Mobile Methods and Large Screens

This chapter details the case studies that were conducted as part of a five-year research project, which conducted the world’s first real-time cross-cultural exchange via the networking of large public screens located in Melbourne and Seoul. The project linked large screens located in Seoul and Melbourne for three media events: SMS_Origins and <Value>, HELLO, and Dance Battle. The chapter details methodological innovations of the research, which involved the reformulation of the way in which the scholar was embedded in the research and transformed according to the interactive research process. It also elucidates critical insights into the process of cultural exchange, the impact of media technologies on public space, and the transformation of the public sphere in the global era. The empirical research generates fresh insights into public interactions with large screens, providing a prototype for future cross-cultural events and offering new theoretical perspectives on the use of public space.

Big Screens, Little Acts

This chapter demonstrates how the introduction of large screens to contemporary public spaces function to assimilate diverse arts, commercial, and public forms into a conservative regime. On the one hand, the new opportunities that accompany the large public screens are subverted by the logic of capitalist accumulation, which informs a public address designed to achieve high volumes of individual engagement, rather than high quality public engagement. On the other hand, new opportunities to enhance public engagement are subjected to bureaucratic modes of governance, which pre-emptively censor content such that it extends and satisfies conservative regimes of early broadcast regulation. The authors argue that the confluence of capitalist and bureaucratic regimes governing big screens effectively balkanise audiences, valorise nondemocratic forms of participation, and privatise public spaces.

Defining the Public in Piccadilly Circus

This chapter examines the large screens of Piccadilly Circus, London, to extrapolate how digital capitalism produces a depoliticised neoliberal public. From the narrow technological parameters to optimise visibility, to the relentless commercial occupation of these ‘public’ screens, Cubitt demonstrates how the possibility of a political public sphere within the space of Piccadilly Circus is foreclosed by corporations that sell the illusion of control and freedom which they have long since usurped. This is further illustrated by his analysis of a novel artistic installation, performed by Fluxus artist Yoko Ono in 2013, which intervened in the corporate occupation of the Piccadilly Circus screens to foreground the triumph of branding over substance that circumvents the democratic potential of large screens in public spaces.

Introduction

This chapter challenges the binary characterisation of large screens contemporary public spaces, as either an incursion which threatens the fecundity of public engagement, or as a renewal of the democratic public sphere. A public sphere approach is utilised to extrapolate how big screens are a dynamic element within an emergent media ecology, which mediatizes and transforms the boundary between public and private spaces. It also foregrounds a key concern of the book as the exploration of opportunities for new transnational democratic publics and public spaces.

Digital Public Infrastructures for Creative Communities

This chapter investigates the potential for new forms of social and civic interaction to be enabled when the notion of the public good is economically and philosophically applied to locative media. It also explores the possible forms that interactive digital technologies might take when embedded within shared public spaces. This is achieved using a multisited ethnographic approach to a case study of Quartier des Spectacles, a digital urban infrastructure in Montreal Canada. The authors argue that insofar as Quartier des Spectacles has successfully prioritized social over private returns, it provides a useful model for the future development of digital public infrastructures, which both closes the gap between top-down and bottom up approaches to interactive technology design, and more effectively meets the needs of end users.

Walls, Attractions, and Media

This chapter examines pre-twentieth precedents for big screen displays in public spaces to demonstrate how media culture has never been segregated from outdoor milieus of distraction. It addresses largely ignored histories of public displays, including trade signs, banners, broadsides, billboards, and early dynamic displays including magic lantern shows. The chapter contextualises outdoor screens within this history to argue that public media culture is a peculiar mode of spectatorship that must be apprehended as element among many that vies for the attention of individuals within public spaces, including aural, physical elements, and other visual elements. It argues that the tendency to characterise large screens as an incursion of the private into the public fails to address the history and context of public displays, which are instead more productively apprehended as sites where the distinction between public and private is renegotiated.

The Inside/Outside Equation

This chapter examines the relationship between the internal façade and internal structure of buildings to elucidate how digital buildings have generated new levels of interactivity between people and structures. Applying a media ecology approach to the analysis of digital buildings, such as Times Square “zipper” and the Empire State Building in New York, the authors demonstrate how such buildings transform the relationship between inside and outside of architectural structures, and intensify the capacity to meaningfully communicate with contemporary publics. They argue that the multitudinous uses to which digital media façades are put, is consistent with the ethos of public space.

Conclusion

This chapter reflects on contexts of contemporary urbanism, and on artistic experiments with perspective and sensory perception, to develop a concept of ambient awareness as a mode of inhabiting mediated cities. Ambient awareness refers to the sensibility that attends to the field by relating elements that are peripheral to each other and organising them into a new form. This chapter argues that large screens constitute a key platform for both the new aesthetic genre of ambient art and the emergence of new forms of public communication. It outlines the concept ‘ambient perspective’ as a means for clarifying: the dynamics of interaction in knowledge production; the sensory processes in play in the casual observer’s reactions to urban screens; and the more general activities of symbolic and cognitive work in the media city.

Shanghai’s Public Screen Culture

This chapter examines local specificity of Shanghai’s public screen culture to contest conceptualisations of public space as subject to the homogenizing effect of globalisation. Berry examines two processes that shape local deployments of the moving image. First, he demonstrates how the drive toward “secular enchantment” is offset by the specific local uses of each screen, which is determined by its social function and institutional context. Second, he analyses Shanghai’s text-based or “walking word” screens as part of a long and varied lineage of putting writing into public spaces. He argues that these local uses are not a “glocal” adaptation of Western standards, but rather, evidence a pattern of coeval development under conditions of rapid proliferation of new media technologies around the world.