Urban Inscriptions - Malcolm McCullough

• must “MEDIA” mean REMOTENESS ?

The urbanism of electronic communications has seldom

been encouraging. For whether the word “media” implies

passive entertainments, global networking, production

software, or the attention economy of all of these, it does

tend to imply disembodiment; and that implies trouble for

space and place as we know them. But what happens when

media become embodied in access, spatial in operations,

and place-based in content? In particular, what happens

when information technology moves out beyond the

desktop into the sites and situations of everyday urban life?

What does it mean that content is something you do, not

something you are given, and where do you go to do that?

OBIE best of show 2007Source: The OBIE awards

Timeline: place-based media

A recently popular image in the flyposting debatesSource unknown

Literary society (ca. 1885)Henry Collins Brown

Physical components of pervasive computing

Five trends in urban computing

Components of ambient information

Information foraging on the derive

Cached communication

Four kinds of writing

Epigraphic reading in PersiaSource: Geoffrey Nunnberg

Sao Paulo to ban billboardsSource: www.worldchanging.com

Timeline: pollution

Press kit feature on airportsSource: OAAA

Press kit feature on airportsSource: OAAA

Removing soot, Penn Station Pittsburgh, (ca. 1948)Source: The Carnegie photo database

QUESTION # 2

“How much information is pollution, that something can be done about?"

(6)

0% -->

LITTLE

all information welcome

pollution just in the eyes of the beholder

(4)

<--100%

MUCH

toxic data smog!

Audience text-in pollThe Interactive City, ISEA07

QUESTION # 1

“Which activity bonds urban spaces together most effectively?"

(6)

SOCIETY:

conviviality

“third place”

public assembly

social navigation

presentation of self

(4)

COMMERCE:

(especially shopping)

Audience text-in pollThe Interactive City, ISEA07

Ambient media planning

Dimensions of urban markup

Toward a new Epigraphy

Water Bottle LabelSource: The Henry Ford (Museums)