Urban Art and Digital Technologies for Autopoiesis in Citizen Tourism

Abstract

This research proposes a “conversation” that connects urban art and digital technologies for autopoiesis of citizen tourism, through observations of artistic interventions that use the city as support and spread on cyberspace. In this study, we will develop a discussion from the gables’ graffiti of Elevado Presidente João Goulart in São Paulo, a place also known as “Minhocão”. The general objective of this study is to reflect on how the combination of urban art and digital technologies can contribute to an autopoietic reinvention of citizen tourism. In this way, the specific objectives are: a) discuss the autopoiesis concept in relation to citizen tourism; b) discuss the relationship between urban art and digital technologies for citizen tourism. The theoretical references concerning urban art are based on Pesavento (2007), Eckert and Rocha (2016), Harvey (2012), and Campos (2021). To approach digital technologies, the principal references are Lévy (2010), Kerckhove (1997, 2003), and Taufer (2020). The autopoiesis concept had as a theoretical substrate the thought of Maturana and Varela (2003), Luhmann (1992, 2009), Guattari (1992), and Baptista (2015), while the tourism approach is established by Gastal (2006), Baptista (2020) and Moesch and Beni (2016). This study is guided by Cartography of Knowledge (Baptista, 2014), a strategic methodology that is divided into four trails, explored simultaneously by researchers: Personal Knowledge, Theoretical Knowledge, Production Plant, and Intuitive Research Dimension. In terms of preliminary results, it was perceived that the association between urban art and digital technologies shows new autopoietic constructions between the subject and the tourist citizen. The art interventions create agencies that shift the tourist citizen of their routine, thus they share their new perceptions of the city through digital technologies.