Tactical actions in public space: Spatial readings through art and architectural installations

Public space can create public memory and revive cities through the use of constructed spatial elements, as well as through the spatial events and interventions that take place in these particular spaces. With the help of these elements, public space creates its own common, accessible exhibition. Every people walk of life need to create continuous communicative realtionship with surroundings instead of space and the hole city. In our era, production, action and interaction are being encouraged by the new design culture. Multiple and versatile meanings, a pluralistic environment, and the participation of the city's actors in design are emphasized. In the discipline of art and architecture, we are moving from static, definite and finished icons to more open, changing, and reflective spatial entities. Installations which are type of art, can be named as an architectural installations. Because these architectural installations get closer to architecture in terms of creating livable and experiencing areas. This creative architectural installations provide citizens to comminicate each other as well as the city. They can re-structure their spatial perceptions and reconceptualise the spatial structure of the city. By disturbing usual everyday practices, rhythms, and choreographies, these architectural installation forms propose alternative living scenarios in public space. Urban public spaces are designed with the interest, welfare, and access of the public in mind. Also public spaces are designed to create an encounter between urban bodies. In this way, with the help of encounter and interaction, space can occur as a place for the experience of the body to take form. In this respect, we can talk about the conception of urban life that has evolved through the contribution of the body. To create our lived experience in the city, we can concentrate body experience. Spatial configurations encourage, initiate and shape bodily experience in the city. Because of this statement, experimental spatial interventions that activate the body in urban spaces are the main focus of this study. They create important alternative ways int terms of perceiving and operating the city. We are currently facing a paradigm shift in the field of art and architecture. To encourage interaction between body-space relationship, instead of creating a normal atraction, art and architectural disciplines are searching for new design approaches of spatial installations. In the installations found in urban spaces, participants become the subject, rather than simply having direct contact with the object. So, communicative space can exist itself. Participants can enable the space to become dynamic, reflective and communicative through the use of their bodies. In this way of thinking, participants attach themselves to the urban space, like prosthesis and make it a collective space through their own input. Cities are no longer a complex of stable structures, but are active environments that combine the activity of the urban bodies as a way to interact. By creating a provocative mediums in the daily routines of the city, art and architectural installations enable the citizens perceive their surroundings, re-estblish their daily practices and change their constant life more unsteady. Having similar characteristics, the art and architectural installations are affecting oeach other in their renewing approach to public space. An art installation can be explained as a three-dimensional work that is designed in relation to a specific space, location, or situation. The characteristic of contextuality, or site-specificity, is the first aspect that merges the two disciplines. Secondly, to establish a permanent, useful dialog with the public, both disciplines try to find new solutions to create experimental works. They attempt to enable a place or an atmosphere or a situation where the creative imagination of both designer and the spectator can flourish. By affecting the body's own imagination they suggest new ways of communication and interaction for social contact in the urban space. The art and architectural installations that is the subject of this work, create interactive mediums by which the urban citizen communicates with his or her surroundings, thus enhancing spatial awareness. So, the citizens develop his or her spatial awareness by the help of spatial structures which enables the body to creates his own perceptual experience. These structures make architectural space more communicative, sensitive and interactive, increase the use of urban public spaces by presenting different spaces. It encourages a new trend that moves from old, static, definite, and finished icons in design towards more open, alive, accessible, and sensitive spatial entities. In this way, the body becomes more creative and performative. Public space is a place where citizens can express themselves; where they can interact and intervene with other places by creating their own space. Body and space relationship connect themselves with the feeling of belonging. In this way, the body creates his own space by experiencing it and re-defining its boundaries according to his body movements. So, this redefining process learns the body to explain the effects of body receivers which is effective in perceiving and experiencing the space. According to this body-space receiving relation, the body creates his own space with the help of his own perception. Even though the space is stable, the body and its awareness change according to particular conditions. In public space, in order to create the space it desires, the body tries to create new ways to transform spatial perception. This part of the study deals with tactical actions in design which enables the body to create new ways of negotiating with its surroundings. The design examples discussed in the process of work seek to serve public space by using different tactics, such as creating new conceptual ideas, breaking boundaries without strict rules, and re-defining the public space. These tactical actions are accepted as re-defined and adapted actions that aim to let society understand their surroundings and improve the way of comunication between each other. These examples consist of collective spatial interventions that support the citizens to be a participant in public space. In this way, one can change his perception, make connection with another people and learn to adopt public space. These spatial interventions try to interact with the viewer and make unexpected encounters possible as part of the daily routine of the body. Architectural installations in public space create main types of behaviour and emotional experience and are able to activate citizens and encourage them to take part in the construction of the urban environment. Urban art and architectural interventions are productive and creative mediums which change urban experience by re-shaping the emotional landscape of the city. By breaking everyday practices and routines spatial performatives, they create experimental, sensitive and impressive mediums in which citizens can communicate with their surroundings and improve their spatial perceptions and conceptions of the living area. Art and architectural installations enables to make spatial reading around the public spaces. These installations have a remarkable effects on shaping the urban public spaces. In this work, the tactical actions are analyzed acording to their major character according to their effects on the common spaces. There are six tactical actions in terms of re-activating unused urban land, re-defining urban surfaces, using the idea of play, emphasizing technology, emphasizing the idea of the pop-up city, creating mobile parasites. By using these design tactics, the artists and designers can use different approaches to improve the qualifications of the urban space. They create playful furniture, interactive surfaces, or small-scale spatial effects to re-define the relationship between body and urban space. This analysis shows that art and architectural installations are important structures with the potential to make significant contributions to citizens behaviors. These installations manage to create a new public awareness by mirroring, revealing, or complementing the unique characteristics of the chosen sites. Becoming an object, public space create awareness on citizens and improve their way of looking in daily life. In this way, the individual becomes a subject, has potential to create his or her personal spatial limits physically and emotionally. The micro-architectural and macro-planning scales should be brought in the city life. Metropolitan voids do not stay empty; they are appropriated for unexpected programs of activity. The role of architectue is to create space but it is the individual who makes space alive. Because individual can create movement, performance in the space and transform it. According to this statement, it is suggested that art and architectural installations provide creative spaces that trigger performative practices in urban space. With these spatial productions, the action is started by the designer, but he or she does not control it. The one that keeps this action alive is the citizen; in other words, the individual him or herself.