3 The Urban Metainterface: Territorial Interfaces

In the app Las calles habladas, or Spoken Streets, by Clara Boj and Diego Diaz (figure 3.1), the user is offered a random map and walking path around their location. The app seemingly functions like an audio guide, where the user listens to news or facts about places along the way. Unlike most audio guides, however, the narrative appears fragmented. The audio track does not contain the voices of the people living there but rather an automated text-to-speech function. The route planning includes not only a suggested path but also Google searches related to the location. Each user movement generates a search and is answered by the reading of debris from the World Wide Web's enormous body of text: phrases from websites, Twitter feeds, or Facebook events appear together with symbols, numbers, and URLs. Sometimes there is a direct and visible linkage to the user's location, as when the user is near a shop that also is listed on a website. At other times the relation is more abstract, and invites the user to speculate on potential narratives, as when a place is linked to a Facebook event or Twitter feed. On rare occasions, there is only a semantic linkage, as when the name of a street or shop is common, and perhaps located in hundreds of cities. The relation between sense and nonsense, between potential narrative and raving incoherent jabber, seems to be central to the experience of using the app. The confrontation with Spoken Streets (i.e., how the web speaks the streets) appears absurd to a human being. It functions almost like a joke or a parody of the ways that sense making functions in other, more conventional applications that, for instance, augment reality by linking locations to the real-time generation of information.