Public Urban Media @ Urban Screens Stedelijk Museum

Urban Screens ’05 is an international conference ranging from critical theory to project experiences by researchers and practitioners in the field of art, architecture, urban studies and digital media.

The focus is on understanding how the growing infrastructure of large digital displays influences the visual sphere of our public spaces.

How can the commercial use of these screens be broadened and culturally curated?

How can urban screens con-tribute to a lively urban society, and involve the audience interactively?

Lecture Public Urban Media @ Conference Urban Screens, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 23-24 September 2005

Urban
Screens

Urban Screens ’05 is an international conference ranging from critical theory to project experiences by researchers and practitioners in the field of art, architecture, urban studies and digital media. The focus is on understanding how the growing infrastructure of large digital displays influences the visual sphere of our public spaces. How can the commercial use of these screens be broadened and culturally curated? How can urban screens con-tribute to a lively urban society, and involve the audience interactively?

In the context of our cities’ rapidly evolving commercial information sphere, developers bring new digital display technology into the urban landscape, like large day-light compatible LED screens or high-tech plasma screens. Meanwhile, there is a growing interest in exploring their potential for non-commercial use, challenging new strategies of content production and management. Instead of limiting our view to the emerging occasional ‘infiltration’ of video art, let’s regard these screens as ‘screening platforms’ and investigate their social and cultural potential and their impact on our urban society.

Public space has always been a place for human interaction, a unique arena for the exchange of rituals and communication. Its architecture, being a. storytelling medium itself, plays an important role in providing a stage for this interaction. The way public space is inhabited can be read as a participatory process of its audience, its (vanishing) role as a space for social and symbolic discourse has often been dis-cussed in urban sociology. Modernization, the growing independence of place and time and individualization seem to devastate traditional city life and its social rhythm. Besides experiments with social networks and the media, a variety of new tools have emerged. Starting with the development of virtual cities with its chat rooms and spaces for production of identity, we now face communal experiments like collaborative wikis, blogs or mobile phone networks in the growing field of social computing and cross-media plat-forms.

Parallel to this development, an event culture has evolved in the real urban space of internationally competing cities, focusing on tourism and consumption. Considering the importance of social sustainability of our cities it is necessary to look closer at the livability and openness of public spaces and start to address the urban users as citizens instead of passive consumers. Shared experiences in the digital communication sphere might serve as an inspiration for this social enhancement of the real city. Could large outdoor displays function as experimental ‘visualisation zone’ of the fusing of the virtual public spaces and our real world? Can screens function as a new mirror reflecting the public sphere?

Urban Screens wants to address these questions and launch a discussion about how digital culture can make use of the existing and future screening infrastructure, in terms of art and social or political practices, generating a higher value for its operators and ‘users’. We want to address the existing commercial predetermination and explore the nuance between art, interventions and entertainment to stimulate a lively culture. Other key issues are: medi-ated interaction, content, participation of the local community, restrictions due to technical limits, and the incorporation of screens in the architecture of our urban landscape.

The conference aims at an interdisciplinary audience with the intention to ex-change experiences and start a network to initiate future collaborations.

Addressing
the Social Value
and Civic Culture
through
Participation

23 September 2005, 14:00 15:30 Session 2
Soft Urbanism: Public Urban Media, Elizabeth Sikiaridi, Frans Vogelaar

The presentation focuses on concepts, applications and projects for urban screens. It addresses the changes of public urban space due to medialisation and develops scenarios for the interplay of the public urban space and the public media domain, for the creation of urban hybrid spaces. A series of projects are presented. ‘Soft Urbanism’, a new interdisciplinary field of design, exploring the dynamic interaction of urbanism and the space of mass media and communication networks, is introduced.

related PRESS