Hybrid Culture @ Marlowes Architecture Magazine

Hybrid
Culture

With the COVID-19 lockdown and the closure of physical meeting places – from schools, offices, restaurants to museums, theaters or clubs – digital spaces and networks became lifelines of social life. Our horizons were broadened by the possibilities of online communication, and we learned about the need for media infrastructure and media literacy. However, we also recognized the limitations of a predominantly online social life.

At the same time, the hygiene requirements during the pandemic meant that more and more events were held outdoors, and we saw an unprecedented increase in outdoor cultural performances. With these outdoor events, it was possible to culturally permeate the city and the country on very different levels. We realized the rich ways in which celebration and culture can be embedded in the physical social environment.

The pandemic brought with it an enormous acceleration of the digital transformation. Even after the lockdowns were lifted, digital formats continued to develop, making them an integral part of public and private life today. But the outdoor cultural experiences mentioned above are also an important wealth of experience that we can draw on. This has given rise to initiatives that aim to use the potential offered by the combination of the digital and the physical to create new forms of cultural experience and thus promote active participation in cultural social life.

reBOOT
Culture

The reBOOT Culture program was launched by Hybrid Space Lab to allow hybrid formats, i.e. formats combining digital and physical elements, to penetrate deeply into the urban landscape in a decentralized manner. The aim was to activate the public space of the cultural landscape. In order to do justice to the polyphony in the city and in the countryside, the involvement of civil society and the active participation of the audience was planned. It was important to combine online and face-to-face formats, which are usually developed separately, in order to generate positive synergy effects.

As part of the program, a hybrid infrastructure was developed that is mobile, nomadic, modular and based on sharing models to bring culture into society and connect physical and digital public spaces. This flexible system, with its broadcast studio infrastructure and media connectivity elements, could be configured in different ways and thus easily adapted to local requirements. This enabled cultural programs rooted in the urban landscape to reach a larger, translocal audience via broadcast and narrowcasting (TV, radio, internet).

To this end, infrastructure elements were proposed in various dimensions, on a micro, medium and mega scale. The flexible broadcasting studios were installed and transported on light vehicles such as tricycles and on containers, minibuses and pontoons. And even on boats as floating stages, with the audience on the shore and on the quays.

reBOOT

reBOOT, a media art laboratory on board a ship that sailed down the Rhine from Cologne to Amsterdam for a week in October 1999, served as the model for the “Reboot Culture” program. Along the way, “reBOOT” docked in Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Emmerich, Arnhem, Rotterdam and many smaller ports.

Around 80 artists traveled on the boat, exploring the then-new internet network, the river as an archetypal symbol of connection and the localities along the route. A traditional translocal physical network (the Rhine) was short-circuited with the – then new – global media networks of the internet. Artists, musicians and media collectives developed projects during the journey that explored the Rhine, the towns along its banks and the associated idea of networking on various levels. The joint artistic work on board and on land resulted in hybrid spaces that were tied to specific locations and at the same time based on their connection.

The project title ‘reBOOT’ refers to the word “boat” in Dutch and German and at the same time to the English term ‘reboot’ as a term not only for restarting a computer, but also for a newly developed narrative based on an existing narrative.

Sharing
Cultures

The pandemic has weakened many traditional business models and therefore also called for new beginnings and rethinking. This is particularly true for smaller cultural institutions and venues on the periphery, which already have fewer resources. Together with ongoing gentrification and increasing financial pressure, the current (and upcoming) austerity measures in the cultural sector pose massive challenges. This makes the development of new models for cultural networks with a sustainable perspective more urgent. See BETWEENstitute

Circular sharing practices are fundamental to environmental sustainability. A shared, hybrid infrastructure that is mobile, nomadic and modular can help to ensure that technically mature infrastructures that were previously inaccessible are temporarily deployed in decentralized locations. This can promote culture in urban neighborhoods as well as in rural regions and thus also strengthen social sustainability.

Culture
of the
Night

The COVID-19 lockdown triggered similar developments in club culture as it did for other cultural players. There was an enormous acceleration in technological developments due to the emergence of concert streaming and other digital offerings. However, the celebrations were not only virtual: Bicycles were converted into sound machines and PA systems and parties took place outside venues in parks or in lost spaces in the periphery.

The pandemic-related collapse of traditional club business models in particular has also triggered new collaborations with the wider cultural scene, with exhibition organizers and with the performing arts. As part of the international Club Futures program, these developments were reflected upon in order to design new models for clubs and their communities.

Next
Stop
Culture

The participants considered how the newly acquired open spaces could be used by means of innovative clubbing practices to contribute to the reactivation of the urban fabric. The workshop outlined ideas for cultural acupuncture as a catalyst for culture-based urban development. Mobility infrastructures should be made usable as lively community spaces and cultural places of encounter and exchange in order to counteract the disadvantages of functionally separate and fragmented urban structures. “Next Stop Culture” took up a wide range of ideas and encouraged the cultural repurposing of such spaces, e.g. with ‘pulsating’ subway stations, so that “DJs in Berlin might soon not only be able to play in clubs”.

Animal
Club

At the same time, club culture was seen as a sustainability multiplier in our multi-species urban habitat. The “Animal Club” project reflected on the future of clubbing in the context of the biodiversity crisis. On the one hand, the program dealt with the spatial aspects of clubs and their embedding in species-rich environments. The habitats not only of humans, but also of plants and animals should be taken into account in order to meet non-human needs as well.

The focus was on the development of sustainable club cultures that could promote the coexistence of different species. “Animal Club” speculated on imaginative clubbing practices that could help us to better perceive, understand, empathize and interact with our complex and endangered habitats.

The night was considered not only as a space of interspecies conflict, but also as a theater of multispecies performances. Lightweight, minimally invasive media infrastructures, e.g. on tricycles, can be used to generate digitally supported acoustic and visual representations of ecophysiological data. These can be used to create mappings of endangered animal species or – by evaluating drought-related stress noises – plants. In this way, environmental crises can be made directly tangible and ecological awareness can be strengthened.

They also investigated how our perception changes when we are able to perceive our shared habitat with the senses of animals – in other words, to see through the eyes of others and hear through the ears of others. And we considered how these experiences could sensitize us to a healthy coexistence of species, solidarity and care.

Hybridity

Our perception of reality is constantly constituted as a hybrid. We are simultaneously online and offline, local and global. This gives rise to hybrid cultures that are anchored and embedded in physical spaces, while at the same time they are increasingly disseminated, shaped and negotiated in translocal media networks.

In the face of these rapid technological developments, it is important to approach digital technologies from a cultural perspective in order to transform them to fit the way we want to live as a society. When we work on the design of spaces today, we should take care to filter out the best of both worlds, the physical and the media, and to bring together and combine these dimensions intelligently and effectively.

Even if we move in digital spheres, we are still embedded and anchored in physical spaces. It is therefore important to think of digital space from the physical, from the urban landscape. A work by Hybrid Space Lab from the late 1980s, the artistic vision of a combined urban and media public space as Public Media Urban Interfaces, already pursues such an approach. The project developed models that enabled all city dwellers to actively participate bottom-up in media culture in order to anchor the digital in the urban world of experience.

At that time, the internet and digital technologies were still in their infancy and their applications were not yet established. One could still speculate with great freedom about possible spaces and think about alternative scenarios for the interaction of digital networks with urban space. Even then, the aim was to strengthen the functionality of public space, both urban and media.

This was also the intention behind the hybrid game City Kit, developed in 2007 for the Hong Kong Social Housing Authority. As space in Hong Kong is extremely limited, it enabled children and young adults to conceive and design temporary meeting places in the open spaces of their high-rise housing estates. Through the game and with the help of modular building elements that could be moved and placed in specific locations in the city, they could build micro-stages, exhibition decks, pavilions, picnic sets and other micro-structures to activate the public space of their neighborhood. The locally based, digital game platform encouraged them to break out of the digital space, leave their screens to actually physically meet in the neighborhood and play on it in a hybrid way.

unSocial
Media

Today you can order food, medication, clothes online, chat, stream … without leaving the house. We spend a lot of time alone with ourselves and our smartphones. The problem of loneliness, which has long been a taboo, is currently gaining attention as a key challenge for public health programs, and ministerial posts for loneliness have even been created, for example in the UK and Japan.

There are fewer unavoidable activities in public spaces, which means that chance encounters, which are of great importance for social cohesion, are steadily decreasing. It is becoming increasingly rare to meet people who are different and think differently. Even in the so-called “social media”, people usually remain in their own echo chamber.

Since the business models of market-driven social media are based on the collection of data, the corresponding algorithms aim to intensify users’ screen activity. These algorithms are programmed to attract and direct attention in order to engage users, usually through strong emotions. And these strong emotions are often nothing other than hate, greed and fear. In the current political debate, which is largely conducted on social media, this has a polarizing and divisive effect and therefore has an extremely negative impact on social cohesion.

With the rapidly advancing development of artificial intelligence, which can also simulate emotional language, more and more people will establish (fake) relationships with AI chatbots. See Tagesspiegel article “In love with an illusion – how people become dependent on machines“. Not only does this make people dependent on automated systems. They are also unlearning how to interact with real people. And they no longer train the ability to deal with the friction that encounters and confrontations with real people can bring. You no longer meet the other person.

Hybrid
Culture

Providing spaces that promote social interaction is becoming increasingly important because social cohesion is undermined rather than supported by “antisocial” media. This affects all generations – but perhaps especially the digitally savvy younger generation (the main target group of club culture).

Strengthening public space is essential. Today, hybrid space is a central place for social interaction. It is therefore necessary to create inclusive hybrid public spaces in which people can meet not only through the media but also physically. The aim is to enable inclusive socio-cultural interaction in spaces that allow the digital and the physical to merge. Where people can celebrate and interact playfully. Where they can develop empathy and learn to intuitively understand people who are different and think differently.

This is where the strong integrative potential of culture can be harnessed. Cultural institutions should be seen as part of the basic infrastructure and strengthened as a central public good. Hybrid infrastructures can help to anchor culture in the public space of the urban landscape – also and above all in decentralized locations and spaces.

Developing the urban landscape as a task therefore also means designing flexible network infrastructures and using the transformative power of culture to open up spaces for co-creating our coexistence.

Marlowes
Architecture
Magazine