This dissertation describes, historicizes, theorizes, and deploys “massive media,” an
emerging subset of technical assemblages that include large outdoor projections,
programmable architectural façades, and urban screens. Massive media are massive in their
size and subsequent visibility, but are also an agglomeration of media in their expressive
screen and cinema-like qualities and their associated audio, interactive, and network
capabilities. This dissertation finds that massive media enable and necessitate the
development of new practices of expanded cinema, public data visualization, and new
media art and curation that blend the logics of urban space, monumentality, and the
public sphere with the aesthetics and affordances of digital information and the moving
image to support a more participatory public culture in which we identify and engage with
collective presence, memory, and action through information, architecture, and the
moving image. Through historical research, case studies, conversations with cultural
producers, participant observation, and creation-as-research projects, large-scale public
projections are shown to represent a new monumentality that can be better understood
and evaluated using analytical tools from cinema studies, namely superimposition,
montage, and apparatus/dispositif. Low-resolution LED façades, while sharing some of the
functional and theoretical characteristics of projection, are shown to uniquely support an
emerging practice of public data visualization and represent a more consistent embodiment
of a hybrid and relational public sphere through a tighter coupling of information,
architecture, and context. Programmable architectural façades, more than projections,
embody the development of supermodernism in architecture where data-rich public spaces
of identity, congregation, and contestation seek and find appropriate and consistent outlets
in highly visible spatial assemblages of architecture and media. Finally, a curatorial
approach to massive media is crucial in order to create suitable spaces and opportunities
for the development of massive media as a legitimate art form. This requires the sustained
provision of technical support and coordination as well as an ongoing negotiation with
corporate, institutional, and civic owners and operators. While massive media exists
primarily as a highly commercialized phenomenon, it can also be pressed into service,
through coordinated curatorial and artistic efforts, to critique or co-opt commercialization,
and to re-envision the role of urban media environments in shaping collective identity,
historical consciousness, and public display culture.
Visualizing Marine Soundscapes for Marine Resource Managers and the General Public: Data Visualization Website Developed Using Human-Centered Design Principles and Interdisciplinary Collaboration
