Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code

We are very happy to report that a paper that that Mark, Matt, and Andrew Boulton have been working has just been accepted for publication in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

The paper is titled Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code and the abstract is below:

With the increasing prevalence of both geographic information, and the code through which it is regulated, digital augmentations of place will become increasingly important in everyday, lived geographies. Through two detailed explorations of ‘augmented realities,’ this paper provides a broad overview of not only the ways that those augmentations realities matter, but also the complex and often duplicitous manner that code and content can congeal in our experiences of augmented places. Because the re-makings of our spatial experiences and interactions are increasingly influenced through the ways in which content and code are fixed, ordered, stabilised, and contested, this paper places a focus on how power, as mediated through technological artefacts, code and content, helps to produce place. Specifically, it demonstrates there are four key ways in which power is manifested in augmented realities: two performed largely by social actors, distributed power and communication power; and two enacted primarily via software, code power and timeless power. The paper concludes by calling for redoubled attention to both the layerings of content and the duplicity and ephemerality of code in shaping the uneven and power-laden practices of representations and the experiences of place augmentations in urban places.

Please send Mark an email if you would like a pre-publication copy. We would welcome any thoughts and comments you have about the paper.

(we'll leave it to you to work out what nyancat has to do with anything in this post)