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.