Projecting the new world city: The city as spectacle in an urban light festival (2015) (original) (raw)

MEDIACITY 5: Reflecting on Social Smart Cities

Abstract: As a precursor to the 2014 G20 Leaders’ Summit held in Brisbane, Australia, the Queensland Government sponsored a program of G20 Cultural Celebrations, designed to showcase the Summit’s host city. The cultural program’s signature event was the Colour Me Brisbane festival, a two-week ‘citywide interactive light and projection installations’ festival (‘Colour Me Brisbane’) that was originally slated to run from 24 October to 9 November, but which was extended due to popular demand to conclude with the G20 Summit itself on 16 November. The Colour Me Brisbane festival comprised a series of media-architectural projection displays that promoted visions of the city’s past, present, and future at landmark sites and iconic buildings throughout the city’s central business district. The festival was supported by a website that included information regarding the different visual and interactive displays and links to social media to support public discussion regarding the festival. Festival-goers were also encouraged to follow a walking-tour map of the projection sites that would take them on a 2.5 kilometre walk from Brisbane’s cultural precinct, through the city centre, and concluding at parliament house. In this paper, we investigate the Colour Me Brisbane festival and the broader G20 Cultural Celebrations as a form of strategic placemaking—designed, on the one hand, to promote Brisbane as a safe, open, and accessible city in line with the City Council’s plan to position Brisbane as a ‘New World City’ (‘Brisbane Vision’). On the other hand, it was deployed to counteract growing local concerns and tensions over the disruptive and politicised nature of the G20 summit by engaging the public with the city prior to the heightened security and mobility restrictions of the summit weekend. Harnessing perspectives from media architecture (Brysnkov et al. 2013), urban imaginaries (Cinar & Bender 2007), and social media analysis, we take a critical approach to analysing the government-sponsored projections, which literally projected the city onto itself, and public responses to them via the official, and heavily promoted, social media hashtags (#colourmebrisbane and #g20cultural). We argue that the Colour Me Brisbane festival can be understood as a carefully constructed form of urban phantasmagoria that attempts to call Brisbane into being as a ‘new world’ digital city. We analyse the ways in which the Colour Me Brisbane festival employed imagery and light displays to project a phantasmagoric vision of the city’s past, present, and idealised future. Acknowledging that cities are more than amalgamations of physical features, this research employs qualitative methodologies to explore the social experiences of Colour Me Brisbane participants and makes of use of a hybrid dataset that incorporates social media (Twitter and Instagram) activity and ethnographic observations. Our critical framework extends the concepts of urban phantasmagoria and urban imaginaries into the emerging field of media architecture to scrutinise its potential for increased political and civic engagement. Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria (Cohen 1989, Duarte, Firmino, & Crestani 2014) provides an understanding of urban space as spectacular projection, implicated in commodity and techno-culture. The concept of urban imaginaries (Cinar & Bender, 2007; Kelley, 2013)—that is, the ways in which citizens’ experiences of urban environments are transformed into symbolic representations through the use of imagination—similarly provides a useful framing device in thinking about the Colour Me Brisbane projections and their relation to the construction of social memory. Employing these two critical frames enables us to examine the ways in which the urban projections open up the potential for multiple urban imaginaries—in the sense that they encourage civic engagement via a tangible and imaginative experience of urban space—while, at the same time, legitimating a particular vision and way of experiencing the city, promoting a commodified, sanctioned form of urban imaginary. This paper aims to dissect the urban imaginaries intrinsic to the Colour Me Brisbane projections and to examine how those imaginaries were strategically deployed as place-making schemes that choreograph reflections about and engagement with the city.