EDITED BY SCOTT MCQUIRE, MEREDITH MARTIN URBAN SCREENS Reader AND SABINE NIEDERER 2 URBAN SCREENS Reader 3 Urban Screens Reader Editors: Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin and Sabine Niederer Editorial Assistance: Geert Lovink and Elena Tiis Copy Editing: Michael Dieter and Isabelle de Solier Design: Katja van Stiphout Printer: Raamwerken Printing & Design, Enkhuizen Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2009 ISBN: 978-90-78146-10-0 Contact Institute of Network Cultures Phone: +3120 5951866 EDITED BY Fax: +3120 5951840 SCOTT MCQUIRE, Email: info@networkcultures MEREDITH MARTIN Web: http://www.networkcultures.org AND SABINE NIEDERER INC READer #5 Order a copy of this book by sending an email to: [email protected] A pdf of this publication can be downloaded freely at: http://www.networkcultures.org/publications Join the Urban Screens mailing list at: http://www.listcultures.org Join the International Urban Screens Association at: http://www.urbanscreensassoc.org Supported by: the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science in collaboration with Virtueel Platform, the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, the School for Com- munication and Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, MediaLAB Amsterdam and the International Urban Screens Association. The editors would also like to acknowledge the assistance of the Australian Research Council LP0989302 in supporting this research. Special thanks to all the authors for their contributions, and to Michael Dieter for his careful copy-editing. This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 2.5 Netherlands License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/nl/deed.en No article in this reader may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means without permission in writing from the author. 4 URBAN SCREENS Reader 5 CONTENTS Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin, and Sabine Niederer Introduction to the Urban Screens Reader 9 URBAN ScreeNS: HISTORY, TechNOLOGY, POLITIcs Erkki Huhtamo Messages on the Wall: An Archaeology of Public Media Displays 15 Saskia Sassen The INC reader series are derived from conference contributions and produced Reading the City in a Global Digital Age 29 by the Institute of Network Cultures. They are available in print and pdf form. Scott McQuire The Video Vortex Reader is the fourth publication in this series. Mobility, Cosmopolitanism and Public Space in the Media City 45 Uta Caspary Previously published INC Readers: Digital Media as Ornament in Contemporary Architecture Facades: Its Historical Dimension 65 INC Reader #4: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds.), Leon van Schaik Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, 2008. The Lightness in Architecture 75 This reader is a collection of critical texts dealing with the rapidly emerging world of online video – from its explosive rise in 2005 with YouTube, to its future as a significant M. Hank Haeusler Autonomous Pixels: Liberating the Pixel from its Planar Position on a Screen 83 form of personal media. Download a free pdf from www.networkcultures.org/videovortex Sean Cubitt LED Technology and the Shaping of Culture 97 INC Reader #3: Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (eds.), Andreas Broeckmann MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries, 2007. Intimate Publics: Memory, Performance, and Spectacle in Urban Environments 109 This reader is a collection of critical research into the creative industries. The material develops out of the MyCreativity convention on International Creative Industries Research SITes held in Amsterdam, November 2006. This two-day conference sought to bring the trends and tendencies around the creative industries into critical question. Kate Brennan, Meredith Martin and Scott McQuire 121 Download a free pdf from www.networkcultures.org/mycreativity Sustaining Public Space: An Interview with Kate Brennan Mike Gibbons and Scott McQuire INC Reader #2: Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen and Matteo Pasquinelli (eds.), Public Space Broadcasting: An Interview with Mike Gibbons 135 C’LICK ME: A Netporn Studies Reader, 2007. Jan Schuijren and Scott McQuire This anthology collects the best material from two years of debate from ‘The Art and Putting Art into Urban Space: An Interview with Jan Schuijren 145 Politics of Netporn’ 2005 conference to the 2007 ‘C’LICK ME’ festival. The C’LICK ME Simone Arcagni reader opens the field of ‘internet pornology’, with contributions by academics, Urban Screens in Turin and Milan: Design, Public Art and Urban Regeneration 151 artists and activists. Download a free pdf from www.networkcultures.org/netporn Soh Yeong Roh and Nikos Papastergiadis Large Screens and the Making of Civic Spaces: An Interview with Soh Yeong Roh 157 INC Reader #1: Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle (eds.), Julia Nevárez Incommunicado Reader, 2005. Spectacular Mega-public Space: Art and the Social in Times Square 163 The Incommunicado Reader brings together papers written for the June 2005 conference ‘Incommunicado: Information Technology for Everybody Else’. The publication includes a CD-ROM of interviews with speakers. Download a free pdf from www.networkcultures.org/incommunicado 6 URBAN SCREENS Reader 7 PUBLIcs AND PARTICIPATION: INTerACTIVITY, SOCIABILITY AND STRATEGIes IN LOCATIVE MEDIA Giselle Beiguelman Public Art in Nomadic Contexts 179 Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat StalkShow 191 Liliana Bounegru Interactive Media Artworks for Public Space: The Potential of Art to Influence Consciousness and Behaviour in Relation to Public Spaces 199 Jason Eppink and Alice Arnold Electric Signs: An Interview with Jason Eppink, the Pixelator 217 Annet Dekker City Views from the Artist’s Perspective: The Impact of Technology on the Experience of the City 221 Sabine Niederer, Shirley Niemans and Bart Hoeve Content in Motion: An Example of Urban Screens Education 233 Ava Fatah gen. Schieck Towards an Integrated Architectural Media Space: The Urban Screen as a Socialising Platform 243 Audrey Yue Urban Screens, Spatial Regeneration and Cultural Citizenship: The Embodied Interaction of Cultural Participation 261 APPENDICES Author Biographies 281 8 URBAN SCREENS Reader INTRODucTION 9 INTRODUCTION SCOTT MCQUIRE, MEREDITH MARTIN AND SABINE NIEDERER On September 23, 2005, about 200 people crammed into the 11th floor of the POSTCS building in Amsterdam for the opening of the first Urban Screens conference. One of the most noticeable aspects of the event, organised by the Institute of Network Cultures in con- junction with Mirjam Struppek, Gerrit Rietveld Academy and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, was the range of different interest groups it attracted. Artists sat alongside broadcasters and other ‘content providers’, architects and urban planners jostled with advertisers, curators and new media theorists, while activists rubbed shoulders with screen owners, technology providers and signage analysts. This heady mix unleashed the kind of energetic discussion born of frequent misunderstandings as much as productive intersections, and crystallized the realisation that something significant had changed. In 2005 ‘urban screens’ were about 30 years old, if we can take the installation of the famous Spectacolour Board in New York’s Times Square as a convenient point of origin. However, if Spectacolour in the mid-1970s was clearly about forming a new advertising platform, by 2005 cumulative changes in technology, urban space and public culture had all contributed to the pervasive sense that something new was emerging. Instead of treating the digital realm primarily in terms of its separation from everyday life (as the discourses around ‘virtual reality’ and ‘cyberspace’ had done in the 1980s and 1990s), the discussion around urban screens was animated, above all, by recognition of the growing integration of media into everyday existence. Urban screens of various scale – from the small handheld screens of mobile phones to the large screens dominating the streetscapes of global cities – exemplified a new urban paradigm produced by the layering of physical space and media space, resulting in what has been variously called ‘Hertzian’, ‘hybrid’, ‘mixed’, ‘augmented’ or ‘stereoscopic’ space. Two more international Urban Screens conferences have taken place since 2005. The first, in Manchester in 2007, was jointly organised by BBC Public Space Broadcasting, Corner- house Manchester, MDDA and the Institute of Network Cultures, and focused on the issue of content creation, including processes of commissioning and funding, and practices of curatorship. The most recent event took place in Melbourne in 2008, as the result of a partnership between the University of Melbourne and Federation Square. Under the rubric of ‘Mobile Publics’, the conference investigated the new conditions of public culture and the public sphere in the context of global digital networks and new forms of transnational mobility. Both events attempted to foster the sort of interdisciplinary orientation that had marked the first Urban Screens conference and, in particular, to provide an arena in which a range of different voices and concerns could be heard. Recapitulating this brief history is germane to this collection, not at least because many of the papers had their genesis at one or other of these conferences. The issues first raised 10 URBAN SCREENS Reader INTRODucTION 11 in these presentations have been updated, extended and reformulated for the current vol- determining standards and ‘affordances’, or erecting