Caterina Benincasa

Emerging forms of alternative economic frameworks are changing the structure of society, redefining the relationship between centre and periphery, and the social dynamics in the urban fabric. In this context, the arts can play a crucial role in formulating a concept of complex and plural citizenship: This economic, social and cultural paradigm has the potential to overcome the conventional isolation of the arts and culture in ivory towers, and thereby to gradually make the urban fabric more fertile. This volume faces such sensitive issues by collating contributions from various disciplines: Economists, sociologists, urbanists, architects and creative artists offer a broad and deep assessment of urban dynamics and their visions for the years to come.

Unver and Taylor have explored digitally a methodology that has interested makers and observers for decades. In the 1930’s Walter Benjamin in his seminal discussion of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction worried about the destruction of authenticity and aura that reproductions of the real created for the viewer, whilst acknowledging that this reproduction allowed artefacts to be dislocated from their original ritual purposes and therefore making the once scared more accessible. In 1977 Roland Barthes liberated the emphasis of construction and understanding of knowledge from the makers to the spectator by proposing that the author was no longer the ‘god’ that should be sought out to explain the works on offer. In fact, once the understanding of a text is placed with the viewer he suggested that to try to impose a final reading of an object is ineffective. Baudrillard believed that when a reader seeks out an image of the real the more vast the schism between a lived experience. Unver and Taylor, have helped to reinstate an immersive experience through the Stonehenge Virtual Reconstruction research. Up for debate is whether their output really is another example of ‘technological inertia’ or whether, because digital life and real life are now so closely intertwined they have enabled new spectators to be perceptually closer to the stones and the surrounding site. [1] Roland Barthes. Image Music Text [1978] [2] Jean Buadrillard. The Consumer Society