Research

Concept

Renao is a collaborative media environment engaging the socioaesthetic quality of Renao (热闹) or ‘heat and noise’ as an element of urban livability and walkability. Our work proposes speculative applications of real-time gestural computation of group activity and poetically composed media which scopes movement and computing to a realm of concern endemic to public life. Flow-based movement sensing techniques allow visitors to continuously modulate media through movement and gesture, including ambient sounds sourced from high-spatial resolution recordings of Renao public space as well as the color temperature of ambient lighting. In the mediated Renao space, we simultaneously create and sense the media environment through continual sensorimotor activity and feedback to catalyze experimental-experiential events. Such events facilitate immersive poetic spaces co-curated by designers and visitors, in which visitors attend to their own individual and collective production and experience of vibrancy in dense social spaces. The media environment affords aesthetic creation and experience adequate to the heated and noisy activity characteristic of these social spaces, as well as attunement to socioaesthetic potentials for future urban places.

Team

Jonathan Bratt: Research Ph.D | Geography, ASU

Garrett Laroy Johnson: Research Ph.D | Synthesis, AME

Brandon Mechtley: Research Professor | Synthesis

Sha Xin Wei: Director | Synthesis

Adam Nocek: Professor | AME, CPT

Kevin McHugh: Professor | Geography, ASU