The Adab of Urbanity

The Introduction defines the main terms of the book: household anthology (majmuʿa, muraqqaʿ), adab, eroticism, love, and urbanity. It places the anthologizing of Isfahan within a critical genealogy of city reading to argue that urban practices related to seeing, reading, desiring, and writing were intimately related and mutually coconstitutive, thus informing both the lived experience of the city and its (re)assembly as household anthologies. A reader’s guide to the anthologies outlines the unfolding of the narrative, which begins with the imperial Safavi project and moves to the urban media of household anthologies through eight resident authors who act as city guides.

A Cautionary Tale of Urban Media Art: Media-Bait, Planned Censorship and Its Repercussions

How do curatorial initiatives in public spaces balance the critical pursuit of art and the professional ethics of the exhibition context? What are the pros and cons of conducting attention-grabbing guerrilla campaigns versus infiltrating politically sensitive public arenas with long-term initiatives? What happens when corporate sponsors of art become trapped in the battlefield of art-fueled media controversy? This article expands on such inquiries by analyzing the collision of two artistic urban interventions, Open Sky Project and the Countdown Machine campaign—a collision that took place within the delicate political context of Hong Kong in 2016.

Post-City (III): Co-spatiality Politics and New Mediality

One of the most significant factors influencing the co-spatialities regimes of post-urban communities is the development of new urban media. On the one hand, new urban media symbolizes the complex transition to new post-urban communities and new spatial regimes of their existence; on the other hand, they are the basic element of the newly emerging policies of co-spatialities. From the phenomenological point of view, post-politics is treated as the growing dominance of flat communicative ontologies in post-urban spaces, characterized by the disintegration of the traditional modern methods of communication. A post-urban locality is defined as a medial co-being, centering the next here-and-now cartography of imagination, which can be considered as a post-political action. The de-territorialization of post-urban communities takes place through the “smoothing” of urban spaces, turning them into mostly “smooth spaces” with the help of the new media. Specific local geo-cultures, a new, “rhizomatic” type whose development is based on the post-political transcription of socialization and medialization of urban spaces, are formed. The affectivity of post-urban co-spatialities is manifested in the gradual increase in the number of new specific urban actors that herald the slipping away of traditional state and municipal policies. The post-political can be considered as a sphere of geo-semiotic violence aimed at the over-coding of co-spatial situations. The mapping of co-spatialities reproduces the Earth as a total chora of post-political ontology. The post-city nomos constantly forms a communicative periphery with the missing center, where any message can signal the transactions of imagination aimed at the devaluation of “center–periphery” systems.

Curating Massive Media

A curatorial approach to the building as screen is crucial in order to create suitable spaces and opportunities for the development of massive media as a legitimate artform capable of shaping the critical discourse of cities and citizens. Based on two in-depth case studies of curatorial organisations in the field, Connecting Cities and Streaming Museum, I propose that massive media 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 commercialised phenomenon it can also be pressed into service through coordinated curatorial and artistic efforts to critique or co-opt commercialisation and to re-envision the role of urban media environments in shaping collective identity, historical consciousness, and public display culture.