ADD YOUR SPOT
Research
Two teams of artists, Kronberger & Kronberger and gold extra, are working with people who live in Salzburg to create new maps for the city—and thus make the city feel a little more like home.
Especially in a city like Salzburg, which is so strongly influenced by tourist images, the question of the spaces that local people use is particularly pressing. As part of the Digital Spring Festival, the artists are conducting joint research to get to know special places in conversation with interested citizens and to depict places that should become better known, that are hidden, or that are missing altogether.
Own artistic explorations
The joint process begins with three different circles. The first consists of projects that both groups have already undertaken in the field of documenting urban situations. These include Reinhold Bidner's long-standing street photography series Subtext and interview and photography projects such as Magareden, in which Bidner interviewed people about their neighborhood, the 5th district of Magareten in Vienna. It also includes projects such as Future Rearview by Sonja Prlić and Reinhold Bidner, in which stories from the past of Salzburg residents were linked together in a virtual installation and knowledge about past places, present and future situations was superimposed. In Stranger Home by Tobias Hammerle, a bus trip to unknown parts of Salzburg was staged (Festival Scene), and in Regeln der Stadt (Rules of the City) by Karl Zechenter, interviews were turned into playable role-playing adventures set in Salzburg.
Kronberger & Kronberger have also dealt with urban geographies on several occasions in the past...
From the Situationists to Critical Mapping.
Maps, plans, and administrative urban divisions were subject to institutional criticism from many sides in the 20th century. From the Passagenwerk and surrealist observations of cities, situationist explorations of places, entire art forms such as land art, which dealt with the new definition of places, to de Certeau's urbanism and Foucault's revolt of knowledge, public space has become a central topic of discourse. Critical cartography has a long history, beginning with questions such as how to represent reality statistically on maps. This leads from Charles Joseph Minard's map of the campaigns of Napoleon's army in 1812 (1869) to the development of isotypes at the Vienna Museum of Society and Economy, run by Otto Neurath with Marie Neurath née Reidemeister and graphic designer Gerd Arntz in the 1920s (and later at the Isotype Institute in London).
Guy Debord's “La société du Spectacle” inspired artist William Bunge and his colleagues to found The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute and, in this context, to engage in experimental “radical cartography,” a term used by groups active in the field today to describe the connection between cartographic representation, socio-political agenda, and social change, including the Counter-Cartographies Collective, Iconoclasistas, and Bureau d'Etudes, Hackitectura (fadaiat), the Institute for Applied Autonomy, Bill Rankin, and many more. Critical cartography experienced a strong upswing in various groups in the early 2000s, primarily through open source tools, new technical possibilities, and a new understanding of changes in practices of social representation. This new “locative art” and “psychogeographical mapping” is also often associated with the use of augmented reality as a platform for visualization.
Our research
Our joint research began with the presentation of the projects. The Critical Mapping project by Kronberger & Kronberger combines short personal reflections, which are the result of tips, conversations, and interviews, and creates a map of everyday knowledge in Salzburg. SEEDS by gold extra brings together stories and experiences of people in specific locations to form a series of interconnected questions about love, freedom, and security in an AR installation that results in a kind of city tour.
In an initial discussion, we addressed the following questions: this plays a particularly important role in Salzburg, a city that is very much defined by its image as a tourist destination and is also a protected World Heritage Site. What effect does this codified external immutability have? How does it affect people in urban life? Our research reveals an exciting exchange with the outskirts of the city, with places that often do not invite you to linger at first glance, with niches in the city.
During the research and interview phase, this initial impression was reinforced, and interviews so far show a movement in a belt around the inner city towards the outside. In creating the prototypes, we consciously tried to move to a very personal—and therefore not statistically representative—level. The aim was to use the prototypes to provide an insight into possible psychogeographical maps of Salzburg.
Presentation
At the conclusion of their artistic research, the artists invite the public to participate. Results, stories, and sketches will be presented as inspiration, inviting everyone to discuss locations, places, and spaces with the artists, to design new maps of Salzburg—and to reshuffle the deck.
The results of this joint research, which culminated in two prototypes, Critical Mapping by Kronberger & Kronberger and SEEDS by gold extra, will be presented on March 20 at the Add Your Spot event at ARGEkultur. In the presentation, we want to discuss further points of Salzburg's urban geography with those present and incorporate them into the respective maps, as well as explore the question of how the needs expressed in the interviews can affect the city
– and where the people of Salzburg actually want to go swimming?
