About

Building_Space_with_Words emerged from the ongoing conversation between Anne-Laure Fayard, assistant professor of Management at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly), a Franco-Swiss social scientist with a multidisciplinary background in philosophy and cognitive science, and experience in ethnography, human computer-interaction, and organizational studies and Aileen Wilson, associate professor of Art and Design Education at Pratt Institute, a Scottish visual artist and educator.  We are both currently living in Brooklyn and have both lived in various parts of Europe and Asia while maintaining relationships and interacting with friends, colleagues, and family over a long distance. 

We started this conversation as we realized that the proliferation and ubiquity of new forms of communication, in addition to changes in their uses, raises a multitude of questions regarding their impact on social relationships, community identity and work practices. 

Such a development of communication media and practices also questions the definition of what constitutes a public space, which has been extended through online forums, blogs, messaging tools (e.g. Skype), and social networking applications (e.g. Facebook and MySpace). Indeed, nowadays, you can meet or engage online with people that you have never met, on diverse topics. You can be working in the privacy of your office, yet be part of a social network, posting on several forums, or chatting via Skype. You can be in a park or coffee shop, connected via wireless Internet, interacting with people located all around the globe—while not interacting with those nearby. Thus, public spaces are not only co-located spaces; people also interact, meet, build relationships and interact in virtual public spaces.

These questions led us to want to  deepen our understanding of how virtual public space can trigger interactions and (potentially) relationships through an interactive installation Building_Space_with_Words which aims to prompt reflections on communication and community (or “we-ness”) in both physical and virtual spaces. Here, “space” is understood in a broad sense–not only as a physical arrangement, but as “a living system, a collection of interacting and adjacent patterns of events in space (Alexander, 1979).” 

These issues will be developed in an installation on the the campus of NYU-Poly in Brooklyn in March 2009. The installation will comprise  a maze form acting as a metaphor for online interactions on which will be projected virtual communication text derived from the Building Space with Words blog as well as from other public blogs.  Invited to take part in this blog conversation on communication and space-both the virtual and physical would be participants representing a wide array of fields including , sociologists, psychologists, artists, designers and architects.  The aim being to  support a dialogue on spatial perspectives and practices from various fields. 

From this dialogue, we will extract key  ideas and  questions to be asked of visitors to the installation. In addition, the public will have the opportunity to participate in the blog while visiting the installation with their blog posts becoming a part of the installation as they are projected onto the maze. More generally, we want to start a conversation and deepen our understanding of these issues through a dialogue with people coming from various backgrounds and perspectives.

 Looking forward to the conversation,

 al and Aileen