The City-as-Palimpsest: Mixed-Media Techniques of Urban Interface Design

This course delves into urban spaces as layered texts via field trips, discussions, and mixed-media workshops. Participants are introduced to different practices of interface creation, such as meme-making, critical mapping, AI art and game design.

This workshop explores urban spaces as palimpsests. Cities are multi-layered texts made from entangled memories, hidden narratives, forgotten traces, enmeshed affects, and liminal landscapes. Thus, to delve in the city-as-palimpsest, one must engage with urban spaces across boundaries between past and present, individuality and collectivity, ideology and materiality, and reality and simulacra. In this course, we’ll explore how mixed-media practices of participatory design, remix culture and urban hacking uncover the layers of the city-aspalimpsest. In this mixed-media playground, participants are the players of a game in which the city’s multi-layered text become a creative stream of possibilities. This workshop proposes a unique blend of critical discussions, readings, field trips and mixed-media interface designs. Students will be introduced to different practices of multi-media interface creation, such as meme making, critical mapping, anarchiving, AI art and game design. Moreover, they will be introduced to a few theoretical tools from media studies, philosophy, psychogeography, and queer theory.

By the end of "The City-as-Palimpsest," participants will have honed their skills in mixed-media interface design, while learning to think critically about such creative processes. Moreover, this workshop culminates in the development and production of an individual mixed-media project. The knowledge, experiences and techniques acquired during this workshop invites students to produce playful interfaces to interact with the complex fabric of urban spaces.

Schedule

Day 1 : analysing the city-as-palimpsest, imagining the city-as-utopia, an introduction [city trip to memorial site] 

Day 2 : Memeing the city-as-collection [museum trip]

Day 3 : Mixed-media interface design workshop : project development [in class] 

Day 4 : Mapping the city-as-archive [urban drift trip]

Day 5 : Mixed-media interface design workshop II : project finalization and presentations [in class]

Albertine Thunier specializes in the exploration of playful and interactive media, with a focus on internet memes, which are short, humorous creations from and by online communities. Her research and creative work reconstitute and hybridize current digital memes and 19th-century humoristic archives. Albertine’s academic background includes a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Université du Québec à Montréal, as well as a certificate in Philosophy. She continued her academic pursuits further, earning two Master’s degrees, one in Political Analysis and the other in Digital Humanities, both from Université Paris VIII. For her doctoral studies in Communication, she focuses on the ritual practices rendered by memes, which she considers to be the product of non-competitive labor capable of fostering cooperative modes of sociability.

https://albertinethunier.uwu.ai/

Hubert Alain’s research engages territories as archives and focuses on the material traces left by the infrastructural development of Québec in the 1960s. Through an anarchiving approach, he uses mixed-media techniques (digital collage, herbarium creation and speculative writing) to reinscribe queer affects and stories in a territory historically disfigured for the construction of a hetero-nation. His work addresses questions of energy, affect, territories, landscapes and dwellings from queer, decolonial and neomaterialist
perspectives. He also holds a bachelor’s degree in art history and a master’s degree in communication studies from McGill University