Video-pool: Manu Luksch

Urban Road Movies
February 2003: the Congestion Charge is introduced in London. The fee applies to all vehicles entering the central zone. Compliance is ensured by a surveillance apparatus that records vehicle registration plates. Vehicles are monitored throughout the charging zone. In mediaeval times, city walls signified to those entering them that they were approaching the centre of political, economic, and religious power. Today’s guardians, closed-circuit TV cameras that peer down from posts on every street corner, ensure that modern citizens are no less aware of this fact.

In 1995, at the Telepolis symposium in Luxemburg, an attempt was made to redefine urbanism for an emerging digital age, in which trade, communication, and information exchange would be increasingly carried out by means of e-commerce, video conferencing, and chat- and newsgroups. Today, media convergence is a reality, but the predicted decline in the physical movement of people has not occurred. The increase in traffic is not just across national boundaries, but also across the economically more significant city borders. Former inhabitants leave older European and American city centres, now turned into lifeless zones of speculation. The influx of people into newer urban centres in Asia and South America is creating mega-cities.
The European city plan is mediaeval, its nodes of activity are crossroads. The new Asian media cities (attached to Dubai, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur) are growing around an infrastructure of data highways, and their nodes of activity are the access points to these highways. To what extent can electronic media impose or create an urbanism? What kind of urbanism will this be? Could this be? Or, will the urban appear only in the interstices, despite the planners’ best intentions?

Media convergence and the diffusion of digital technology, coupled with increasing anxiety and paranoia in the city, has greatly expanded the realm of video. The telephone conversation, the journal entry, the eyewitness account, the infant’s room – all have enhanced, supported, substantiated, monitored, or otherwise qualified by the use of ‘moving’ image. Video is most prevalent not in any ‘pure’ form, but in such hybrid manifestations.

This symposium and exhibition will examine the extents to which mediation forms our urban experience, and urban experience influences video culture. We invite work that throw light on the place of video in the city, and of the city in video. Works that situate urban experience around networks of traffic (human, vehicular, or data), or that examine the relationship of newer, developing cities to media, would be of particular interest.

Manu Luksch (March 2004)
http://www.ambienttv.net

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