City as a Poetic Database Through Walking, New Media and Site Interventions: Performing and Transforming Urban Otherness

The wider spatial, geo and digital turns in arts and humanities have made apparent the performative, social and hybrid character of walking in the city as a means of creation, experience and non-verbal communication. The aesthetic and cultural implications of urban walking (mainly through the traditions of flanerie, psychogeography and fluxus) have been widely explored across contemporary art, geohumanities, poetics, social methods and embodied technologies. The city has been a key-place and idea with universal impact, echoing self/other oscillations. The current chapter explores the ways walking as an aesthetic, performative and technologically mediated practice reveals new hybrid aspects of the Other in a multilayered public space of the twenty-first century. Through selected artists’ cases, it explores how selected metaphors for the city and the art practice which draw to literature and new media theory are able to suggest an interdisciplinary method for creation and critical reflection with the Other and towards the marginalised—city as database, as interface, as threshold through a number of walking-oriented, participatory and technological processes. The chapter aims to foster interdisciplinary thinking by bridging hybrid forms of art practice with ideas and concepts from communication and media studies.