Massive media: when cities become screens

Abstract

This paper describes, historicizes, and evaluates a phenomenon I refer to as massive media: an emerging subset of technical assemblages that include large outdoor projections, programmable architectural façades, and urban screens. Massive media are massive in their size and subsequent visibility, but are also an agglomeration of media in their expressive screen and cinema-like qualities and their associated interactive and network capabilities. I demonstrate how these situations enable and necessitate the development of new practices of expanded cinema and public data visualization that blend the logics of urban space, monumentality, and the public sphere with the aesthetics and affordances of digital information and the moving image to support a more participatory public culture in which we identify and engage with collective presence, memory, and action through new screen scenarios that merge information, architecture, and the moving image.