concrete.*

This article was published by Sarah Barns in 2013 as part of a book on urban creative practices published by UTS. It reflects on the work of making the public art project Last Drinks - One More Round at the Australia House, delivered by Esem Projects for the City of Sydney in 2012 for Art&About Sydney. 

Read the article [here](https://www.dropbox.com/s/9p899ce0jcky9u5/Concete_Remains_Barns_2013.pdf?dl=0
). 







Book chapter featured in the 2013 publication 'Creative Suburbia' 

The Concrete Remains: The Art of the Modern in Downtown Sydney

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*How many things the night recalls, and how we weep for them though they never were!* Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.

The nights are playing their tricks on us.

Come sundown, large-scale illuminated projections are transforming cities into magical caverns of light and magic, colour and spectacle. 
Melbourne’s White Night attracted some half a million nocturnal gatherers, Sydney’s [Vivid Festival](https://youtu.be/o5ZvCv7yUKk) is ‘like New Years Eve’ for two weeks in July, Sydney’s coldest month. Public light shows are proliferating across cities and towns, in steets and back alleys: I Light Marina Bay (Singapore), Lux (Wellington), City Evolutions (Newcastle), Melbourne’s Gertrude St Projection Festival, every year New York’s Materials & Methods produce projection festivals in partnership with local artists and lighting designers.

This Nuit Blanche concept is not new: in recent years, the success of Paris’ Nuit Blanche, which began in 2002, has inspired a pan-European event called “Nuits Blanches Europe” involving night festivals across cities like Brussels, Rome, Madrid and Bucarest. The Son Et Lumiere concept, credited to Paul Robert-Houdin, was a form of nighttime entertainment usually presented in an outdoor venue of historic significance and first held at the Château de Chambord in France in 1952.

This night-time immersion of the arts has been hosted in more than 120 cities around the world including Brussels in Belgium, New York in the US and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. One of the most popular ‘Nuit Blanche’ celebrations around the world with tourists and residents in early March is in Montréal, Canada. It antes up some 180 mostly free indoor and outdoor activities including installations, exhibitions, live performances and screenings that light up the night in the city. The cities exchange experiences, projects and artists and new cities become candidates each year.

Spectacular in their scale and dazzling in their brightness, artists, lighting engineers, and audio-visual mavericks design these installations by using the surfaces of built spaces to sculpt visual masterpieces of light, form and colour. Their tricks of illumination exploit technical tools – 3D architectural mapping, sensors, software-enabled visual distortions, real-time image manipulation of the ever growing, luminous flux of data – to introduce into public spaces a sense of the ‘technological uncanny’ (1), a phantasmagorical urban world in which anything, seemingly, is possible (2).

To see the image of a woman splayed out over the sails of the Sydney Opera House, her hands reaching out towards the harbour, or the surfaces of a warehouse building peeled back to reveal a forest beneath, is to see the familiar transformed into the strange, the impossible revealed as if it might really be true.

For creators of projection artworks, the topography of the built environment becomes a material to incorporate into the programming and design of urban interfaces(3). Digitally-projected, luminous information is in this way mixed with the ‘data’ of material spaces – it’s the disjunctures between the two that can be exploited to provoke the greatest of surprises. We think we are seeing a wall, but suddenly we are seeing a forest. Architectural dreams become hyper-real surfaces.

Such is the dynamic nature of projection art today – and, indeed, the size of the commissioning budgets attached to them – that we can now see unfolding a proliferation of genres and approaches to working with light and data in public space. I’ve started to think about how we might begin to frame these approaches (early stage thoughts, please bear with me).

**Media architecture**

In [City Life](https://vimeo.com/44290654), Sydney-based projection agency Electric Canvas transformed a historic customs house into a living, breathing community of city workers. Here, the digital agency edia architects use digital projection to reveal complex interactions existing, real-time, within localized audiences, making use of harvested information gleaned from mobile devices and other sensors, thus illuminating patterns of mobility, complexity, and flux. Technically, the piece mixed high power digital projectors with use of large-format “PIGI” projectors, filling the walls of the building with spectacular, bedazzling colour and light. Everybody will look up in wonder.

3D Mapping

Projection mapping is fundamental to most projection artwork, playing with the sense of uncanny produced by remapping the dimensions of a building and then layering it with completely different visual animations and effects. The field is vast and diverse, the aesthetics sometimes, dare I say, dubious, driven by a [shock and awe mentality](https://youtu.be/uZzEJ-udOCM) at times.

Here is a recent event in Maastricht, the Netherlands, which did explore a temporal dimension to projection mapping in a historically sensitive way. Vrijthof, one of the best known squares in Maastricht, was lit up for one week in November 2013, from 13 to 20 November, [featuring a 20 minute ‘show’ ](https://youtu.be/CDmpQ76Avis)projected onto the facade of the ‘Hoofdwacht’, a military guardhouse with a history dating back to the 17th century. Here was an impressive 3D mapping projection that offered audiences an overview of the turbulent history of the city.

**Place-making & Urban Interventions**

During recent years I’ve become more and more involved in projection-based artworks, which reflects partly the growing demand for this genre of work, whether from local councils, universities, urban developer clients and public art commissions. Working with Michael Killalea through Esem Projects, this practice has been continually evolving to incorporate different ways of working with communities, their stories, local historical collections in projection-based outcomes.

There are multiple layers to this work. In the first instance, each projection project is knitted closely with stories of place: who has lived here, what has changed, where are the strongest attachments and how are these expressed, what has been documented? Why is this project being funded, and what role is it to play in connecting with a community or audience? Each of these questions shape the given response to a commission.

Here, for example, is our work ‘Eyes on the Street’, projected onto the United Services Club on Watt St in Newcastle nightly from June 2013 to April 2014.

[View video](https://vimeo.com/68944475)

 The film loop incorporates visual recordings and documentation of Watt St from its earliest European habitation. It is deliberately confined to the acts of documentation, and the ways in which these are co-opted to represent the ‘image of a city’ to a wider audience.

For the work of Esem Projects, digital projection allows for a different kind of engagement with digital collections and archives, enabling some playful interventions (and sometimes difficult negotiations) in the spaces of the city. 

The public canvas allows for a recorded archeology of a collection to be surfaced back into the present day in a more spectacular fashion. 

We bring community contributions to this practice, allowing members of a community to see their own memory pieces writ large. By doing this, new communities are in turn forged. 

Working with the site of the former Hotel Australia for the Last Drinks project for Art & About in 2012, we spent an evening with community contributors from across Sydney, who all had known the way the precinct used to be, but would have no cause to ‘visit’ the historical site now, because all is dust. 

Reinscribing documentation of the past back into the present is to work with the possibilities of temporal layering, in situ, and of ‘creating’ historical sites once edited out of the modern city.

In this image below, a man is seen closing the curtains of his window at University House, ANU. The man was filmed in 1956. The footage is being projected onto University House in 2013.

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This is not technically complex, but I do believe it has a role to play in extending the possibilities of projection artworks in public spaces. There is both the selection of site, and the location of documentary footage, that underpins the affect of such a work which, while not technically difficult to achieve, does rely on fairly extensive research, quite some chance, and ready access to the site. But such playful layering of past and present spaces can be used not just fancifully, but also to more political ends.

The ‘[Latent Souls](https://vimeo.com/9423881)’ project, for example, arose from a series of smaller activities by the “Niño Viejo” (“Old Child”) Collective in Valencia. The artists state: “Our aim was to use the city as an audiovisual format to express various proposals which criticise urban development in the city. Small, playful actions which interfered with the urban space and aimed to alter it, were sarcastic about it and transgressed it, thereby offering a critical and personal vision of ‘public space’.


**Spatial Practices & Mixed-reality Interfaces**

“[Box](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX6JcybgDFo)” was released by Bot & Dolly in September 2013 and seemed to reset the boundaries of projection mapping for the next little while at least, incorporating never-before-seen robot-powered projection mapping on moving objects. “Box”, launched to widespread acclaim, resulted in the synthesis of real and digital space made all the more alive through the sense of fluidity and movement, of machines, of man, and of movable objects (er, a box), the culmination of multiple technologies, including large scale robotics, projection mapping, and software engineering. 

As said by the makers: “We believe this methodology has tremendous potential to radically transform theatrical presentations, and define new genres of expression”.

And then, there is [Little Boxes](https://vimeo.com/64225728), by artist Bego Santiago. This is perhaps my most favourite piece of all, with its playful use of scale and movement, and its dedication to a timeless, iconic song, that puts us all in our places.

*This piece was written while Sarah was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.*

**References**

(1) Collins and Jervis 2008:1

(2) Sassen 2009: 29

(3) Edensor 2012: 1107.


Reflections on the uncanny natures of digital projections 

Thinking Projections / Writing Places

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Creative placemaking and the arts of urban intervention

Dr. Sarah Barns is a public artist, writer, researcher and consultant whose work today is committed to elevating the role of creative practices in sustaining hopeful futures. 

Inspired by the potentials of site-specific arts and storytelling to connect with multi-layered histories of place, Sarah has developed a range of acoustic and mixed-media approaches to engaging the histories of places through a range of community and cultural engagement methods, spanning oral history, community workshops, field recordings and collections research. 

Sarah's creative partnership with multimedia artist Michael Killalea since 2011 has supported the co-creation of over 30 cultural and participatory digital arts & curatorial programs through Esem Projects, spanning digital projection, interpretation, sound design and more. 

Sarah's previous background in strategic design and policy also informs her work as a cultural and digital strategist, supporting future-focused organisational and strategic frameworks that link digital, community and place-based objectives for public good outcomes. 

In 2023 Sarah was awarded a Vice Chancellor's Senior Research Fellowship at RMIT, building on her experience leading a range of academic and practice-led research programs that span technology, cities and creative practices. She is author of [Platform Urbanism](https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9789813297241) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and a recognised [speaker, researcher and expert](http://sitelines.media/) in the fields of urban digital strategy, digital placemaking and digital cultural engagement. Her research has been published in a wide range of books and international journals, spanning Cities, Culture and Society, Space and Society, Urban Geography and the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies (see full [Research profile here](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sarah-Barns-4)). 

When she's on the creative tools she loves to craft [immersive soundscapes](https://soundcloud.com/soundwalking) and write creative non-fiction essays (see [Inside Story](https://insidestory.org.au/authors/sarah-barns/)). 

Read more about Sarah's background and experience on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahbarns/). 

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Sarah Barns

Curatorial Practices & Engagement Adviser 





Dr. Sarah Barns

Dr. Sarah Barns

Co-Founder and Director

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