Orama

Orama

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).