diploma thesis, architecture, tu graz, january 2011

abstract

Digital technologies add the properties of omnipresent locatability and mobile networking to daily life and thus increase the awareness of placiality. Digital data get “localized” and places experience a complex level of digital representation through the democratization of cartography. There exists a visible trend towards the revaluation of locality with technologies like geoweb, geotagging and geo art. Combined with the terms locative media and mediated locality they could be summed up as geomedia. These constitute the theoretical foundations for the thesis and for a debate on the topic of navigation, in relation to the realized project of a lighthouse as a landmark. Based on the do-it-yourself construction and the re-utilization of a grain silo converted to a lighthouse, the work questions to what extent the typology lighthouse can establish itself as a landmark and how it can at the same time sustain its original function. By means of digital mediation of places, the work also deals with digital navigation and how it permits interaction with the space constituted by landmarks.

Land Mark Light House – Towards A New ‘A-Whereness’ from ulrich a. reiterer on Vimeo.