Introducing Massive Media
This chapter introduces the concept of massive media, a term used to describe the emergence of large-scale public projections, urban screens, and led façades such as the illuminated tip of the Empire State Building. These technologies and the social and technical processes of image circulation and engagement that surround them essentially transform buildings into screens. This chapter also introduces theoretical concepts surrounding space, media, cinema, monumentality, and architecture in order to provide a framework for the analysis of the emergence of the building as screen. These concepts are key axes upon which the ongoing transformations of the public sphere revolve. Subsequent chapters are introduced in which massive media is probed, in case studies and creation-as-research projects, for its ability to enable new critical and creative practices of expanded cinema, public data visualisation, and installation 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.