Scott McQuire

The media city: Media, architecture and urban space

Introduction The Uncanny Home PART ONE: THRESHOLDS OF THE MEDIA CITY The Territory of Images The City in Fragments Liquid Cities PART TWO: PUBLIC SPACE: STREETS, LIGHTS AND SCREENS Electropolis Performing Public Space PART THREE: PRIVATE SPACE: FROM GLASS ARCHITECTURE TO BIG BROTHER The Glass House The Digital Home Conclusion

Immaterial architectures: Urban space and electric light

Since its invention, electric lighting has had a decisive impact on the psychogeography of urban space. Concentrating on the period from 1880 to World War II, the author argues that electrical lighting has been a major factor in the emergence of modern urban environments, in which the traditional function of architecture as a stable ground has increasingly given way to a growing mutability of forms and fluidity of appearances. This tendency both paralleled and converged with the effects of modern media technologies such as cinema, contributing to the emergence of a new environment characterized by “relational space,” in which the city is increasingly defined by the overlap of material and immaterial spatial regimes.

Rethinking media events: large screens, public space broadcasting and beyond:

The current deployment of large screens in city centre public spaces requires a substantial rethinking of our understanding of the relationship of media to urban space. Drawing on a case study of the Public Space Broadcasting project launched in the UK in 2003, this article argues that large screens have the potential to play a significant role in promoting public interaction. However, the realization of this potential requires a far-reaching investigation of the role of media in the construction of complex public spaces and diverse public cultures.

Photography’s afterlife: Documentary images and the operational archive

In the 1980s, the deployment of digital cameras inspired widespread concern about the ‘death of photography’ and the loss of the evidentiary value of photographic images. In retrospect, it is easy to see that many of these fears were either overstated or simply misplaced. Nevertheless, the digital threshold has enabled enormous changes to the way in which images are produced, circulated and stored. In this article, the author considers how images ‘testify’ in the digital milieu. He approaches this issue by way of several long-standing debates in documentary practice, namely context, access and stance. He then argues that the current shift of the photograph from ‘picture’ to ‘data’ is driving a related shift in the image archive, creating the conditions for what he calls the operational archive. Operationality has significant implications for developing new protocols for managing image archives that are relevant to historically oppressed groups such as Aboriginal peoples in Australia

Mega Screens for Mega Cities

This article considers how networked large urban screens can act as a platform for the creation of an experimental transnational public sphere. It takes as a case study a specific Australia-Korea cultural event that linked large screens in Federation Square, Melbourne, and Tomorrow City, Incheon, 1 through the presentation of SMS-based interactive media art works. The article combines theoretical analyses of global citizenship, mobility, digital technologies, and networked public space with empirical analyses of audience response research data collected during the screen event. The central argument is that large public screens can offer a strategic site for examining transformations in the constitution of public agency in a digitized, globalized environment. The idea of ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ is finally proposed as a conceptual framework for understanding how new forms of transnational public agency in mediated public spaces might operate.

Immersion, reflexivity and distraction: spatial strategies for digital cities

Commencing with the history of cinema and of communicative technology, this essay focuses on the ways the cinematic sensibility and urban existence have influenced the contemporary experience of surveillance and complexity. And vice versa.

Digital dialectics: the paradox of cinema in a studio without walls

This is an electronic, pre-publication version of an article published in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television is available online at

Ethical Considerations When Using Visual Methods in Digital Storytelling with Aboriginal Young People in Southeast Australia

This chapter discusses a digital storytelling project involving young Aboriginal people from southeast Australia who used the creative capacities of digital technologies to explore subjective experiences of identity. We discuss three key ethical considerations that supported and emerged from working with young Aboriginal people. Decolonization, the participation gap and situated learning were critical factors that were important in developing an ethical framework for engagement in research with Aboriginal young people. The approach sought to address the challenges that Aboriginal youth continue to experience, including marginalization from mainstream society, negative stereotyping and lingering misperceptions of real Aboriginal identities in contemporary urban Australia. The visual content arising from the workshops supported Aboriginal young people to reposition their contemporary visual self-representations as diverse and authentic.

Libraries as redistributive technology: From capacity to culture in Queensland’s public library network

Australia is currently rolling out one of the most expensive and ambitious infrastructure projects in the nation’s history. The National Broadband Network is promoted as a catalyst for far-reaching changes in Australia’s economy, governmental service provision, society and culture. However, it is evident that desired dividends, such as greater social engagement, enhanced cultural awareness and increased civic and political participation, do not flow automatically from mere technical connection to the network. This article argues that public institutions play a vital role in redistributing technological capacity to enable emerging forms of social and cultural participation. In particular, we examine public libraries as significant but often overlooked sites in the evolving dynamic between digital technology, new cultural practices and social relations. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork across the public library network of the state of Queensland, we attend to the strategies and approaches libraries are adopting in response to a digital culture.

From Object to Platform Art, digital technology and time

In this article we argue that the upsurge of digital technology in contemporary art practice is requiring artists, art institutions and audiences to engage with time in new ways. Beginning with the way institutions such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art broke with the museological paradigm of only displaying ‘dead’ art, we then examine how the emergence of video art in the 1960s created new practices of time-based spectatorship and altered exhibition protocols. From this vantage, we identify and address a key tendency in the present, namely the move away from conceiving the artwork as a finished object, in favour of the production of open platforms requiring the participation of the public in order to generate their content. We argue that this new setting for art is complex and ambivalent, enabling both new forms of collaboration and social engagement, but also pushing art towards the ‘experience economy’ of commodified leisure.