Orama

A collaborative narration for contemporary flaneurs

Media arts, Net-art, Collaborative hypertext
Torino (IT), Valparaiso & Santiago de Chile (CL) / 2002-2005

Orama is a collaborative writing system that supports the creation of shared spatial narrations of cities, districts, places (orama, from the greek orao, vision). It is intended to interface and map the interconnected works of a series of individual artists and groups interested in building a shared representation of a space they live in, explore and want to reimagine. Orama locates their creations within a dynamic hypertextual network that defines position, and relations of any part of the orama with the others and their connection through sense-links, the narrative paths through which the users can jump from one page to one another and explore the website. The resulting network is mapped through a cartography that shows positions and relations of the different creations shared by the Orama’s users.

Brief / Concept

Today cities are maybe one of the most striking examples of the risks and opportunities offered by contemporarity. They could be a fascinating place to develop new kinds of shared culture, but are nonetheless the place where is more difficult to involve people in a common local imaginary, because of the dispersedness of the urban environment. The origin of the project stands within this context. We were unsatisfied with the already existing ways to describe the city and all the other spaces around us. We experienced a gap between our personal experience and the mediated world spread through radios, TVs, newspapers, magazine accounts. We perceived the cities and the urban spaces as something silenced by traditional media overuse, TV addiction, and disinterest. We wanted something to build our autonomous representation of the spaces we were living in.

Technical details

The Web application is based on a PHP/XML mix that supports the content creation features in the backend. The map system (designed in 2002 - way before the GoogleMaps era) is built in Flash/Actionscript and displays dynamically all the contents being created by Orama writers. The hypertexts are composed by a combination of multimedia files and scripts and they are linked together according to the narrative intentions of the authors (more than 30 overall). Several Orama were proposed starting from Torino in 2002 (Italy), to Santiago and Valparaiso in 2005 (Chile).