Screenspace.

URBAN SCREENS 05 STEDELIJK MUSEUM 

AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

SEPTEMBER 23-24, 2005

Urban Screens 05: Discovering the Potential of Outdoor Screens for Urban Society was an international conference focusing on the public space that is created when architecture and media screens intersect. At a moment when use of the newest technology attests to the affluence and glamour of a city and access to light-emitting diode (LED) screens is controlled by large corporations, the topic is timely if not urgent. The conference succeeded in bringing together people from a wide range of disciplines to analyze this phenomenon and project ideas for future use. The mix of perspectives included those of artists, designers, architects, media theorists, critics, journalists, and corporate producers. Three issues seemed pressing: the design and integration of the screens both with architecture and environment, screen content, and the formation of creative partnerships that could facilitate noncommercial programming. The event revealed the scarcity of artwork on LEDs due to prohibitive costs that limit them to corporate use.

In his keynote speech, "The Politics of Public Space in the Media City," Scott McQuire, a media and communications theorist from Melbourne, Australia, discussed the demise of the town square and the role that urban screens and mobile technologies are playing in reinvigorating public space. For example, television, formerly confined to the living room, now animates building facades while people are using their cell phones to engage in private conversations on the street. He suggested that the public use of these technologies could produce new social relationships and used Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's "Body Movies" (2001) as an example. In "Body Movies," portraits taken of people in the city of Rotterdam are projected onto a building facade and interact with projected shadows of passersby, some of whom engage by performing for the screen. The screen is now the town square.

Louis Brill, a journalist who writes about developments in LED screens for Signs of the Times, a leading magazine for the sign industry since 1906, also believes these screens can have an important social value. He showed how shopping malls such as Millennia in Orlando, Florida, employ them to attract customers, while Times Square, an example cited by almost all forty speakers at the conference, has become a tourist destination due to the impact of its moving walls.

Corporate branding of an entire building (NASDAQ's in Times Square is a prime example) has a unique application in the proposal by Vera Buhler and Andreas Wenger of the University of Art & Design, Basel, Switzerland. Their project "Intelligent Skin" uses solar cells and smart electronic systems to create an infrastructure that responds to its environment, an integrated media facade where screen and content are interdependent.

Also looking for alternatives to commercial screens but using an interventionist approach, Outvideo in Yekaterinburg, Russia, is an international video art festival in which thirty-second silent video artworks are inserted into every eight minutes of billboard advertising. The project was conceived and implemented by artists Arseny Sergeev and Nailya Alachverdeiva, whose argument that art programming would bring a broader audience to the screens proved convincing to those in charge. Giselle Beiguelman's "Egoscopio" (2002), also located on billboards and interspersed between ads in Sao Paolo, Brazil, invited people to submit the address of a Web page, which would then appear on the billboard. These images could be altered by online participants while webcams on location transmitted reactions of onlookers.

There were many presentations of artist projects ready to debut on a public LED. Among them, Jason Lewis's "Cityspeak" invites participants using cell phones to send messages to software that layers them with local news and weather reports as they are displayed. Linda Wallace's "Living Tomorrow" is a database driven three-screen narrative in which software, choosing from an archive of video clips, streams images to the screens. Her concerns in developing these short clips resulted from observing people's behavior patterns on city streets.

The conference ended with the description of two noncommercial initiatives for permanent urban screens: the city of Amsterdam will be installing a video screen at the Zuidplein with 80 percent of the content devoted to cultural programming. The partnership includes the Zuidas Virtual Museum, and the corporate entities SKOR and Faircom. In his closing keynote, Mike Gibbons from Public Space Broadcasting (PSB), a BBC initiative, described the role PSB was playing in supplying screens for community and art use. The pilot in Manchester, UK (called the Big Screen), is a partnership with the Manchester City Council, Phillips Corporation, and the Royal Bank of London. PSB manages content by creating liaisons with community and arts organizations such as the Cornerhouse Gallery where Kate Taylor curates artists' videos for the Big Screen.

Issues of taste and decency are built into the BBC sponsorship (prime-time rules apply), as are corporate logos. Urban screens, then, are real estate that fall prey to the same rules that govern public art. This is where a critical vision for the future by artists and curators is essential. Mirjam Struppek commented in her introductory remarks that through the use of new technologies not only is public space redefined but social interaction becomes a hybrid of the virtual and the real. Can screenspace be that catalyst?

PERRY BARD is an artist living in New York who presented her projects Status: Stolen (2005), The Terminal Salon (2000) and Walk this Way (2001) at Urban Screens.

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For more information see www.urbanscreens.org.