The Media City

Media, Architecture and Urban Space

Scott McQuire, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780857025371, 9781412907934
• eBook ISBN: 9781473903074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología urbana

"If only more new media commentators had this level of historical-critical reference, engaging, good stories, and a degree of wonder at what media and windows bring to the city, to life."
- John Hutnyk, Goldsmiths, University of London

"Just when you thought the last word had been said about cities and media, along comes Scott McQuire to breathe new life into the debate. When revisiting existing pathways, his always ingenious eyes produce startling and original insights. When striking out into new territory, he opens up before us inspiring new vistas. I love this book."
- James Donald, University of New South Wales

"A book that crams into a single chapter more insights and illustrations than seems feasible, yet which ties all threads together through a consistent, theoretically rich analysis of the interplay of media and city... Writing with effusiveness uncharacteristic of back-cover blurbs on academic tomes, James Donald says ?I love this book?. But I will end by echoing his praise, and make a promise to readers: you will love The Media City, too."
- European Journal of Communication

"Refreshingly clear, getting to grips with some of the key concepts of urban sociology in a way that moves beyond the wistful evocation and splatter of undigested terms that characterises so much academic writing on culture and cities."
- Media, Culture & Society

Significant changes are occurring in the spaces and rhythms of contemporary cities and in the social functioning of media. This forceful book argues that the redefinition of urban space by mobile, instantaneous and pervasive media is producing a distinctive mode of social experience.

Media are no longer separate from the city. Instead the proliferation of spatialized media platforms has produced a media-architecture complex - the media city. Offering critical and historical analysis at the deepest levels, The Media City links the formation of the modern city to the development of modern image technologies and outlines a new genealogy for assessing contemporary developments such as digital networks and digital architecture, web cams and public screens, surveillance society and reality television.

Wide-ranging and thoughtfully illustrated, it intersects disciplines and connects phenomena which are too often left isolated from each other to propose a new way of understanding public and private space and social life in contemporary cities. It will find a broad readership in media and communications, cultural studies, social theory, urban sociology, architecture and art history.

Winner of the 2009 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Award, awarded by the Urban Communication Association.

1

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Introduction: The Uncanny Home

There will be a road. It will not connect two points. It will connect all points. Its speed limit will be the speed of light. It will not go from here to there. There will be no more there. We will all only be here.

(TV ad 1993)

[T]he dream of a completely fluid and passable world-space may be the last utopia of the 20th century.

(Multiplicity 2005)¹

The house that Gates built

In the mid-1990s, as the dotcom boom ramped up in velocity, media reports circulated about the house Bill Gates was constructing in Seattle. Conceived as a state-of-the-art merging of computer technology with architecture, Gates’ multi-million dollar residence boasted all the standard automated functions such as climate control and electronic security systems, as well as a few extras like a hot tub which switched itself on as soon as the master’s car entered the grounds. But the most striking feature of the Gates’ house was its walls. Gates’ original plan called for interior walls consisting of a series of massive floor to ceiling video screens. In some cases, like the trampoline room, the 360-degree panorama would be supplemented by an additional screen in the ceiling. All these screens could be programmed, according to his guests’ wishes, with works of art selected from their host’s virtual collection (the largest in the world). The duration of the displayed images could be tailored to each guest’s attention span, while the different rooms they entered, accessed via electronic security PINs, would never repeat the same picture.

These chameleon-like walls gripped the imagination of many commentators, including leading proselytizers of ‘digital architecture’ such as William Mitchell (1995: 33):

The interior wall panels are not what they seem. They turn out to be huge, flat video screens. In repose they simulate the surfaces of standard architectural materials, but activated they become electronic windows opening onto anything at all.

Penz and Thomas (1997: 3) soon envisaged the democratization of such possibilities:

What Bill Gates has in his domestic environment today, we will all be able to have in our homes the day after tomorrow, or the day after that. Our digital windows will be able to provide a screen version of the world offering anywhere, anytime, any reality […].

A similar vision was evident in the ‘Digital House’ designed by New York-based architects Hariri and Hariri for House Beautiful magazine in 1998. The design was an adaptation of the ‘plug-in’ logic developed by Archigram’s Peter Cook in the 1960s, comprising a central core onto which additional factory-built rooms could be joined, as one might connect new electrical appliances. The main walls were to be made from LCD screens, dubbed ‘the building blocks of the future’ by the architects (quoted in Riley 1999: 56).

Of course, wall-size screens were familiar creations of 20th-century science fiction. In Tomorrow Revealed (1955), author John Atkins envisaged walls that were not only screens, but interactive devices enabling the house to become a conscious entity capable of speech, thought, listening, acting and entertaining:

The walls could dissolve into a three-dimensional scene of jungle or veldt, anything you liked, a scene from a fairy-tale or from a romance, with animals and vegetation to match, smells, sounds, hot sun, cold snow. The walls were not quite alive, but they were at the next remove: made of crystal, played on with dimensional, super-reactionary, super-sensitive colour film behind glass screens, plus odorophonics and sonics. (Atkins 1955: 180)

Wall-size screens have also featured in numerous science fiction films, including landmark productions such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), William Cameron Menzies’ Things To Come (1936), Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990). What is immediately noticeable from such films is the wall-screen’s political versatility. In Metropolis, the wall-screen is both a symbol and a practical technique of technocratic power; a unique device located in the top floor office of the city’s patriarch. In Things To Come, the screen facilitates a more democratic form of technocracy, distributed throughout the populace to serve an apparently benign educational and communicational function, while in Fahrenheit 451, made in the era of broadcast television, the wall-screen is figured as a propaganda device for pacifying the general population. In Total Recall the range of imagery that the wall-screen provides, from live news feeds to ambient images, is used to dramatize the split consciousness of the protagonist.

As it turned out, wall-screens were much easier to propose in literature or simulate in films, than they were to produce materially and architecturally. Lamenting the fact that the hardware for producing large-scale screens with sufficiently high definition had not been perfected in the mid-1990s, Bill Gates was forced to scale down his ambitious plans. Nevertheless, as Penz and Thomas forecast, spin-off technology from digital cinema systems meant that wall-size images were soon becoming a familiar experience in the home.² Walls that have become electronic windows construct a novel point of view which is no longer continuous with site, but instead establish variable sightlines apparently capable of opening ‘anywhere, any time, any reality’. Such window-walls offer to radically renovate the home, displacing its customary interiority, while also disturbing the spatiality of the world at large.

Technological nature

There are several points we might note in relation to this scenario. The first is the way that imagination and desire continually outstrip technology, despite – or perhaps because of – extraordinarily rapid technological development. To give one point of reference, it is well-known that the field of computing has undergone a period of exponential growth lasting several decades. In the first issue of Wired in 1993, Frederic Davis (1993: 30) commented:

[H]ad automobile technology advanced at a similar pace over the last 20 years, your car would travel at 500 000 miles an hour, get a million miles to the gallon, and only cost a measly $1000.

Yet, even this dizzying velocity of technological change in a realm where many of the changes are themselves mostly about speed (measured in processing power and bandwidth), leaves many impatient and frustrated that things don’t move even faster. The ‘world wide web’ was soon ironically dubbed the ‘world wide wait’ as bandwidth limitations – and the cost of addressing them – became apparent in the mid-1990s. Like Bill Gates, we often find ourselves waiting for technology to catch up to where our imagination – fuelled by corporate advertising – has already taken us. A striking example was the wave of enthusiasm, crossed by a frisson of fear, that surrounded Virtual Reality technologies from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, as ‘cyberspace’ became the new frontier for millennial fantasies. As anyone who was actually able to get access to a pair of EyePhones or some other VR system soon discovered, the experience fell a long way short of the total perceptual hallucination promised in films like The Lawnmower Man (1992). While there was certainly industry hype in the service of commercial agendas at work here, there was also a kind of longing – a technological yearning – which we need to recognize as part of the motor driving the ideology of progress. The deep-seated aspirations for the mastery of nature and the transcendence of bodily limits which have long underpinned faith in progress have found themselves increasingly invested in new waves of technology, culminating in the emergence of ‘technoculture’ in which the place of ‘nature’ and the delineation of ‘human nature’ have become problematic in new ways.³

If fantasies of mastery and transcendence constitute a general premise of modern technological development, they have found particularly fertile ground in the field of media and communication. Because media and communication technologies have the capacity to reconfigure the spatial and temporal parameters of perception and experience, enabling us to see, hear and even act ‘at-a-distance’, they alter frames of existence previously taken for granted as natural, if not immutable. The ability to span space and compress time through different generations of media from telegraph to satellite television and the internet has not only exerted a powerful fascination over modern imagination, but has fundamentally shaped the economic and social relations of modernity. As Giddens (1991: 17) observes:

Modern social organization presumes the precise co-ordination of actions of many human beings physically absent from one another; the ‘when’ of these actions is directly connected to the ‘where’, but not, as in pre-modern epochs, via the mediation of place.

The widening of the gap between ways of life primarily grounded in place, and emergent ways of life in which spatial experience is increasingly opened to events occurring elsewhere has been a primary characteristic since industrial modernity. The capacity of new steam-powered vehicles such as trains and ships to traverse space more rapidly and consistently in the second half of the 19th century fed the massive extension of colonial empire and international trade in that period. In the 21st century, the increased capacity of new media technologies to generate ‘real time’ action-at-a-distance has underpinned the post-industrial phase of globalization characterized by the heightened penetration of transnational economic and cultural exchanges into the ‘local’ interstices of everyday life. Lash (2002a: 15) argues the centrality of new communication forms underpins a general shift to ‘technological forms of life’ characterized by the pervasiveness of human-machine interfaces. Insofar as technological culture is ‘constitutively culture-at a-distance’, social bonds assume technological forms:

I operate as a man-machine interface – that is, as a technological form of natural life – because I must necessarily navigate through technological forms of social life. […] Because my forms of social life are so normally and chronically at-a-distance, I cannot navigate these distances, I cannot achieve sociality apart from my machine interface. (Lash 2002a: 15)

Since these developments collectively redefine not only the speed of economic exchange but the spatio-temporal frameworks of human experience, it is not surprising that cultural responses often seem to simultaneously reach backwards and forwards in time: on the one hand, towards creation myths and the sort of omnipresence traditionally attributed to the gods, and on the other to a future in which all material coordinates, including the body, are dissolved to unimaginable ends. This broad spectrum underlines the extent to which responses to technological transformation have long been marked by ambivalence. The desire for technological transcendence has been intimately linked to the cultural production of what might be called the technological unconscious – a theme cogently explored in modern art and literature, perhaps most notably in the modern genre of science fiction. Atkins’ ‘telepathic house’ of the 1950s is both distant and yet recognizable at the dawn of the 21st century. The walls ‘which were not quite alive’ evoke the distinctly modern myth of the technological creation of life – an ur-narrative which enters modern consciousness precociously with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), in which the all-too-human ‘monster’ comprises a collection of body parts animated by electricity.

If Shelley’s monster is an assemblage which serves to index the growing uncertainty about the boundaries of the human in a society subject to new forces such as steam power and electricity, the vastness of industrial transformation over the next century demanded the invention of a new primal scene. This need was memorably fulfilled by the famous scene of the creation of the robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). While Lang’s fantasy robot was also enervated by electricity, it was quite a different entity to Shelley’s patchwork monster. Instead of a crude copy, the technological double could now be imagined as visually indistinguishable from the organic human being – a shift paralleling the uncanny doubling of the visible world by the technological images of cinema.

Following World War II, and the emergence of the cybernetic paradigm, the encounter of human and machine was increasingly figured through the enigma of the cyborg.⁴ The cyborg is neither human nor machine as these terms have been traditionally defined, but depends instead upon their merging as informational and communicational systems to produce a hybrid entity. In her influential ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ of 1984, Donna Haraway (1991: 150) appropriated the term to stress the conditions of identity in cultures which were rapidly being computerized: ‘By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are cyborgs.’ The cybernetic paradigm has exercised a major influence over the trajectory of scientific research, notably in underwriting developments in biotechnology. The success of the Human Genome Project in garnering massive research funding, which led to the earlier than expected completion of its mapping phase in mid-2000, depended on a cybernetic understanding of the lived body as a computational system running on a genetic programme in which DNA figures as ‘the code of codes’. In this vein, Walter Gilbert (1992: 96) conjures a digital primal scene, looking forward to the day when ‘one can pull a CD out of one’s pocket and say, “Here’s a human being; it’s me”.’ This is a new conception of personal media; the person as media.

These three narratives of technological birth, spread across almost two centuries, can be read as distinct moments in the rewriting of Nature by technology, as industrial machines are supplemented by informational machines – media – and the horizon of programmed and patented life forms beckons. Lash (2002a: xi) underlines this trajectory when he links the emergence of genetic engineering to a broader shift in the operation of power, and argues that the transition from a discursive to informational mode of power-knowledge means that ‘[…] “life” becomes a question no longer of organic systems but technological systems.’

Unsettling the home

Because of the radical uncertainty affecting what was once taken for granted as the ‘ground’ of social experience, I want to try to dislodge my response to the Gates’ house from the familiar trajectory in which yesterday’s science fiction becomes today’s reality. The issue is more complex than the neat succession this kind of narrative promotes. Instead, I want to read the Gates’ house as a metaphor for the generally unsettling effect exercised by electronic and digital media on the production of public and private space in contemporary cities. The transformation of the individual home is paralleled on a metropolitan scale by the reconstruction of urban spaces, and on a global scale by the spread of digital networks which are reshaping the vectors of economic and political power, as well as the matrices of cultural affiliation. In fact, the most significant change is that where these fronts or frontiers – domestic, local, urban, regional, national, transnational – were once distinct, or, at least, were believed to be – they now seem to be irreducibly imbricated in one another. The globalization of media flows goes hand in hand with the reorganization of the space of domestic life, including the micro-politics of the family.

The home itself now contains a wide array of media forms. Many of these are in the process of shifting from predominantly one-way broadcast systems with regional or national reach, to interactive global networks in which each node of consumption is also capable of production. As Beatriz Colomina (1994: 210) notes: ‘The house is now a media centre, a reality that will forever transform our understanding of both public and private.’ If the boundaries of the home have become more porous in an era of ubiquitous media, so have the borders of the nation-state. Contemporary cultural identity is consequentially less defined by an ‘imagined community’ based on the geographical borders of a single national territory, but increasingly assumes the mosaic pattern adumbrated by the overlapping footprints of satellites and the flows of digital networks. At the same time, media devices have become ubiquitous elements shaping the public space of contemporary cities, embedded in urban infrastructure in a wide variety of locations and forms from informational kiosks, large public screens, digital surveillance cameras and computerized traffic systems. The development of new generations of mobile media which are carried in the course of everyday life has further intensified the challenge to established boundaries of public and private space. The transformation of the spatial relations supported by the telephone is symptomatic. For the best part of a century, a phone call was made to a fixed site such as a house or office, and the caller asked whether or not a certain person was ‘there’. In contrast, the customary greeting on a mobile phone is ‘where are you?’ In an era in which media have become mobile, ubiquitous and personalized, technology and person have merged, and this merging is fast becoming taken for granted.

The wall-screen of the Gates’ house can thus be read as symptomatic of the ways in which a broad array of new media technologies and platforms are no...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Uncanny Home
• Part One Thresholds of the Media City
• Part Two Public Space: Streets, Lights and Screens
• Part Three Private Space: From Glass Architecture to Big Brother
• Bibliography
• Index