This interview was conducted by Marco Mancuso for DigiMag in conjunction with the article Meta-design, Liquid Space and the Cities of Tomorrow. Founded in 2005 by Marco Mancuso, DigiMag became one of the leading international online magazines dedicated to digital art, design, media culture, and the impact of emerging technologies on contemporary creative practice, documenting the evolution of new media art through interviews, critical essays, and reviews.

META DESIGN, LIQUID SPACES  AND THE CITIES OF TOMORROW

There are people living in cities who are careful observers of the slow changes which are taking place around them. Such people are not inclined to complaining about new telecameras controlling the access to the old town centre, about the prevailing traffic and polluted air, or the advertising billboards covering the facades of the old buildings in boulevards.

The changes I mean are those little multimedia sparks which have started to become part of the urban landscape surrounding us: digital screens set in frequently visited places (such as stations, squares and airports), interactive shopping windows, public projections, multimedia advertising billboards. Those elements are more and more discussed and arouse curiosity as much as the latest discoveries in the ever-present demotic.

Surely the contents, the message and the display of information that could be conveyed through these digital systems are definitely far from the apocalyptic results imagined in Blade Runner (or in Salvatores' Nirvana, just to pay homage to an underestimated Italian product)on the one side, or simply from a new contexuatualization of the public spaces and the ordinary urban landscape on the other. That could be a possible new form of emotional experience with the environments and relations we usually interact with.

My intention is not to deal with a complex topic on which experts much more “skilled” than me are still discussing and arguing, just in one article. What I just would like to point out is that on the one hand the media exalt a small number of architects who use digital technologies simply as a computation tool for their brave architectural calculations, while on the other hand those studies of design/architecture which interpret the concept of Meta Design or Media Architecture more literally are perhaps considered less appealing. So, together with stars such as Zaha Hadid, Nox, Libeskind, Koohlhas , who are able to surprise and charm with their shapes and projects (we suggest the extremely interesting essay by Maria Luisa Palombo Nuovi Ventri and many other books published in the Universal Architecture Series ), there are studies and projects such as LAb[au] , which consider the idea of architecture mainly as an instrument to reinterpret the space, to enjoy and display the urban network of information, an artistic means to new emotional experiences that can link persons and objects, knowledge and emotions.

The subject is obviously long and complex and its analysis has already been dealt with on previous DigiMag's articles and is meant to be dealt with in the future. Now I would rather take a break and listen to Manuel Abendroth from LAb[Au] , a collective living and working in Brussels and very close to the activities of their exhibition space, Media Ruimte. There are many projects which the Belgian collective developed according to the ideas explained above: interactive installations such as Touch, related to the urban architecture project for Dexia Tower, 12m4s and i-skin, collective audiovisual performances Liquid Space , multimedia dance project Men in e.Space and projects such as PixFlow and EOD02 ,