This article asks how media architecture in the form of urban screens, LED façades, and public projection might function as a critical spatial practice in the hybrid digital and physical spaces of smart cities thereby challenging prevailing practices and theories of monumentality. The activist work of The Illuminator’s guerilla projections of the 99% symbol on buildings in Manhattan, the treatment of highly visible and iconic structures as media channels and sites of public discourse such as an ongoing research-creation project with a community-led media façade in downtown Toronto, and the #WeLiveHere2017 project at the Waterloo Estate in Sydney which supports tenants in protesting gentrification by illuminating their windows, demonstrate how new forms and practices of monumentality through media architecture can better engage citizens and cities in addressing important societal issues such as housing, poverty, indigenous rights, and discrimination in increasingly privatized public spaces.
This chapter introduces the concept of massive media, a term used to describe the emergence of large-scale public projections, urban screens, and led façades such as the illuminated tip of the Empire State Building. These technologies and the social and technical processes of image circulation and engagement that surround them essentially transform buildings into screens. This chapter also introduces theoretical concepts surrounding space, media, cinema, monumentality, and architecture in order to provide a framework for the analysis of the emergence of the building as screen. These concepts are key axes upon which the ongoing transformations of the public sphere revolve. Subsequent chapters are introduced in which massive media is probed, in case studies and creation-as-research projects, for its ability to enable new critical and creative practices of expanded cinema, public data visualisation, and installation art and curation that blend the logics of urban space, monumentality, and the public sphere with the aesthetics and affordances of digital information and the moving image.
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