Augmented Entanglement of Narrative Chronotopes and Urban Territories

Dimitrios Makris,Maria Moira

doi:10.25038/am.v0i20.335

Abstract

The complex conditions of urban places render it difficult to identify and perceive their multivariate aesthetic characters. The question examined herein is in which ways digital media like Augmented Reality (AR) can facilitate a more comprehensive aesthetic appreciation of a place by individuals, enhance their overall experience and allow them to recognize the aesthetic distinctiveness of places that may be phenomenologically dense with aesthetics, memory, meaning, legibility. The framework proposed is founded on the inherent power of novels as chronotopes of potential dialogical experiences and on four characteristic strategies of AR. Narrative chronotope singularities are fundamental sources for understanding the collective, cultural, historical, social and spatial practices, leading to an understanding of urban environments. So the first step is to extract narrative chronotope analysis content from a novel’s urban substance (buildings, roads, squares), characters, plot and sequence of events. The second step involves a three-dimensional re-creation of urban heritage components. Finally, the AR media is interwoven with the novels based on four strategies: reinforcement of aspects of real-world urban places by digitally overlaying the novel’s setting; recontextualization to achieve the semantic transformation of places as the novel’s significance and meanings are revealed; remembrance by facilitating the emergence of diverse identities and memories; and re-embodiment through achieving a deeper understanding and re-interconnectedness with the aesthetic aspects of urban places. Augmented narrative descriptions restore harmony between body-mind-environment and fiction while ensuring that different times, places and psychological situations coincide. The proposed novel-based digitally-mediated interaction could provide a shift that leads to the embodiment, enhancement and re-conceptualization of the diverse aesthetic dimensions of constructs such as ‘heritage monuments’, ‘local community’, ‘public place’, etc. Article received: April 2, 2019; Article accepted: July 6, 2019; Published online: October 15, 2019; Review article

Highlights

The complex nature of urban places renders it difficult to identify and perceive their multivariate and fragmented aesthetic characters
The question examined is in which ways digital media like Augmented Reality (AR) can facilitate a more comprehensive aesthetic appreciation of a place by individuals, enhance their overall experience and allow them to recognize the aesthetic distinctiveness of places that may be phenomenologically dense with aesthetics, memory, meaning, legibility
The framework proposed is founded on the inherent power of novels as chronotopes of potential dialogical experiences and on four characteristic strategies of AR

Summary

Introduction

The complex nature of urban places renders it difficult to identify and perceive their multivariate and fragmented aesthetic characters. Our initial purpose is to reinforce the spatiotemporal bodily experience by overlaying current and past aesthetic, social, cultural, collective and historic layers or fragments to the present urban tissue This approach unfolds in two main directions: (a) augmenting the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of cognition that urban dwellers-visitors-inhabitants fail to perceive it exists in the current urban environment’s reality; (b) augmenting the quantitative and qualitative dimension of the urban environment’s reality itself in a way that is only possible through narratives’ chronotopes. Augmented Reality technologies comprise an innovative framework through which individuals can bodily and cognitively orientate themselves and renegotiate their physical and semantic relationships with the surrounding urban places.[14] The singularities of narrative chronotopes[15] are fundamental sources for the understanding of collective, cultural, historical, social and spatial practices towards the understanding of urban de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. There are three basic strategies for a storytelling AR typology[19] aiming at ontological and semantic enrichment and extension through the integration of novels; added to these is a fourth strategy, that of re-embodiment.[20]

Implementation Framework

Case studies