Konstantinos Ioannidis

This open access book is about public open spaces, about people, and about the relationship between them and the role of technology in this relationship. It is about different approaches, methods, empirical studies, and concerns about a phenomenon that is increasingly being in the centre of sciences and strategies – the penetration of digital technologies in the urban space. As the main outcome of the CyberParks Project, this book aims at fostering the understanding about the current and future interactions of the nexus people, public spaces and technology. It addresses a wide range of challenges and multidisciplinary perspectives on emerging phenomena related to the penetration of technology in people’s lifestyles - affecting therefore the whole society, and with this, the production and use of public spaces. Cyberparks coined the term cyberpark to describe the mediated public space, that emerging type of urban spaces where nature and cybertechnologies blend together to generate hybrid experiences and enhance quality of life.

The initial goal of this effort is to develop a discussion on urban design process and thinking that acknowledges the needs of places with meaning in the design of the urban waterfront. The book addresses the fact that the problematic of the coastal formulation is intricate, comprising not only aspects related to the spatial organization and design of its domain but also shared properties originated by the presence and movement of the perceiving subject in the area. In this framework, the work attempts to provide an understanding of the main relationships that the subject cultivates inside the coastal space and to offer a broader spatial reading of its narrative function.

Writing about the dialectics between the psychospatial inquiry and the spatial experience of the edge, this book sets the general scene in which the material fantasy of the water can play an active role in the compositional strategies and enact from within coastal places that speak 'of' the subject. This view is central to the question 'what this book is about'. Psychospatial inscriptions which make themselves known to the psychic apparatus by means of signs, symbols, and notations, are so architecturally and spatially interrogated as to lose their self-rhetoric and open up ways for the narrative representation of the coastal space.

Public open areas have historically been spaces embracing two aspects of human activity: the locale of the face-to-face communication and the similar locale of interaction amongst people or groups. The one refers to the social dynamics of outdoor space, the other to the processes and dynamics initiated by the co-existence and co-presence, being both grounded to the anthropogenic specificities of the physical space. The one has changed dramatically over the last twenty years with the pervasive invasion of media technologies in our everyday life. The other is correspondently affected by the same change. However, the anthropogenic is what keeps characterizing the nature of the public open spaces of our cities by reflecting the historical present in which the “Anthropos” is captured – or struggles to be captured- within space’s configuration in a variety of ways which we would, in fact, not tolerate to abandon them. But is this the case?

the analysis becomes engaged in the path of transference
– and for us it is the index that this has taken place [1]

This paper is part of a research project called “Indexing Architecture” that explores key issues on the displacement of architecture from analogue to digital landscapes. The way in which architecture is archived and exhibited has nowadays changed and the continuous emergence of numerous virtual museums and indexes is indicative of the role that digital technologies have on this peculiar displacement. This transmedia transference, however, is easier said than understood. The lacanic conception of the index proposes a possible pathway to conceive the displacement of architecture in post-digital humanities: a humanistic approach to the subject of codifying and displaying architecture and a similar humanistic understanding of web 3.0 leads on to this paper’s argument that digital indexes are in fact configurations with peculiar cognitive value. According to Bill Hillier [2], configuration is defined not simply as connections, but as relations that take into account other relations. At one level, this implies that positioning architecture in post-digital humanities is not at all about building the chronological infrastructure in the study of projects through digital repositories. Neoanalogue forms of indexing architecture do not limit media technology to static snapshots of buildings and public spaces; but instead try to expand the dynamics of the archive as to include the sets of interaction and interrelations produced by the medium specificity itself. In this paper, I explore a tentative path for the displacement to occur: by defining the idea of exhibiting architecture through web 3.0 not as a static repository but as a platform for interactive narratives of cognitive capacity, the main intention is to bring forth those user/machine relations that need other relations in order to become communicative. Moreover, I propose to expand its lacanic limits from something that simply allows us to arrange the individual parts that furnish the signifiers of a presentation, to a tool for the translation of the parts into elements and features with interrelated meaning –being the latter a traditional concern of the humanities. This approach draws from a recent work in digital indexes of architecture in the light of their humanistic engagements with media technologies. DomesIndex [3] , the first major effort to exhibit the contemporary Greek architecture in a narrative mode of tracing objects’ fragmented connections with their formative context, is reviewed as a tool for mapping controversies both within its exhibited projects and through their network of information.

Keywords: indexes, postdigital humanities, cognition, neoanalogue

[1] Lacan. (2001). Ecrits: A Selection: Taylor & Francis. p.64.
[2] The term configuration is central to the syntactic conception of space as developed by Bill Hillier. It is used here in an analogical way, considering the Index as adopting a similar complex system of relations as the physical space itself. For more, see Hillier. (1998). Space is the Machine.
[3] Manis, Panetsos and Papadopoulos. (2012). DOMES INDEX 2014, from http://domesindex.com