Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: Introduction This article details the design and curation process underpinning the creation of City Symphony, an augmented reality (AR) music experience overlaying Brisbane City, Australia. This article presents the curation process of City Symphony as an autoethnographic case study of how large-scale AR placemaking projects are crafted across multiple organisations so that the process of public art creation with placemaking goals can be better understood and evaluated. Transparency of curation workflows is important because artists and organisations decide how to represent places and people, often with an explicit intention of shaping the perception of those people and places towards goals such as urban renewal, social transformation, or tourism. Stakeholder priorities impact on the orientation of these goals and associated workflows. Bain and Landau have expressed concern about artist voices potentially displacing community voices in placemaking activities (405-408). By exposing City Symphony’s planning, creation, and iterative technical development cycles for scholarly consideration, I hope to energise conversation around what is possible and ethical within the design workflow of AR experiences that represent real people and places. Artistic Overview of Project City Symphony uses the music and sonic storytelling techniques of video games to unpack Brisbane’s past, present, and future. To do this, the creators have worked with hundreds of local community members and artists to make a music world from Brisbane’s 65,000+ years of human society. City Symphony is accessed through an Android or iOS mobile app and responds to a listener’s location, orientation, and real-time environmental data. Music and story content is shaped by these interactions, creating unique music mixes and revealing stories, narrative journeys, and sonic games based upon how the listener moves through the environment. Brisbane is treated like an open-world game space with sound and music enticing exploration and interaction. For example, when crossing the Brisbane River via the Goodwill Bridge, participants hear didgeridoo compositions by acclaimed artist and Ewamian / Western Yalanji man David Hudson. As participants walk the bridge, they encounter diverse voices of Brisbane locals who recorded messages, prayers, and secrets addressed to Maiwar, the local Yuggera language name for the Brisbane River. Upon exiting the bridge, participants experience a Welcome to Country from Traditional Custodians Ashley and Aaron Ruska. If participants re-enter the Goodwill Bridge later, they will encounter new messages to Maiwar and a different music configuration. Maiwar messages are collected on an ongoing basis and new contributions will be added over time. By designing a time-based, location-reactive experience, we hope to encourage repeated site visits, continued participant reflection, and ongoing community contribution on what Maiwar, Brisbane’s most significant environmental feature, means to its people. By asking contributors to address the river as Maiwar rather than its official English-language name, we are encouraging reflection on the enduring Aboriginal custodianship of the land. City Symphony is a collaboration between Textile Audio, a studio making large-scale interactive audio experiences, and Queensland Music Festival (QMF), an organisation which uses music to enable community transformation. Brisbane is Australia's third-largest city with a diverse population. Like all international cities, it faces challenges of globalisation, sustainability, and social cohesion. City Symphony seeks to foster positive social change via empathy and engagement. Game audio techniques are used to shape people's experiences and encourage connection. An extensive series of community workshops were hosted to craft the themes, narratives, and content presented in City Symphony. By combining best practices for game audio and community music creation, City Symphony seeks to establish techniques for strategic AR interventions in communities at the scale of a city. Our artistic goal is for people to look up from their phone screens, and listen to the city, its music, its story, and its song. Ultimately, we hope that people can meet someone different from themselves and feel more connected to this place we share. City Symphony launches in June 2022 within the Curiocity Brisbane program of the World Science Festival. Placemaking and AR The term placemaking was popularised in the 1960s to describe urban design projects and was increasingly understood as consultative, collaborative processes involving the varied groups of people who share a space (Akbar and Edelenbos 1, 8-10; Madden 1-2, 43-52). Lennon refers to placemaking as an “expansive church” of activities ranging from direct government interventions to “bottom-up initiatives” (449). Authors like Akbar and Edelenbos position placemaking as a social, iterative process involving various actors (1-2). More applied definitions characterise placemaking as approaches and tools which put the community “front and centre of deciding how their place looks and how it functions” (Courage, What Matters 2). A popular approach has been to incorporate creative arts activities into urban design projects as a means of fostering relationships and achieving placemaking outcomes (Fleming; Courage Arts in Place; Lennon; Calderon and Takeshita). However, some authors consider arts-based placemaking as potentially displacing the placemaking narratives onto the artist who ends up speaking for rather than with a community (Bain and Landau, 406). This caution is why the curation process underpinning City Symphony is exposed for consideration in this article. While the concept of placemaking has undergone cycles of criticism and reinvigoration (see: Aravot; Lennon), it is increasingly being deployed as part of government “smart city” urban design methodologies (Potesta 234-239) which seek to incorporate contemporary technologies, particularly information computing technology, into public space design, experience, and management (see: Albino, Berardi, and Umberto; Praharaj and Hoon Han). Government organisations deploying smart city methodologies of urban design are using AR projects as a means of fostering placemaking (see: Sanaeipoor and Emami). For the purposes of this article I am using Craig’s expansive definition of AR as something that mediates ideas between relational configurations of humans and computers (1). In practice, this is experienced as adding interactive digital information to real-world engagement (Craig, 2). Brisbane City Council, the local government organisation responsible for Brisbane, has been developing local creative AR projects as part of their urban renewal and placemaking initiatives: Smart, Connected Brisbane Framework and the Design-Led City: A Design Strategy for Brisbane. Notably, Brisbane City Council was a major funding partner for the development of City Symphony. City Symphony’s Curation Process The remainder of this article will detail the design and curation process underpinning City Symphony. The term curation is deployed broadly to mean the process of drawing together the perspectives on Brisbane presented within City Symphony. Curation is a kind of "gatekeeping" (Jade, 1) and, according to Storer, "a close consideration of who speaks, to whom, and for whom is fundamentally important to curatorial work" (xix). As City Symphony was created with explicit placemaking goals and presents a view of Brisbane on behalf of its community, the creative team needed to consider how the process of curation embeds explicit perspectives and relationships. Consequently, a formal curation process was developed. This process has seven steps, from thematic conceptualisation to completion for public release, detailed in fig. 1. At the time of writing, the City Symphony app is complete, stakeholders have approved launch content, and the experience is awaiting public release at the World Science Festival. Project Establishment Preceding content curation were the following key steps: Initial conceptualisation and design. Reconceptualisation and contracting between organisations. Project pitching to festivals and organisations. Fundraising via grant applications, philanthropy, sponsorships and partnerships. Stakeholder conversations to establish locations for the work. The initial conceptualisation and design of City Symphony occurred between Textile Audio's audio and technical directors and began with a simple question "what if we…?" After several cycles of brainstorming and technical prototypes, the City Symphony concept solidified and was formally written into a pitch document for circulation. Feedback from circulating the pitch led to further refinement and prototyping. After several cycles of this process, QMF approached Textile Audio, and a formal partnership agreement was formed, leading to a six-month fundraising process by both organisations. Importantly, consultative work and the commencement of creative content collection could not proceed until fundraising was achieved. Fundraising impacts on project execution because funding partners specify goals and deliverables in funding agreements. Government grants supporting this project detailed key performance indicators for audience engagement and participation and directed us towards specific locations and community organisations to engage in project development. Sponsorships required branding and the use of specific software in content creation workshops. City Symphony had a significant budget to achieve its large-scale execution. Cumulatively, fundraising increases stakeholder requirements which must be negotiated and balanced during project creation phases. Obligation across funding partners is normal within the Australian arts industry, which has increasingly been moving towards a model of commingling public and private funding (Meyer; Campbell et al., 13-16). Fundraising also determines the sustainability of projects. City Symphony is intended as a multi-year project growing across Queensland in the lead-up to the 2032 Summer Olympic Games, which Brisbane will host. However, this longevity is dependent on the achievement of stakeholder KPIs upon launch, with engagement numbers, critical review, and general enthusiasm determining the continuation of the project and its maintenance. In this way, the conservation of City Symphony, like most computer-based artworks, is vulnerable, complex, and funding-dependent (see: Noordegraaf et al.; Engel and Phillips). Overarching Curation Considerations When explaining City Symphony to community organisations, we described its creation process as a combination of sharing meals, drinking cups of tea, having leisurely conversations, listening, music-making, and writing code. For example, to create an experience of Brisbane’s cultural diversity, QMF hosted a potluck dinner for the Welcome Dinner Project. This organisation supports new Australians by facilitating shared meals in local homes so new migrants can extend their social networks. A few weeks later, interested attendees from the Welcome Dinner visited the QMF offices for lunch and more in-depth conversations about their migration journeys. Both experiences were recorded and transformed into content for Reddacliff Place alongside recordings by musicians from the JADE New World Collective, an intercultural ensemble in residence located at the nearby Queensland Performing Arts Centre. Importantly, participants knew that Reddacliff Place, the location for their content, is outside the local government offices of the Brisbane City Council. Consequently, participants reflected on the messages they would like council workers to hear from their stories. While generalised, the description which opens this paragraph is representative of how City Symphony was crafted. However, as the Reddacliff Place example illustrates, this description lacks the detailed planning, reflection, and review processes that both Textile Audio and QMF considered ethical foundations from which to work. The implication of City Symphony as a placemaking experience is that it is in some way representative of Brisbane, its history, its future, and the people who live and have lived here. Creators of mass public artworks and experiences have a responsibility to ensure that the representations they craft are responsive to and respectful of the environment and people being depicted and are not merely exercises in place-based rebranding (see: Eckenwiler Defining, Ethical; Richards and Duif, 141-162; Zimmerman). For City Symphony, we needed to care for the breadth and depth of Brisbane’s cultural and environmental history and its more than 65,000-year custodianship by traditional owners, the Turrbal and Jagera peoples. Care was foregrounded in the approach to community consultation and was the primary consideration for establishing a partnership between Textile Audio and QMF. At Textile Audio, we knew that we needed a greater depth of knowledge and experience to work meaningfully with local community organisations. QMF provided this expertise, having worked in the Brisbane community for over twenty years on music-oriented social transformation projects. QMF has also worked extensively with Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Therefore, this partnership brought a natural structure to project curation. QMF managed site-based research, community relationships, event planning, artist engagement, and contracting. Textile Audio oversaw artistic and technical execution of the project and its output medium as a mobile app. Overlapping responsibilities included content collection and editing, thematic focus, visual design, marketing strategy, and experience review. Like all complex places with competing histories and stakeholders, there was no coherent or straightforward depiction of Brisbane. Given this, we decided to approach curation in a bespoke way for each location rather than seeking to overlay a holistic narrative structure or mode of engagement. As a placemaking experience, we felt content focus and structure should emerge from each site's specific environment and community, with community members positioned as experts (Madden, 43-52). This is unlike AR games like Pokémon GO which overlay generic experiences to places (see: Geroimenko). We also knew that we would need to include a representative range of community groups in our consultation and creation processes so that Brisbane’s diversity could be represented. We consulted with hundreds of local community members by visiting local organisations, then following up with bespoke workshops or events suited to the needs of the organisation’s members. Examples of community organisations who participated in consultation, workshopping, and creation processes include: With One Voice Brisbane, a mixed ability choir who rehearse inside Brisbane City Hall; the Star Gayzers, an LGBTIQ astronomy club; and the Lyceum Club Brisbane, a women’s club located in the Brisbane and social activities for its members. important consideration of placemaking arts activities is that they are broadly to the people being (see: Project for For City Symphony, this led to the to release the app as a make the app and of mobile a technical of this had such as developing the app in to shaping the and of audio and the mobile While was an design it is important to that large-scale also in As a mobile audio experience, City Symphony is to or people. mobile will not be to all community organisations we consulted with are in City release content to curation and We do not have for these at the time of are also within AR experience design and as as the developing (see: and The City Symphony’s project team that and needed to be formally so an iterative and process of creation on reflection, experience, and was deployed as part of each project This was by particularly content was shared to artists and community members for and on for participants to with stakeholders shaped and the content and experience for each Ultimately, deploying a consultative, and curation process across multiple stakeholders was and However, it was for a around the of underpinning the curation of each site and across We considered and as the most ethical way to craft an experience with explicit placemaking as time and (see: Richards and Duif, Curation To project management with an iterative and the development of each site and experience needed to be into processes of consultation, reflection, and as detailed in 1. 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Source: M/C Journal
DOI: 10.5204/mcj.2898
Author: Eve Klein
Institution: The University of Queensland
Language: English
Topic: Sound Studies and Aurality
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4297724745