The Video City
Urban media and “sense of place”
Matteo Pasquinelli
Antennas, photos Jesus O’Bof (trakatan)
“In the longer term every object may become a screen connected to the Net, with the whole of built space becoming a set of display surfaces.”
So new-media theorist Lev Manovich views the imminent scenario of ‘augmented reality’, propagating itself as a result of the dissemination of ever more portable modular communications devices with always-on net connections, adding an ulterior dimension to the space of our daily lives. In truth physical space has always been inhabited and ‘augmented’ by images, signs, antennae, cables, etc. What is happening with the latest media evolution is the arrival of an interface wherever you go, like a 1:1 scale map.
Virtual and geographical space converges and the new media cast the foundations of an “augmented”
architecture
Virtual and geographical space converges and the new media cast the foundations of an ‘augmented’ architecture that some might call the Internet of Things, a network of intercommunicating objects (not without Orwellian overtones, see the hotly disputed RFID, the radio ID chip that can be applied to goods).
Antennas, photos Jesus O’Bof (trakatan)
The new media produce new spaces, not only virtual but also real: the architects and town planners understood this many years ago, though more commonly we struggle to comprehend the physical effects of communications media. Certainly there is talk of the mediascape and spatial metaphors are used to describe the virtual world, but the space that we inevitably forget about is of the off-line variety. For this reason, some activists and researchers have begun to operate around the concept of ‘locative media’, counterpointing the concept of ‘augmented reality’, desirous of shifting attention onto social interaction, the mobility of the devices and their ability to ‘know’ where they are (location-aware devices). GPS technology, which uses satellites to track a moving object and determine its coordinates to within a few metres, has, for example, inspired the creation of locative art projects. With these positioning technologies the artist can visually map out the routines, cycles and social interactions that make up a city, as Esther Polak has done with her Amsterdam Realtime project. WilFried Houjrbek makes algorithms for psychogeographic drift, taking inspiration directly from the dot walk programming language that was among the winners of the 2004 Transmediale festival.
Antennas, photos Jesus O’Bof (trakatan)
In these examples it is easy to see how the perception of architectural and urban space is always mediated by the coded abstractions of the digital matrix. There is a sizeable gulf between the artist-activists of the digital generation and those of the analogue generation, despite the convergence anticipated by Manovich, according to which we will discover flows of digital information and flows of video images cohabiting everywhere. The displays that infest the streets of the big oriental cities are not so far from this scenario, but the modes of colonization of urban space by ‘old-fashioned’ TV are different. And it is a difference that we instinctively perceive.
The video medium began its invasion of urban space in 1950s America, although in the form of advertising billboards. J.G. Ballard, in The Atrocity Exhibition of 1970, offers us the ideal description of the symbiosis between media image and urban space: “The enormous figure of a dark-haired woman had been painted on the sloping wall of the fort. The enlargement was so big that the wall to its right, the size of a tennis court, contained little more than the right eye and cheekbone. He recognized the woman: it was the same one he had seen in the posters near the hospital, the actress Elizabeth Taylor. But these pictures were more than gigantic blowups. They were equations that embodied the profound relationship between the actress’s identity and the millions of people who were distant reflections of her, in time and in the shape and position of their bodies. The planes of their lives intersected at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths that fused with the divinities of the commercial cosmos. Divinities that presided over their lives, the movie actress, with her fragmented body, furnished a set of operative formulas that eased their passage to awareness.” Ballard’s vision is not that hallucinatory after all: just think of the gigantic advertising hoardings that cover some of our city buildings with superhuman-size celebrity endorsements. Media images produce the urban spaces they require: it is an architecture that fleshes out the demands of Spectacle and thus there is little room for man.
Antennas, photos Jesus O’Bof (trakatan)
Between the colonizations of locative media and hypertrophic advertising there are those who wish to experiment with other relationships of technology and urban space: something that, for example, street TV does.
When you talk about television in Italy, you are talking about monopolies, freedom of information and independent communication. In the current situation, concerns about its ‘architectural effects’ hardly spring to mind. If we look at the history of street TV we do find, however, a close relationship with place. The first telestreet, Italy’s name for pirate street-TV stations, sprang from the medieval rooftops of Bologna early in 2002, in Via Orfeo to be precise, a working people’s microcosm that boldly resists the gentrification of the surrounding old-town. Like other pirate TVs to follow, Orfeo TV takes its name directly from the street where it was born. Street TVs are very often a direct offshoot of neighbourhood life and do not so much represent a source of information as a space in which to defend and tend to social fabric. As happens in Milan, for example, where Isola TV has become an instrument to support the Isola neighbourhood’s opposition to building speculation and Council developments in a corner of the city that still resists sales-culture thinking.
Street TVs give a platform to the underbelly of the city. ‘Independent’ communication is not the central issue but, as is happening with modern man, recovering relationships with the city through the use of technology. Precisely because of this they are also known as “short-range TV stations” and feel no need to communicate at long range (their transmitters cover a few kilometres at most). The street TVs want to reconstruct a certain ‘intimacy’ of transmission, a video aesthetic of everyday concrete space, where the hiss and crackle of the signal makes sense rather than impedes it. Low-fi, analogue street TVs are successful in something impossible for the smooth and abstract spaces of the new technology: the reconstitution of an inhabitable dimension of urban space. Perhaps street TVs were not born to combat television monopolies (in truth a titanic undertaking); there is the uncanny sensation that they were born from the tangible need to recover relations with the city, to reconstruct what Joshua Meyrowitz calls a “sense of place.”
