Derp Single Initiative City Centered

City Centered was a three-day festival of locative media and urban community in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, a gathering of practitioners at KQED in the Mission District, and a weekend of community training workshops. The event included three consecutive days of exhibitions, a symposium, and demonstrations and installations of locative including an afternoon of presentations, an exhibition opening event, Saturday symposium, and Sunday walks and tours of installations using wireless technology.

Over two weekends, it engaged artists, educators, civic organizations, and community members of all ages in exploring how locative media can act as a platform and venue for community-led expression.

Exhibitions, festivals, and conferences across the US and in Europe have taken wireless networks, public space, locative media, and urban environments as sites of intervention, creativity, and critique. Formulated within the emerging context of networked urbanism and mobile media; City Centered: A Festival of Locative Media and Urban Community focused on the dynamics of shifting, locative, cartographic, and social space of the city. It was organized by educational, arts, community-based and civic organizations and asked how locative media can act as a platform and venue for community-led expression.

From within San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, this festival celebrated the rich possibilities that art and technology offer for urban communication of place and place-based media. City Centered focused on the use of locative media and wireless technologies for site-specific and neighborhood-based interventions. Artists, designers, architects, community and cultural workers —people, places, and devices — will meet for four days of street-side celebration, public exhibitions, a symposium, and workshops. The festival sought new work aligned with the themes of creative mapping, urban storytelling, sentient space, body awareness, local history, contested spaces and gaming.