Public Space, Media Space

Description: Public Space, Media Space asks how public space is being mediatized in different ways in different cities around the world today. Urban public spaces are saturated by media, perhaps more than ever before. These range from highly visible large LED screens in cities like Tokyo, through the cassette sermons one hears in the streets of Cairo, to the invisible, inaudible satellite surveillance systems that are everywhere. They include personal media like MP3 players and mobile phones, public information systems, commercial advertising, and more. How do these media shape, interconnect, or constitute physical public space, and how do they connect to virtual public spaces? How should we understand these phenomena? Is this simply a process of ever greater degradation of the public as direct face-to-face communication is replaced by ever more mediated and commercialized forms of communication among strangers? Or are new publics, new public processes, and new public spaces being constituted?



Contents: Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction; C.Berry, J.Harbord & R.O.Moore What Is a Screen Nowadays?; F.Casetti Multi-Screen Architecture; B.Colomina Mapping Orbit: Towards a Vertical Public Space; L.Parks Cairo Diary: Space-Wars, Public Visibility and the Transformation of Public Space in Post-Revolutionary Egypt; M.Abaza Shanghai's Public Screen Culture: Local and Coeval; C.Berry iPhone Girl: Assembly, Assemblages and Affect in the Life of an Image; H.Grace In Transit: Between Labor and Leisure in London's St. Pancras International; R.Moore Encountering Screen Art on the London Underground; J.Harbord & T.Dillon Direct Address: A Brechtian Proposal for an Alternative Working Method; M.Lewandowska Domesticating the Screen-Scenography: Situational Uses of Screen Images and Technologies in the London Underground; Z.Krajina Privatizing Urban Space in the Mediated World of iPod Users; M.Bull Publics and Publicity: Outdoor Advertising and Urban Space; A.M.Cronin Index



Author Biography: CHRIS BERRY is Professor of Film Studies at King's College, London, UK. Recent publications include: (edited with Kim Soyoung and Lynn Spigel), Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology, and Social Space (2010); and (edited with Nicola Liscutin and Jonathan D. Mackintosh), Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes (2009). JANET HARBORD is Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. She is the author of Chris Marker: La Jetee (2009), The Evolution of Film: rethinking film studies (2007), and Film Cultures (2002). She has worked on a number of publically funded, collaborative projects, supported by the EPSRC and AHRC for the project 'MediaCity: Social Trends' (2009), and the Leverhulme funded 'Tracking the Moving Image: screens in public space in Cairo, London and Shanghai' (2009-11). RACHEL MOORE writes about the historical and contemporary avant-garde. She is the author of Savage Theory: cinema as modern magic (2000). Her current book project, based on earlier research around film and contact across time and space conducted during her Guggenheim Fellowship, is called 'In the Film Archive of Natural History'.