The Spaces Around the Screens: Towards a Critical Spatial Practice of Media Architecture

Date & Time 

Monday, June 28  |  14:00-16:00 CEST, 8:00-10:00 EDT, 22:00-00:00 AEST
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Description

This online (ZOOM) workshop will focus on discussing and employing some of the concepts from my recently published book, The Building as Screen: A History, Theory, and Practice of Massive Media (Amsterdam University Press, 2020). We will discuss theoretical concepts from film, media studies, and design, such as critical spatial practice, data visualization, apparatus/dispositif, superimposition, and montage, as well as Casetti’s concept of the “relocation” of cinema, and then apply these theoretical frameworks to help us deconstruct and reconstruct the effects of embedded media in urban spaces in critical and creative ways. Our focus will be on the spaces around the screen as much as screens themselves. Here, we include the hybrid spaces created by the intersections of urban space, digital displays, and digital networks, large and small, communal and personal. Examples used will include projects that have won MAB awards in the past, as well as MAB 2020 nominees, with guest lectures from some of the creators (TBD). Locations in Toronto (the Ryerson Image Arts Building, the CN Tower, Yonge and Dundas Square) will also be explored in greater detail by the organizers in a pre-recorded video. The video will be viewed to participants during the workshop. Participants will be given worksheets to complete while watching the video, employing observational methods and reflective writing to help digest the theoretical concepts in context. Finally, workshop participants will work in small groups to propose a critical urban media intervention for a specific site of their choice based on their observations and theoretical knowledge gained during the workshop. The results of this design sprint will then be shared with the group.

This workshop should appeal to a wide range of interests and actors including academics, researchers, artists, urbanists, city planners, architects, technologists, and designers. Participants acquire theoretical and practical tools for deconstructing existing urban media environments in order to understand the affordances and power dynamics and subject positions created by the interplay of space and media. Following this, they will be able to test and transform the knowledge, skills, and attitudes developed in the workshop in a short design sprint. They will engage creative and collaborative energies, while allowing for the collective discussion, critique, and creation of new theories and hypotheses. 

 

Signing up 

Email david.colangelo@ryerson.ca

Register before June 1, 2021.

You will be sent a link to the ZOOM meeting once the schedule has been finalized.

 

Workshop Organizers 

Dave Colangelo, Patricio Dávila
Co-Founders — Public Visualization Studio, Toronto, Canada

 

More information & Contact

For more info, click here or contact david.colangelo@ryerson.ca 

 

Image Credits: Shadow! (2018), Public Visualization Studio