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Interpreting Urban Screens
Paper presented at the Urban
Screens Conference, Amsterdam 23–24 September 2005 by
Anthony Auerbach, adapted for publication, November
2005. Published 6 February 2006 in First
Monday, Volume 11, Number 2.
Abstract
Large-scale video screens in urban settings suggest new possibilities
and challenges for city authorities and regulators, architects,
advertisers and broadcasters as well as cultural curators and producers.
While this potential remains largely untested, it is clear that
urban screens establish new sites for the negotiation between commercial,
public and cultural interests. This paper takes a critical approach
to the question of defining the role of culture in urban media,
highlighting the shifts in the relations of representation mediated
by video and the complexity of the urban media environment.
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Location
The conference ‘Urban Screens’ [note
1] aimed to explore the potential of large-scale video screens
in public places as venues for artistic and cultural programming.
My contribution sketched a critical approach which did not start
out with simplistic notions such as ‘electronic billboard’,
‘outdoor TV’ or ‘public art’. I aimed to
locate large-scale video installations in the spectrum of television
and video networks which populate and, increasingly, construct the
urban fabric. The photographic
documentation which accompanied my talk (and which accompanies
this article) is an inventory of the urban phenomena of video familiar
to everyone. It demonstrates how a small set of technologies supports
a large set of applications at different scales: from the infrastructure
of terrestrial, satellite, cable and mobile networks, through the
equipment of the home, the workplace, commercial and public spaces,
to systems of surveillance and control. Each photograph offers a
document which would repay analysis, tracing the web of interactions
between of media and architecture, subject and commodity, identity
and desire, the city and its phantasmagoria.
My starting point, ‘Video as Urban Condition’ [note
2] is the working title of an exhibition and archive project
which begins as an inquiry into how video shapes urban experience.
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Fascination
The fascination of urban screens — like that of television
when it appeared in the twentieth century — is the allure
of a medium in search of a message, with the potential to create
audiences. The large-scale LED video screens which are becoming
an increasingly common sight on the urban landscape have been put
there principally for advertising, information or entertainment.
In practice, the installations have usually combined all three purposes
in various proportions and sometimes admitted other content such
as artists’ videos or interactions with members of the public.
Urban screens are made possible when the interests of those who
control the exhibition space, the technology, the potential content
streams and the potential revenue streams converge. Urban screens
today are experimental enterprises. Emerging in complex environments,
urban screens will challenge the assumptions of artists, curators,
urban- and media theorists as well as the expectations of city authorities,
advertisers and broadcasters.
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Subjectivity
Whereas the discussion of ‘urban screens’ has been dominated
by screen technology and what could or should be done with it, mainly
from the point of view of professional producers, I would like to
emphasise the multiplicity of subjectivities implicated by video
in urban environments. ‘Video as Urban Condition’ aims
to explore how our knowledge, perception and fantasy of urban environments
are mediated by video. That means understanding not only the influence
of the flickering screens which surround us, but also the image-world
of the city transmitted, for example, by TV drama or by the urban
playgrounds of video games such as SimCity or Grand
Theft Auto. The games, moreover, assert the position of the
viewer as the first person subject acting on or in the virtual city.
Similarly, with the spread of consumer-level camcorders and video-equipped
mobile phones, it is important to acknowledge how the subject of
‘video’ (‘to see’) is the one who holds
the camera as much as the one who watches the screen (even —
especially — if in the act of recording, the two cannot be
separated). Video has become a medium of mass-production —
that is, mass-participation — as well as mass-consumption.
Video is no longer the exclusive domain of professionals. Video
offers the tourist, for example, a means of both mediating consumption
(of technology and of travel) and authenticating experience (even
when the preoccupation with filming would seem to compromise the
experience promised by the idea of travel). One could also argue
that, despite the aura which clings to the profession ‘artist’,
the way artists use video has more in common with the amateur than
with the professional broadcaster or film-maker.
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Origins
Which brings me to the origin of ‘Video as Urban Condition’
as a project: against the background of the myriad uses of video
in daily life, the effort to assimilate and contain video within
the norms and institutions of art (and thereby to defend the status
of the artist as such) begins to seem absurd. We are accustomed
to the idea that video images assert a multitude of different claims,
that the same LCD, LED or plasma screens, cathode ray tubes or projectors
convey a multitude of different messages and will ambush us in almost
any location. To be sure, the video screen captures eyeballs, but
does not by itself dictate a particular mode of viewing in the way
the traditional media, framings and settings of art works instruct
the viewer to adopt an appropriate mode of reverent attention. With
video, we are capable, indeed trained, to adjust our subjectivity,
perception and receptivity instantaneously — almost continuously
— as quickly as we flip the channels with a remote control,
or, for that matter, as we walk down a commercial street.
This condition seemed to me to present a more exciting set of
possibilities for producing and showing videos than the battle for
artistic credibility. What strategies would emerge if we could create
the chance for artists to make use of the existing video infrastructure?
In other words, not to offer a TV set on a plinth in a white cube
or a projection in a black box, but instead to remove the protection
of such institutions, expose the work in urban space and accept
this less reliable frame; to accept that video will not support
an artist’s claim to exceptional status or of itself command
respect.
That seemed like a good idea and I began to investigate the practical
possibilities. It will be no surprise to you, that in probing the
structures which regulate public space and artistic production,
I soon discovered the naivety of my proposition.
Hence the need to interpret the site-specific nature of urban
video installations and to understand what I have called the relations
of representation.
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Dialectics
To interpret ‘urban screens’ and assess
their potential, it seems to me vital to acknowledge the dialectics
of screens, that is, their double and contradictory functions. Broadly
understood, a screen is there to display something, but also to
conceal something. A screen acts only as if it were a passive
receiver of an image — as some would have it, merely the reflection
of the society in which it is found. In the urban context especially,
it is also a transmitter. As one agency claims, outdoor advertising
is the ‘last remaining truly broadcast medium.’ (ClearChannel,
2005) [note 3]
Considering the relations of representation, we could ask: What
is the ideological function of the screen? In other words: What
and whose assumptions are concealed by the screen? Many speakers
at the ‘Urban Screens’ conference invoked the notion
of ‘public art’, but without suggesting that there is
any agreement about how artists and public identify themselves or
one another, by whom, and by means of what technology and what institutions
this relationship is mediated. Instead of assuming, as the original
call for papers seemed to suggest, that urban screens are culturally
deprived spaces which need to be served by self-styled cultural
producers and curators, we could ask: Who says what is culture?
In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman discuss
the notion of culture which is propagated by broadcast media in
the United States. They write:
There are exceptional cases of companies willing to sponsor
serious programmes, sometimes the result of recent embarrassments
that call for a public-relations offset. But even in these cases
the companies will usually not want to sponsor close examination
of sensitive or divisive issues — they prefer programmes
on Greek antiquities, the ballet, and items of cultural and national
history and nostalgia. Barnouw points out an interesting contrast:
commercial-television drama [i.e., soap operas] ‘deals almost
wholly with the here and now, as processed via advertising budgets,’
but on public television, culture ‘has come to mean “other
cultures.” ... American civilisation, here and now, is excluded
from consideration.’ [Barnouw, 1978, p. 150]
Television stations and networks are also concerned to maintain
audience ‘flow’ levels, i.e., to keep people watching
from program to program, in order to sustain advertising ratings
and revenue. Airing program interludes of documentary-cultural
matter that cause station switching is costly, and over time a
‘free’ (i.e., ad-based) commercial system will tend
to excise it. Such documentary-cultural-critical materials will
be driven out of secondary media vehicles as well, as these companies
strive to qualify for advertising interest, although there will
always be some cultural political programming trying to come into
being or surviving on the periphery of the mainstream media. (Chomsky
and Herman, 1988, p. 18)
Many of the ‘cultural’ initiatives we heard about
during the conference appeared to reassert this model, that is,
the tendency towards displaying ‘culture’ as if it were
separate from the conditions of its reproduction, and the acceptance
of a marginal position. At least, this appeared to be the basis
for the alliances between cultural workers and corporate sponsors,
technology providers and media- or advertising agencies in developing
cultural programmes for urban screens. [note 4] At most, culture provides
a utopian affirmation of the power relations which govern public-
and media space. Indeed, one could argue that such affirmation helps
to define, secure and defend the realm of culture as such.
From this perspective, it is not really these power relations
which are hidden by the screen. When you look, for example, at the
‘Big Screen’ in Manchester’s Exchange Square (which,
incidentally, carries no advertising in its programme) you see that
the logos of the local authority, the Royal Bank of Scotland, the
BBC and Philips are permanently branded on the installation. What
is concealed by large-scale video screens in public places, one
could argue, are precisely the shifts in the relations of representation
which have occurred since Chomsky analysed network television.
There is not enough space to develop the argument fully here,
but I would like to make two comments which suggest how the analysis
could go: one about the role of video in conditioning urban space
and urban subjects; the other about communications technology and
the privatisation of public space.
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Producing and seducing a public
The multiplication of channels in the home which seemed to threaten
the cohesion of television’s audience and its status as a
mass-medium prompted advertisers and broadcasters to target their
audiences in public. However, in taking TV from point-of-sale installations
and the captive audiences of station platforms, airports, queues
and waiting rooms into ‘public space’ means entering
more complex urban environments. It means facing the decline of
urban community spaces which, since the 1950s, has often been blamed
on television. ‘Public space broadcasting’ [note 5] is a meaningful
proposition only if it can produce a public. This requires not just
programming a screen, but all the forces of urban planning, architecture,
policing and so on.
The role video surveillance in this process hardly needs to be
underlined. CCTV is perceived to be the ideal means of making cities
safe, in other words: of excluding ‘undesirables’ from
specific places and helping to moderate the behaviour of individuals.
What I would like to point out is how video display and surveillance
installations can work together in the so-called regeneration of
public space.
Surveillance and display both have a share in the fascination
of television, that is, its ability both to connect the viewer to
a distant place and to distance the viewer in the present location.
As part of the apparatus of controlling urban spaces, video surveillance
facilitates the ways in which a video display can assemble, interpellate
and commodify a public. In turn, the fascination projected by display
facilitates the acceptance of video surveillance by seducing the
individuals under surveillance with their own images on screen —
permitting individuals the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing themselves
where they stand — at a distance. The ‘narcissism’
of the Exchange Square audience was mentioned as a key factor in
successful programming for that public screen. This narcissism is
echoed whenever we walk under the monitor placed at the entrance
to a shop or station to reassure those it welcomes and warn those
it excludes with the announcement: You are being watched. TV still
flatters, even without the promise of fame.
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Private in public
Large-scale video screens tend to adopt modes of address which are
familiar from television, outdoor advertising or the cinema. Each
has its history and retains some of its rhetorical force, but all
are increasingly undermined by the integration of entertainment,
information and mobile communications technology. ‘Public
space’ as the natural environment for one-to-many communications
and the shared spectacle is now intersected by private and personal
channels: connecting you to your choice of media streams , to other
individuals in other places, or simply immersing you in the interior
urban movie produced with the soundtrack of a portable music player.
Big screen initiatives have emerged which invite you to use your
mobile phone to display poems, photographs or messages, to vote
or bet on what you see. The efforts of commercial and cultural producers
alike to incorporate mobile communications technologies into the
big screen appear to be motivated by the anxiety to bind the potentially
autonomous user to its regime. For a while, the screen becomes the
audience. It receives your message or image and projects a flattering
notion of public address. The ‘interactive’ message,
like the radio dedication, still goes out only to ‘friends
and family’, whom you could contact directly whenever you
want.
At the same time, electronic ‘interactivity’ divides
the audience into those who have, and those who do not have access
to the technology. It flatters the haves (while, if possible, harvesting
data) and advertises the product to the have-nots. For increasingly
integrated media and communications corporations there is no conflict
in using the public screen to promote the private consumption of
video in public places, just as broadcasters frequently use the
screens in public places to advertise what they have to offer the
home viewer.
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Potential
At the end of her book Ambient Television: visual culture and
public space, Anna McCarthy reflects:
The TV screen embodies all the political contradictions that
come with art in public spaces, as well as those more particularly
associated with television. As a public medium governed by private
logics, as a private medium that comes to stand in for the public
it addresses, as a private, domesticated possession that regularly
appears in, and alters, public places, television spans utopia
and critique as it brings modes of spectatorship into the illegible
terrain of the everyday. These video installations ... involving
TV’s commercial logics in a dialogue with radical alternatives
to consumerism [note 6] [provide] us with provocative and instructive inkblots
not for thinking about how to begin making rapprochements between
utopian and critical ideas about TV, social change, and public
space but for recognizing and exploiting how much these rapprochements
are already available in the spaces of everyday life. This means
taking seriously the site-specific power relations which become
visible in ambient television installations. Only then can we
devise policies, programs, and practices that develop these ideas
about sociality and collectivity that TV’s presence in such
places raises. (McCarthy, 2001, p. 251)
In my view, discovering the potential of urban screens also means
taking seriously the inattentive viewer, the perpetually distracted
subject which video and the city have created.
Consumer culture is often blamed for the homogenisation of urban
experience, through the domination of global brands and the insidious
effects of the entertainment industry and media corporations. Video
is at the heart of this process and is perhaps the pre-eminent means
of propagating norms. Video has also produced the subjective hybrids
which we know as infotainment, docudrama and reality-TV as well
as the many unnamed alterations of perception and behaviour mediated
by the video screen. Such alterations certainly influence, but do
not necessarily bind the ever-growing number of people who are video-makers.
The distribution of video technology suggests the possibility engendering
as many approaches as there are users. Among them, perhaps, ways
of contesting the conventions and habits which video persuades us
are second nature, and means of making the specificities of urban
experience perceptible.
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Notes
- Urban Screens: discovering the potential of outdoor screens
for urban society’, Amsterdam 23–24 September 2005. An international
conference organised by Mirjam Struppek in co-operation with the
Institute of Network Cultures (Department of Interactive Media
at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam) welcomed a wide range of speakers
to discuss the uses of large-scale LED screens 'that increasingly
influence the visual sphere of our public spaces in urban settings'.
In the words of the organisers, the conference would 'investigate
how the currently dominating commercial use of these screens can
be broadened and culturally curated. Can these screens become
a tool to contribute to a lively urban society, involving its
audience interactively?' Contributions from academics, curators
and artists were complemented by talks by architects, technology
providers, advertising agencies and broadcasters. back
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- See http://www.video-as.org back to text
- Clearly, that also applies to billboard-sized LED screens,
although it will be interesting to see what influence the increasing
segmentation of air time on such screens will have in the future. back to text
- Chomsky and Herman do not point out that when advertising itself
becomes the chief cause of ‘switching’, then cultural matter can
present itself again as a means of binding the audience to the
flow. On a commercial channel, cultural matter has the ambivalent
status of advertising the fact that there remains unsold air time. back to text
- This is what the BBC calls its project, and in so doing expresses
a ambition shared by commercial operators. back to text
- McCarthy has just discussed two video works in public places:
a self-organised intervention by TWCDC (Together We Can Defeat
Capitalism) in which the activist group paid $800 to insert a
message in the San Francisco public transport information system,
and an elaborately conceived interactive video art installation
by Dara Birnbaum, commissioned by the developer for a new shopping
mall. In the latter case, the interactive element depended on
the movement of shoppers, who, apparently not attracted either
by the video installation or the shops, failed to show up. The
supposedly critical rhetoric of the installation thus was bound
to share the success or failure of the commercial enterprise. back to text
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References
ClearChannel, 2005. ‘Glossary’
accessed 21 September 2005.
Erik Barnouw, 1978. The Sponsor. New York: Oxford University Press
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, 1988. Manufacturing consent:
the political economy of the mass media. New York: Pantheon Books
Anna McCarthy, 2001. Ambient Television: visual culture and public
space. Durham: Duke University Press |
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