Complete Program/Infos (900 kb PDF)
Lecture Summaries:
The
Politics of Public Space in the Media City
Scott McQuire
Paul Virilio argues that public space has given way to public image, shifting
the location of the public domain from the street to the domestic display
terminal. But what happens when the screen leaves home and moves back into
the city? The public domain of the 21st century is no longer simply streets
and plazas. Nor is it defined solely by electronic media space. Rather it
emerges in the complex interaction of material and immaterial spaces. In this
paper, I want to trace some different conceptions of public space, and ask
what forms of access and interaction might support 'democratic' public space
in the hybrid spaces of contemporary media cities.
Urban Media Surface: First Steps
Lev Manovich
Living your life in the modern city, you constantly interact with multiple
UMI (Urban Media Interface) - from the small screen of a cell phone to a large
screen of a public electronic billboard. What are the most aesthetically daring
examples of UMS (Urban Media Surface) designs so far? How is our experience
of a spatial form (i.e. architecture) is affected when the form is covered
with dynamic and rich multimedia information? What are the historical precedents
of UMS phenomena and what can we expect in the future? A report from the squares
and the research labs.
Media
Facades in the Context of Urban Scale
Christoph Kronhagel
In 2004 the ag4 mediatecture company realized a 300 sqm transparent media
façade for the headquarter of the mobile phone carrier T-Mobile in
Bonn. Infront of a glass façade an external construction with integrated
light emitting diods had to be installed without disturbing the panoramic
view from inside. The transparency of this medium allows a deliberate interaction
of architecture and electronic media, provoking a new scale in urban development
- the question of perceptioning moving pictures in urban space. The perception
depends on the dimension of a media façade. Valuable technologies and
media conceptions that synchronize with the cultural nature of the city are
needed.
Integration of screens in architectural / urban
design
Prof. Peter Lavery
An overview of urban redevelopment in Brisbane Australia on a former army
barracks site with differing screens informing the architectural design of
building surfaces as public art spaces. Identifying different publics including
commuters, specific groups in public spaces, and a newly forming residential
community in a distributed environment using large screen interactivity in
community development. University / government partnership in urban redevelopment
and leveraging government policy on public art to create an urban screen environment.
Intelligent Skin. Houses that Oikoborg
Andreas Wenger, Vera Bühlmann
“Intelligent Skin” develops a media façade as an expressive
membrane of houses as organisms with proper individualities. Such organisming-personing-houses
will develop an own „Lebenswelt“ due to their sensitivity and
sensuality, intelligence, and memory. With people parasiting their proper
milieus, communicational spheres might evolve into new hypercycles. What would
it feel like to live in a city where houses court each other in springtime?
Soft Urbanism: Public Urban Media
Prof. Elizabeth Sikiaridi and Prof. Frans Vogelaar
The presentation focuses on concepts, applications and projects for urban
screens. It addresses the changes of public urban space due to medialization
and develops scenarios for the interplay of the public urban space and the
public media domain, for the creation of urban hybrid spaces. A series of
projects are presented. “Soft Urbanism”, a new interdisciplinary
field of design, exploring the dynamic interaction of urbanism and the space
of mass media and communication networks, is introduced.
Urban Video Displays as the New Voice of Public Communications
Louis M. Brill
How have communities integrated LED video signage into public spaces? How
do the dimensions of art & entertainment as expressed through video displays
transform a civic public space and a digital display into a singular location
that enhances the value of that space as a tourist or community destination?
This presentation will view the integration of the public videosphere in us
within certain shopping malls, parks and building structures where large scree
video has become an identity beacon in creating digital public space.
The Shape of Content on the Urban Screen
Perry Bard
Is it possible to use the urban screen to address a gap mainstream media creates?
I will describe two video interventions done in collaboration with community
groups who have little access to technology and discuss the problems in accessing
the technology, problems with the kind of technology provided when it is provided,
sustainability of such endeavours, participation, audience response. These
projects were initiated as an alternative to mainstream media. They are about
voice, about representation, about using the dominant technology to subvert
its most obvious efforts. .
Beaming and Streaming: Developing Infrastructure for an Urban Screen through
the Creative Collaborations Project
Frank Abbott, Dr. Jim Shorthose, Jez Noond
Creative Collaborations is an example of building creative networks and collaboration
for screen content using a DiY approach. We will describe and illustrate how
examples of the development of links through new display technologies can
feed into an urban screen project nurturing emerging relationships between
active cultural production and cultural consumption. A partnership between
Nottingham Trent University and The Broadway Media Centre, Nottingham.
The Art of Interaction, Love Connection and
Global Culture Broadcast
Valentin Tomic, Valerija Tomic, Kristijan Topckov, Dusan Kalicanin
People, Outdoor LED screens and the Internet multifunctionally linked in one
coherent, urban entity by three different approaches. Cultural exchanges wherein
artwork and creativity makes itself approachable to broad audience, is the
first project also offering a unique chance for artists to present their work
all over the world. Similarly, the second one aims to make people more socialized
in the public space through SCANart punkts in front of LED screens. Third
one offers a daily concept of astrological counseling to people in front of
led screens, supported by web site, wherein love will motivate people to meet
you persons according to their unique astral charts.
1er contact - a Festival of Interactive Art in Public Space
Florent Aziosmanoff
The “FIRST CONTACT Festival” is an open-air exhibition in the
heart of the City of Issy-les-Moulineaux (in the southern suburbs of Paris),
displaying interactive installations in especially designed multimedia urban
furniture. The “FIRST CONTACT Festival” is organised by Le Cube,
the largest Digital Art Center in France, and sponsored by the ministry of
Culture and the Town of Issy-les-Moulineaux.
Art vs. Advertising – Comparative Use
of Corporate Screens for Video Art
Raina Kumra
The history of the use of video in the city for retail purposes, the economic
factors for displaying commercial pieces vs. art, examples of video art on
the rise with non commercial motivations. I examine which companies seem more
open to lending time on their screens to artists and why…
Commercial versus Public Service Applications
Olga Barham
Beeing Marketing Manager Media, BU Philips Vidiwall she will talk about the
company’s experiences of dealing with screens and Philips interest in
outdoor public spaces across the world.
Social and Cultural Aspects of Outdoor Video
Technology
Dr. Vladimir Krylov
“Moving billboards” were introduced to cities to compete with
traditional advertising means. They quickly acquired another important feature:
outdoor public address system. Informational and entertainment blocks serve
as value-added to advertising content and increase significance of outdoor
networks for both federal and municipal authorities and national and local
advertisers. What are the challenges to new public-private partnership?
Token screens or opportunity for difference?
Art screens and the branding of the city
Julia Nevárez
This presentation seeks to better understand the use of billboards and/or
screens in public space, specifically Times Square, NYC. Billboards with art
content will be examined to illustrate the branding of the city to attract
a professional class of residents and tourists as well as to comment on issues
of difference represented in public space.
Media-Facades: Use, Mutation and Technologies
Jürgen Meier
Examples of experimental media facades and their concepts generated in the
90ies show the process of mutation of public media. Different levels of research
were put into test in matrix and video facades. Artists and technicians are
looking for grounds and boarders of content, technologies and interfaces.
Users are able to move in virtual surroundings and translate their action
into color façade light and network traffic. Media – architecture
arises rhizomatic spaces between real live commerce and networking contents,
while investors are looking for simple broadcasting solutions in urban context.
Future
Urban Screens - New Concepts for Urban Screens
Florian Resatsch, Corina Weber, Daniel Michelis, Prof. Dr. Thomas Schildhauer,
et al.
Various projects showed recently that the passers-by in public space suffer
a lack of attention to public screens regardless their sizes and content.
Two recently developed concepts show on the basis of examples possible ways
to grab people's attention by using new ways of interaction or new points
of view. The screens in "Urban Moves" use cameras and information
technology to directly interact with the passers-by whereas the concept "Urban
SubScreens" deals with new ideas to place screens and let people choose
how to interact.
Cityspeak : From Private Expression to Public
Performance
Jason Lewis, Cobber Liu, Maroussia Levesque
Cityspeak is a platform for creating digital graffiti. Participants use Cityspeak
to engage in p2P (private to public) interactions, where private modes of
communication drive public displays onto a particular location. Text messages
sent by cellphone and mobile browsers are combined with real-time location-based
data such as news headlines and weather conditions, and then projected into
the location using the the NextText text visualization software. The resulting
interaction is a multivalent exchange between individual participants, participants
as a group and the location itself.
The Relation Between Large Scale LED Screens,
Content Production and Technology
Adrian Velicescu
Standard has recently designed a stunning 60 000 sq ft LED media installation
for Jakarta. It comprises of three lighting media wall installations that
cover two of the vertical 57story facade and the top crown of the Grand Indonesia
tower. In the middle of the North curtain wall there will be a 75x150 ft hi
resolution screen capable of displaying moving images. Standard will design
the content so the lo resolution lighting installation will be complementing
and work in tandem with the hi resolution screen.
Architectural Media Space
Dr. Linda Wallace
Designing for what I term 'architectural media space' requires new ways of
thinking how much commitment do passers-by have to following narratives inside
the frame or across multiple screens, and what kinds of assumptions can one
make about the kinds of people passing, in dialogue with their mind's thoughts
in all kinds of languages these are the some of the issues I addressed in
my PhD and in the works eurovision and LivingTomorrow, recently staged in
Amsterdam. The latter was conceptual prototype research into the potential
of high resolution video running via a database/server over the network to
three screens, whereas the former prototyped the idea of multiple streams
into single-frame templates. Both works addressed narrative and visual form.
(Tele)interventions in Cybrid Public Spaces
Roberta Alvarenga
This paper will address some teleinterventions of Giselle Beiguelman which
she did between 2002 and 2004. She is using commercial electronic billboards
for open public streaming by the Web and via SMS and MMS. These projects are:
Did your Read the East?, egoscópio (both from 2002), Poétrica
(2003, 2004) and esc for escape (2004).
Stalk
Show
Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat
The StalkShow deals with threat of unsafety and isolation. A backpack with
laptop/touchscreen is carried through public spaces. Being surrounded by the
audience you are invited to touch the touchscreen and to navigate through
an archive of texts about threat of unsafety and isolation. The texts derive
from internet, written by people living in isolation, like a prisoner, a nun,
a pilgrim, a digipersona. By webcam and wireless internet connection, your
live video portrait appears together with the text on a large projection screen
in the same public space. www.stalkshow.org
Etre = Réseau: From scenography to planetary
network
Franck Ancel
Since the attacks of 9/11, Franck Ancel has set up an interactive triptych
mixing "architecture - image - technology" on 20th century heritage
sites. In 2002, he put it in the Le Corbusier/Xenakis convent; in 2003 in
a classified theatre in Catalogne; and in 2004 on the screen of Montparnasse
Tower in Paris. Franck Ancel challenges the viewer outside traditional frontiers,
by projecting a setting of a network of information on screens.
Energie_Passagen [Energy_Passages] – Reading and (De)Scribing the City
Wolfgang Strauss & Monika Fleischmann
The project “Energy_Passages” reproduces linguistic spaces of
the city in form of a data flow. Hundreds of catchwords processed from local
newspapers appear in a projected »information flow« and are spoken
by artificial computer voices. As soon as passers-by select individual words,
thematically related networks of terms start to perform in this flow, which
can also be experienced as an audiovisual echo. Text and language is thus
detached from its linear context and staged as a medial reading in urban space.
Curating the Zuidas Urban Screen
Jan Schuijren
In co-operation with the city of Amsterdam, the Zuidas Virtual Museum, SKOR
and Faircom will install a permanent video screen for cultural programming
at the Zuidplein on Amsterdam’s South Axis. Jan Schuijren is commissioned
to curate the screen and will introduce his ideas for this new Urban Screen.
Audiences
on the Move - The Bigger Picture
Kate Taylor
The Bigger Picture curates and commissions moving image art work for a big
screen in Manchester, UK. This presentation will address the challenges of
negotiating a relationship between a non-immersive exhibition point and a
transient audience in a public space. Following experiments with content and
scheduling it will encourage the possibilities of touring, simultaneous screenings
and large scale commissions via the development of distribution networks with
other public screens.
Video as Urban Condition
Anthony Auerbach
Reflecting on how video becomes part of the urban fabric and on its mutability
sliding between fact and fiction, entertainment and persuasion, urban fantasy
and reality-TV, art and activism, surveillance and control. I will consider
‘urban screens’ in the broad sense. I will examine contemporary
shifts in what may be called the ‘relations of representation’
mediated by video technologies, that is to say: the culture and politics of
video as it emerges in various urban contexts. http://www.video-as.org
Outvideo - International Videoart Festival in
Public Spaces
Arseny Sergeev, Nailya Alachverdeiva
The festival OUTVIDEO is carried out for the second year in a row on the network
of 8 outdoor video screens in Yekaterinburg (Russia). The peculiarity of the
festival is that we show the video art pieces as advertisement. Short 30-second-long
silent video art pieces are broadcasted in common advertisement blocks every
5 minutes. We change the rules of the game. Introducing Video Art into the
public environment as advertisement we create the favourable conditions for
active perception (“consumption”) of the contemporary art by unprepared
public. The strategy of the festival is to use the temporary intervention
of contemporary art as the foundation for its future constant presence in
the public environment.
The Signing Operations of the Schaulager Screenings
Dr. Sabine Gebhardt Fink
The focus of my case study of the screenings at the Schaulager is their function,
character, nature and qualities as spatial-social sign, an aggregate of meaning/s
which I maintain is based in both material aspects and social conventions.
I am working with the notion of a signing-situation. One the one hand, I will
consider the material placement and human use of the entrance-area with the
screens on the level of affectedness, articulation and understanding; in using
a phenomenological modell for interpretations. On the other hand, I will explore
the discourses and actions in the cinematographic display-zone by a geosemiotic
case study.
Two
Years Public Space Broadcasting in the United Kingdom
Mike Gibbons
PSB brings 24 hour non-commercial content to the city centres, animating public
spaces; helps provide an event programme for local community and is a information
notice board for the 21st century. PSB is a partnership between BBC, Philips
and the local Government to provide the hardware working together with a creative
programme linking arts, film and video groups in the screen’s catchment
area. The lecture reviews the lessons learned by BBC and the project members
and paints a picture of future development.