City as Screen / Body as Movie

Abstract

Let's start with a photograph taken by Hiroko Masuke--of a billboard featuring an ad for the television miniseries The Andromeda Strain that was printed in the New York Times a year ago. (1) The billboard includes a large, horizontal poster for the series, along with a video display showing clips embedded within the poster. What's not visible, however, is a small video camera (made by the company Quividi) that records passersby as they look at the billboard. The company has developed what it calls the automated audience measurement solution, which documents visitors who look at the billboard, channeling the information into a database, from which it decodes the data. It examines factors such as the overall height of viewers, as well as facial features, including cheekbone height and the measurement of between the nose and chin. The goal is to determine gender and age, and although the company says it does not yet factor for race, it plans to soon. This essay takes as its topic urban video and screens, umbrella terms that include the multiple cameras and projection surfaces that characterize the topology of contemporary urban space. At any given time in an urban setting we are participants within an information space--as subjects surveilled and captured by video cameras; as users of cell phones and PDAs that allow for multiple and layered interactions with data, from telephone usage to web-based activities, photography, and video capture; as users of ATM screens; as viewers of the media displays on terminals at train stations and airports; as readers of assorted screen-based texts; as viewers of video ads; and as subjects interacting with a broad range of specific media streams. In these capacities, we exist as both networked subject and object, viewer and viewed. We are imbricated within networks, often without our knowledge, while interacting with others. In short, we continually negotiate innumerable interfaces, are hailed as subjects and enact our subjectivities in the midst of continual media flux. Urban screens are just one aspect of a larger set of screens that build a network around us. As such, screens are no longer simply dedicated to display; instead, they become components of what has been described as augmented space and mixed reality, (2) namely physical spaces overlaid with data through various devices and technologies. Academic interest in the urban networked sphere stems from the specific, yet convergent, media from which its iterations derive, namely the traditions of cinema, video, public art, and an emerging participatory culture, some of whose participants borrow from and extend the tactical and politicized activist media practices of earlier decades. However, urban screens also intersect with other categories and disciplines: * as integral extensions of the built environment, they are discussed in the field of architectural theory and debates about the intersection of the digital and material as articulated by architects designing and constructing actual buildings; * because screens often display advertising, they are also included in discussions about corporate branding and the interface between markets and individuals; * because they dot the urban landscape, sometimes hovering between private and public space, these screens serve as the focal point for discussions about political power and public as a necessary component of democracy. However, in the context of this particular issue of Afterimage, I want to address what kinds of literacies are being shaped by pervasive video in public space. In spaces rife with advertising, what rhetorical strategies are deployed by users of this space, whether corporations, governments, artists, and others, to speak to viewers? And how are everyday viewers responding with their own images in public? As cities become screens, and bodies become movies, where do we situate empowerment and literacy? …