Director, NABI Art Centre, Seoul
http://eng.nabi.or.kr

Soh-Yeong Roh is the founder and Director of Art Center Nabi South Korea. She founded Art Centre Nabi in 2000, transforming a contemporary art centre into a newmedia art centre, where art, technology, humanities, and industry come together to create new art and cultural artefacts. As the main centre for new media arts in Korea, Art Centre Nabi promotes creative talents from diverse backgrounds, turning ideas into practices. Apart from directing Nabi, she gives lectures around the world and is a visiting professor at Chingwha University in China.  Art Centre Nabi works in the field of media art and culture with a special interest in locative media.

Day 3: Sunday 5th October, Session 4: Cross-cultural Public Networks

'The City as Open Creative Platform'

Information technology has opened up economics, politics, and culture; it will also open up our cities. We already have the free flow of information seeping into every corner of our daily lives. The new information technology, especially the internet, is enabling us to directly participate in political, economic and cultural processes. My contention is that this bottom-up technology can be a vehicle to shape our cities into 'open creative platforms'. In this presentation I will give concrete examples of how our urban spaces function as open creative platforms. From there we can start picturing what our future cities might look like. Public screens are gaining interesting momentum at our end, as Korea is building more than her fair share of U-Cities. One of such projects, perhaps the most notable one is being developed in Incheon, right next to the Incheon airport. The city is developing a new city center along the theme of ubiquitous computing, and fortunately Art Center Nabi is involved in designing parts of it. Not only large screens but some other new technology will be implemented. Naturally we face questions like; what is the benefit of technology? And what kind of cities are we building now?