Addressing " Captive Audience Positions " in Urban Space From a Phenomenological to a Relational Conceptualization of Space in Urban Media Studies (original) (raw)
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Beyond space and place. The challenge of urban space to urban media studies.
Journalism, Representation and the Public Sphere, 2015
Within Urban Media Studies, current research on media practices in urban space is by and large informed by a phenomenological conceptualization of space directly derived from traditional audience studies of the 1990s. This conceptualization has as its linchpin the distinction between space as abstract location, and place as space endowed with symbolic meanings and affections through practices of place-making. This approach has the merit of going beyond deterministic hypotheses of media-related placelessness and clarifying how specific media-related practices can contribute to fostering people's attachment to places and to endowing them with symbolic meanings. Yet, as shown through a discussion of an original case study on "captive audience positions" (situations in which we are somehow forcedly put in the position "to audience" a media spectacle), this conceptualization seems less adequate to addressing the relationship mutually shaping space and practices enacted in urban space, whether media-related or not. These limitations could be overcome by extending the phenomenological conceptualization of space into a fully fledged relational one.
The politics of public space in the media city
First Monday, 2006
What happens when the TV screen leaves home and moves back into the city? The public domain of the 21st century is no longer defined simply by material structures such as streets and plazas. But nor is it defined solely by the virtual space of electronic media. Rather the public domain now emerges in the complex interaction of material and immaterial spaces. These hybrid spaces may be called ‘media cities’. In this essay, I argue that different instances of the public space in modernity have emerged in the shifting nexus between urban structures and specific media forms. Drawing on the pioneering work of sociologist Richard Sennnett, I offer a critical analysis of the forms of access and modes of interaction, which might support a democratic public culture in cities connected by digital networks and illuminated by large urban screens.
SPACE AND PLACE IN URBAN CULTURE
When we think of art as an integral part of the construction and transformation of urban culture, we find the public space as the main stage of this event. The public space, as José Pedro Regatão defends, is "a territory of political character that reflects the structure of the society in which it operates." (Regatão, 2007). This way, we may think the crisis of social structure as being the responsible for the identity crisis of public spaces, which may lead them to what is called "non-places”. These correspond to a functional logic that creates a contractual level of social relations, in contrast to the concept of place, which brings together space, culture and memory. Places are reservoirs of memory. They cover a dual visible and invisible landscape. Anne Whiston Spirn is a landscape architect that defends the place as private, "a tapestry of woven contexts: global, disclosed and lasting and ephemeral, local and reveal, now and then, past and future..." (Spirn, 1998). Addressing concepts such as space, public space, place, home and urban art, we intend to understand how art is responsible for social transformation in communities and what’s their place within them. Placing art in city public spaces will enable a dialogue between the collective and the individual, often prompting personal memories to enable the appropriation of space/place city.
to name a few. The editors of the current volume, however, have not only provided readers with an update on research in what has become a fast-changing engagement by interdisciplinary scholars, but they have also consciously narrowed the scope of previous collected volumes by emphasizing the relationship between new media and public space in terms of questions about the changing conditions of labor and leisure, everyday life, and individual experience. Given these diverse but connected and dynamic initiatives, the pages of this volume offer a subtle reframing of what constitutes urban public space for the cultural present.
Locative Media in the city: Spatial Practices and Social Dynamics
Book chapter in "Mediacity. Situations, Practices and Encounters" - Edited by F. Eckardt et al., Frank & Timme, Berlin, Germany, 2008
Locative Media as " spatial interfaces "-Unraveling the different types of spatial awareness involved in Locative Media Locative Media can be thought of as spatial interfaces, initiating a series of interlacing spatial practices and activities that define their use as everyday media. The spatial character of Locative Media is twofold. In a more general sense, the use of any medium is essentially spatial, by virtue of being part of everyday life practices. Technological, discursive and symbolic artifacts represent and contribute to the shaping of the socio-cultural realities of individuals and communities. These everyday realities are presuppositionally and ontologically spatial (Soja, 1996: 46). In other words, the use of any medium is always situational and contextual and its meaning is contingent upon the specific space-temporal conditions in which it unfolds. In a more specific sense, Locative Media afford a series of highly spatialized activities that set them apart from other types of media. By enabling the execution of location-based activities, Locative Media create new zones of technosocial action and appropriation, each reflecting different types of spatial awareness. Below, we are proposing a taxonomy of these different, yet inextricably related and mutually defined, types of spatial awareness of Locative Media users and the spatial practices they encompass. We suggest that this taxonomy may be used as a theoretical model for different levels of research into the spatial aspect of Locative Media. In proposing this model, we subscribe to Graham's (2004) " recombinant approach " which supports a fully relational view of the links between technology, time, space and social life. a) Performative space We call the first zone of Locative Media the " performative space " and propose that I may be approached through the narrative paradigm according to which the modern city is a " text " on which a variety of textual practices are performed. The environment or landscape always gives meaning to places, and urban landscapes reflect contemporaneous trends (Zeitgeist). The signs and symbols of the city are read as an urban biography. Today these signs include New Media which in their turn become part of a new urban symbolology. For the prominent French philosopher of everyday life, Michel De Certeau, the modern city has become a " concept " (a " concept-city "), by producing its own space through rational organization. This is how the city is being created as a universal and anonymous subject. The " concept-city " functions as a space of metamorphoses and appropriations, as an object of various interventions and at the same time as a subject which is continuously reinforced with new elements. Schematically, the city today is a structured complex, within which the subversive human practices are functioning in an overt or covert way. These are essentially spatial practices " ways of operating or acting " which take place and evolve in space.
Live event-spaces: Place and space in the mediatized experience of events
Locating Imagination in Popular Culture: Place, Tourism and Belonging, 2020
Chapter 13 in Van Es, N., Reijnders, S., Bolderman, L., & Waysdorf, A. (Eds.). (2020). Locating Imagination in Popular Culture: Place, Tourism and Belonging (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003045359 This chapter investigates the deeply mediatized experience of place and space within the lived practice of events by studying two annual Dutch cultural events as cases: Oerol Festival (2017) and 3FM Serious Request (2017). Drawing on substantial datasets containing online and offline participant observations, both short in situ interviews and longer in-depth interviews with a total of 248 interviewees and large datasets from Twitter and Instagram, this chapter demonstrates that media concurrently de-spatialize, in the sense that they diminish spatial borders and overcome distance, and affirm embodied experiences of being-in-place. I argue that it is liveness - the potential connection, through media, to events that matter to us as they unfold - that creates the closeness between the near and the far elements within the “eventsphere” and binds it all together into one event-space.
The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space – By Scott McQuire
2011
Media, city space and urban living are strongly intertwined and with recent technological development, these connections only seem to grow stronger. In The Media City, Scott McQuire, professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, argues convincingly that we need to go beyond the trivial understanding of media as representation of urban space. He claims that the city and technology have become so interconnected that one can not be understood without the other. He views the contemporary city as a mediaarchitecture complex. Media can not be understood as separate of the "real world," because it is an integrated part of the social, political, economical and cultural spheres of society. As he argues in the preface: "Rather than treating media as something separate from the city-the medium which 'represents' urban phenomena by turning it into an image-I argue that the spatial experience of modern social life emerges through a complex process of co-constitution between architectural structures and urban territories, social practices and media feedback."g row_551 227.. 229 The Media City has a broad and interdisciplinary approach and the empirical examples are highly original and entertaining. McQuire tells a story of urban history and shows how media has been an integral component in the formation and trans-formation of the city. He analyses this through critical frames and with thinkers such as Benjamin, McLuhan, Baudelaire, and Derrida as important guides. In addition, he draws on a wide selection theorists to explain how the media always has, and probably always will, mould the city. One important and overarching theme in this book is the transformation of public and private space in the urban experience and the role media plays in this ongoing transformation. From post cards of Paris, via city-symphony films made in the 1920s, to more current developments such as the merge between entertainment and information technology, McQuire shows how the practice of modern life emerges through a complex process of co-construction between built environment, social practices and media feedback.