Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introducing Massive Media
- 2 Large-scale Projection and the (New) New Monumentality
- 3 Low-Resolution Media Façades in a Data Society
- 4 Curating Massive Media
- 5 When Buildings Become Screens
- About the Author
- List of Exhibitions, Films, Songs, Videos, and Installations
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects
4 - Curating Massive Media
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introducing Massive Media
- 2 Large-scale Projection and the (New) New Monumentality
- 3 Low-Resolution Media Façades in a Data Society
- 4 Curating Massive Media
- 5 When Buildings Become Screens
- About the Author
- List of Exhibitions, Films, Songs, Videos, and Installations
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects
Summary
Abstract
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.
Keywords: Connecting Cities, Streaming Museum, digital culture, exhibitions and new media, art and urbanism
Changing Spaces
The social and spatial context of a city changes with the addition of more expressive and connected media architecture in the form of low-resolution media façades, urban screens, and public projection. In the media city (McQuire 2008), feedback associated with urban structures through public screens and personal devices serve to reconstruct contemporary life, instituting new ways of being social and civic. Orientation becomes more contingent and ambiguous, blurring lines between presence and absence, the near and the far, leading to what McQuire calls ‘relational space’ (ibid., 48), a space defined less by pre-existing relationships of familiarity and solidity and more by temporary, ephemeral connections and impressions. Similarly, theorist De Souza e Silva describes this entanglement and imbrication of media and space as ‘hybrid space’ (2006, 271). For both authors, the key understanding is that space, in addition to being socially constructed (Lefebvre 1991), is also constructed through technological lenses, filters, and devices. Crucially, De Souza e Silva argues that in the hybrid spaces of the media city, ‘every shift in the meaning of an interface requires a reconceptualisation of the type of social relationships and spaces it mediates’ (2006, 262). When buildings become screens, new pitfalls and possibilities emerge that require critical reflection. And when these buildings become exhibition spaces for art and culture, they require curatorial direction that considers the new affordances and limits of the medium.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Building as ScreenA History, Theory, and Practice of Massive Media, pp. 133 - 172Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019