The Team

Our little New Media team is hard at work and getting a lot done!
From the left: Martin, Metz, Kris & Kenneth

Concept development 01

Our first brainstorm meeting with our two new team members, Kenneth & Martin – New Media Design students, went well. Kenneth and Martin have been invited to participate in the project as Flash programmers and will be coming to New York with us.

DUMBO (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass) has been chosen by the HDC as the area the project will be based on. DUMBO is located at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Situated 10 minutes from downtown Manhattan, DUMBO has landmark buildings, a vibrant history and a beautiful view of the Manhattan skyline.

The HDC are requesting a virtual platform that INVOLVES and EDUCATES neighborhood communities. With this is mind we are developing a concept where the design, content and interaction all aims at this by applying a thematic structure (using Hillman Curtis’ 7 STEP method). The chosen themes are: CONTRAST, COMMUNITY PRODUCERS, DOCUMENTARISM, DIALOGUE. The conceptual structure revolves around: MANIFEST, RULES/GUIDELINES, PARTICIPATION/FORUM (blog/flikr), CATEGORIES, PORTRAIT, DETAILS.

The collaborators

Virtual Spaces of Identity (specifically the production) is a collaboration between two students from the postgraduate programme Cultural Production, two students from the undergraduate programme New Media Design, the EU-project WISE (collaboration and concept development support), The School of TV (equipment and technical support) and New York preservation organisation Historic Districts Council. This diverse collaboration ensures the broad range of skills and competences necessary to fulfil the projects purpose.
(See The Collaboration for description of the collaborators)

The production

The purpose of the production is to build a virtual prototype for Historic Districts Council, which through physical and virtual interaction educates and involves a community in preserving their neighbourhood.

The HDC will choose one specific New York neighbourhood, which acts as base for the prototype. The Cultural Production (Kristina & Mette) and New Media Design (Martin & Kenneth) students provide suggestions concerning the production of the virtual platform.

To raise awareness and interest in the virtual platform, we need to involve the community – not just as end users, but as participants in the production process.

To create a useful and engaging platform we need to locate specific areas of tangible/intangible culture (language/slang, fashion, meeting places, etc), which are representative for the essence of the community; and from that derive general assumptions on the neighbourhood culture as a whole. When mapping and documenting it is crucial to be selective in order to be significant. The HDC’s knowledge and competences are tremendously important in this.

What are the product perspectives?

The prototype illustrates how a virtual platform can be utilized as a tool for HDC. The HDC wish to use the prototype to investigate its educational and community preserving possibilities and to seek funding for the further development of the prototype into a full size multifunctional website.

In order to ensure the ongoing development of the prototype we have contacted a teacher of New Media Design at New York University (NYU) looking to initiate collaboration with his students, hoping our research can act as basis for future projects by NYU students, and hereby keep the project evolving.

Our production is adaptable for other institutions making their interactive way within the virtual world. It is the intent that our examination of virtuality’s role can be used in regards to other institutions wanting to preserve culture; from the preservation of traditional heritage culture such as ancient objects - to perishable culture such as organic or digital artworks or contemporary performance theatre.

Why New York / Scandinavia collaboration?

Why do HDC need the knowledge and skills that Scandinavian students hold? The education standard in Scandinavia reaches a high level of knowledge, innovation and creativity; the emphasis is on the importance of bringing theory into practice to further new knowledge.

What do Scandinavian students benefit from collaborating with a New York institution? New York is an archetypical global city with a broad cultural perspective; its multicultural lifestyle is one that Scandinavia can learn from, as Scandinavia is becoming a society with growing issues concerning ethnic diversity in the population. Furthermore, we bring back to Scandinavia a range of beneficial and constructive aspects of HDC as a self-supporting, non-profit cultural institution. Scandinavia is heading towards a future where cultural institutions need to become increasingly commercialised and consumer conscious.

Why explore virtuality?

According to several authors within fields such as Urban Cultural Development and Media & Communication, our cultural identities and its relation to geography are changing rapidly due to increasing globalisation – caused primarily by new communication technologies. Virtual Spaces of Identity puts this current theoretic discourse into practise, by examining how a cultural institution (specifically concerned with local heritage and community culture) can use the new communication technology to further its work both in a global and local context.

Why preservation?

Preservation of cultural heritage is mostly done through preservation of physical objects, as intangible culture is obviously more difficult to preserve. According to UNESCO’s ‘Safeguarding Heritage’-statement (2003) the preservation of cultural heritage must include both tangible and intangible values. One of the problems concerning neighbourhood preservation is to document those intangible values, which strengthen the community’s sense of belonging to their physical surroundings. How can virtuality be used to map and document tangible and intangible values?

Virtual Spaces of Identity will examine how virtual representation of a New York neighbourhood can map and document specific areas of its tangible and intangible culture, in ways that create value to the neighbourhood community.

Virtual Spaces of Identity 02

A project about virtual preservation:
The idea is to produce a prototype for a virtual platform that aids the work of the New York based preservation institution Historic Districts Council (HDC), in preserving communities and neighbourhoods. Virtual Spaces of Identity aims at examining how virtuality can be used to map and document specific areas of tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The great challenge is to visualise and portray the heritage in a usable and engaging way.

Here is a .pdf document with our design concept for Virtually DUMBO.
And here is our uploadet test site (work in progress!).

The project combines theory and practise by having both a written part (the thesis) and a practical part (the production):
The thesis Virtual Spaces of Identity aims at examining how virtuality can be used to map and document specific areas of tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The production Virtually DUMBO examines how virtual representation of DUMBO can portray and preserve specific areas of the neighborhood culture.

The HDC are requesting a virtual platform that INVOLVES and EDUCATES neighborhood communities. With this is mind we are developing a concept where the design, content and interaction all aims at this by applying a thematic structure .

The virtual platform, Virtually DUMBO’, explores the history, physical environment and social culture of DUMBO – especially with a perspective on how the neighborhood has changed and is continuing to change with an emphasis on the physical built environment and the community culture. The intend is to visualize the gathered materials as a website where people from DUMBO can participate in the continuous development.

The end product will be published on HDC`s website and will serve as a resource for both neighborhood residents as well as people interested in DUMBO, particularly from a historical, architectural and cultural point of view.