Emergent Vision Symposium 2018
NTU School of Art, Design and Media
A combined review with Hannah Kwah.
Presentation link : https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zj6_A6ZWxxSHh8whHJ5N7ENjRkX0jkj5YSSnd94U9co/edit?usp=sharing
From TV to Public Screens
Migration of Screens
Around the mid-1970s, the migration of electronic screens into the external cityscape has become one of the most visible tendencies of contemporary urbanism. The old television set has morphed from a small-scale appliance – associated with domestic space – to become an architectural surface resident not in the home but in the street outside.
This transformation has intersected the other major transformations of media technology and culture over the last two decades:
- the formation of distributed global networks which erode regional and national broadcast boundaries,
- the emergence of mobile media platforms such as cell phones which displace the architecture that accumulated around fixed media.
The cumulative impact of these developments on the relation between media space and urban space has been profound.
Electric lighting can be understood as a forerunner in some respects to the appearance of large screens in the city: the solidity of buildings – their mass, stable shape, sense of volume – all begin to waver as they are floodlit. Street signage is a distinctive feature of the modern cityscape, an example is the signages displayed at Times Square in New York (1927).
“Media City”
Impact on Public Space
The thing that McQuire looked into was the Impact on Public Space. What is public space for?
- Public space : a place for assembly
- Physically assembly, symbolic assembly
- Public space is supposed to be a space open for everybody
- But it is a contested space, there are visible and invisible barriers to participation, to belonging
The way in which we deal with these kinds of barriers and how they are being impacted by media technology is a critical aspect. Public space as an experience where we can speak and act together.
One of the functions of public space has taken in a modern city as city starts to get much larger and social life has become more of living among strangers, we see higher rates of immigration. Hence there are more diversity in a public space. Public space becomes an important place of encounter, a place where we engage with people of difference.
This is the role of a public space.
Digital Media
How has media changed? As much as cities have changed, so have media. There are recent developments on recent digital media which made an impact on public space much more pervasive.
- In the mid-twentieth century, there was a shift from the centralised distribution of material objects such as newspapers and film reels to the centralised distribution of electronic information such as radio and TV broadcasts.
- Media has become much more possessional. When there is an increase use of GPS in the early 2000s, media can take relevant data and deliver to particular sites or can extract relevant data.
Real time nature of digital networks. We start to see the way media feedbacks system through human and non-human actors.
The description media city is designed to foreground the way that our experience of space in contemporary social life now emerges through a complex process of co-constitution between architectural structures and urban territories, social practices and media feedback.
Large screens have primarily been used in two ways: as relays for live events: (rock concerts, sports) or to provide flexible platforms for information & advertising. These uses largely comply with spectacular public space, with the appropriation of the city as spectacle, but there is also a history of alternative content: e.g. the text based installations by Jenny Holzer in the 1985 called “Private Property Created Crime”. Holzer’s work suggests that a key issue for large screens in public space remains the traditional issue for all media forms: control, access, filtering of content etc.
