Mediastructures, prototypes and collective prosthesis*

Digital facades as public infrastructures

Nerea Calvillo

*Originally published in Urban Media Cultures. Ed: Avedition GmbH. Ludwigsburg. 2012

Urban screens and digital facades keep populating silently our urban landscape. From fun-parks to Las

Vegas or Tokyo, due to their predominantly use for commercial purposes with some exceptions of architects

or historians like Ventury & Scott Brown they have been developing with little attention from the academic or

artistic field until the beginning of the 21st century, to the point that they have been considered in some

contexts capitalist invaders of the public space.

In this text we propose to suspend judgment for a second, and try to describe these devices as urban digital

technologies located in the urban space, and from that perspective, to try to reveal their potential. If they had

some, could they be re-appropriated or hacked, or would it be necessary to build new screen typologies for

them to become machines of inscription that “reunite the body of the city with messages other than those

emanating from the centers of power, capital or privilege” (1)?

The argument is built under two assumptions. First, that based on the anthropological principle of symmetry

and as Jose Luis Brea beautifully describes in his RAM_city (2), “every building, street, body, object and

corner of the city is an emitter” and capturer of images, and therefore digital facades are just one of them

with, eventually, intensified capacities. Second, that, as non humans, digital facades are deeply implicated in

urban social practice because of the intricate entanglement between humans, infrastructure, technology, and

the built environment, and therefore they also have an agency in themselves.

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Recent years have seen much discussion on the impact of the use of personal technologies such as mobile

phones in the urban space, like the blurring of the private/public through the exchange of images between

strangers (3), or their use on urban activism. However, “large screens, due to the fixity of their location,

coupled with planning and content restrictions and hierarchical forms of control, has led many to dismiss

them as a potential civic resource” (4). But, if mobiles have been means of the reconstruction of the self in

the public space, can digital facades be means to reconstruct the collective?

Or to say it with another words: if any interactive installation can be considered temporarily as a prosthetic

device for human creativity that transforms into prosthetic visitors and the space it occupies (5), could digital

facades be considered as collective prosthesis?

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2. PUBLICNESS PRODUCTION

Media(near)Lab and the Media Facades Festival 2010 in Madrid

The case study of this text is Medialab Prado´s digital facade and it’s testing through the Media Facades

Festival 2010 (MFF2010).

As a program of the Department of Arts of the City Council of Madrid, Medialab Prado´s facade, built in 2009,

is one of the few screens in the world commissioned, owned and managed by a public art institution, with no

need of business plan and complete economical independence. From an urban perspective, its almost

hidden location and the lack of urban screens regulations in the city provide a luxurious environmental

freedom. From a technical aspect it is a site specific designed LED screen that covers the whole sidewall of

the building, and although its big size, it has quite low resolution (6).

All these characteristics are clear opportunities of research at various levels, because as “regular” content

doesn’t fill well due to its low resolution new projects need to be designed and then experimentation can take

place. It could work as a “test base” for many experiences to come, and could become a “skunk works

project” of the city.

In its first curatorial statement the facade was envisioned as a laboratory (and named Media(nera)Lab) in

which to experiment with its own new language, as well as its capacity to become a public interface to

expand citizen’s interaction with screens (7). After a production workshop that generated the first projects for

the facade the role of the Media Facades Festival 2010 was to test the relationship with the public and the

possibilities of project exchange and co-curatorship with other European institutions (8).

A brief narration of three evenings/projects selected will help to explore a first range of relationships between

contents, publics and interactions.

-Ars Joint Broadcasting Party.

Over live music being played in Linz the G.O.D. Garden of Delights VJ session took place in Madrid. An

undefined group of people related to the art scene, medialabbers, neighbors, passers by and electronic

music followers got together. Despite the music and the colorful and heavy-content images of the artist, the

screen become slowly the foreground for people talking, drinking, dancing, playing, kissing, selling, breast-

feeding, demonstrating, protesting... producing complex combinations of personal intimacy and civility, where

debates around gender, labor rights, identity, freedom of speech and other topics took place simultaneously.

The digital facade constructed a temporary public space, with an unstructured but active, overlapped and

affective participation.

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This example transformed the nature and stakes of ‘interactivity’. Rather than a menu where ‘choices’

generate relatively predictable consequences, the fact that many people could participate differently at the

same time means there is a more open horizon in which contingency and unpredictability assume a greater

role (9).

-Lummo Blocks and Urban SMSlingshot.

The two games, a spatial version of Tetris and a text-messaging project, were designed by groups of

interaction designers and programmers. When played during Madrid’s White Night, all spectators and

passers by became unsuspectedly active and passive players, where the digital facade played the role of a

public dynamizer.

The ludic and massive participation produced an improvised atmosphere of collectivity, revealing the role of

play in forging public culture, as Richard Sennett would define as a key mechanism for testing and potentially

reinventing social rules concerning appropriate modes of public behavior (10).

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-Tales that are never told: Zero Estigma. Open dialogues.

Through a video Conference and streaming, in a round table with LGTB and mental health activists from

Brussels and Madrid the two unknown contexts met and exchanged ideas, references, personal experiences

and recommendations. With small on-site participation but big on line, the facade became a tool for mutual

recognition, giving voice and representation to invisible citizens through highly committed and grateful

participants.

By revealing their intimate lives this project showed that people are liberated from shame and the ‘need’ to

hide, which leads to something called ‘empowering exhibitionism’. This shared intimacy with strangers is still

a performance, a way of experimenting with the possibilities of the presentation of the self afforded by

different technologies, and provides elements not only of the shaping of the self, but also for the self-

evaluation, thanks to the ability to test the other’s reaction to them (11).

From these experiences it could be argued that the digital facade generated certain publicness, as the place

where the political realm arises out of acting together in the sharing of speech and action, in Hannah Arendt

´s terms, but always trough the cohabitation of difference and the management of the otherness (12).

This publicness was performed by different intensities, roles and times of public involvement. Within the

design process, as software builder, data or information provider or activator of the project in the urban

plaza. Within the urban plaza also different levels of involvement could be identified, such as the recognition

of the self, play, learning process, exchange of information and the construction of the collective, acting as a

collective prosthesis.

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However, it is not only the local what is at stake. When connecting different facades simultaneously as

happened with the Open Windows at the MFF2010, something like a transnational public sphere could be

built. The question would be then which kind of content or interaction would make it emerge, and which

other kinds of globalness could be activated.

The construction of these temporary publicness through the connection of different types of actors, publics

and interactions at the MFF2010 are the small evidence that allows us to extrapolate the following

potentialities to all digital facades. However, their fulfillment depends mostly on how the openness of the

facades is achieved and managed by their owners, being either private companies, public institutions or

eventually citizens.

3. PROTOTYPING (IN) THE STREETS.

Digital facades as laboratories for experimentation.

Erkki Huthamo argues in Messages On The Wall (13) that the environment of digital facades hasn’t been

understood yet as a new medium, for which it is needed to find new formats of content, management and

financial production. Therefore they can all be considered as objects or spaces for experimentation, where

people engaged in the field of urban screens, institutions, citizens and funders can get together to test their

capacity to build different publics, contents, public spheres, imaginaries and commons.

To constitute digital facades as laboratories the possibility of experimenting in real time in the urban space is

needed, which is to say, that non-finished projects may be seen in the streets. Then the idea of an urban

project shifts from a finished material to a prototype that can be permanently reassembled and modified, and

therefore intercepted and opened up.

4. MEDIASTRUCTURES.

Digital facades as public infrastructures.

Thrift defines urban infrastructures as an assemblage of objects-in-relation replete with ’interactional

intelligence’ built into code, thinking machines, software-led systems, and object-mediated human thought,

pulsating as an ‘urban unconscious’ (14). If we consider digital facades as an assemblage of an

interconnected set of actors (the technical device, energy, darkness, surveillance cameras, code,

technicians, mediators, “public”, plaza, project, streets, climate, etc), we could think them as urban

infrastructures. But, which kind of infrastructures would they be? What would they make possible or

facilitate?

As opposed to governmental infrastructures of mobility, communication or supply, this new digital

infrastructures are soft infrastructures, localized and small in scale. There are some studies about their

capacity of becoming socializing platforms (15) enhancers of cultural participation (16) or promoters new

forms of shared experience in symbolic locations (17), but also have the capacity to install political action and

the management of conflict at the scale of neighborhood relations producing a new kind of governance.

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They have also an agency in themselves, which is to contribute, as mentioned earlier, to the urban

unconscious. Composed of a city’s material infrastructure as well as a city’s ‘aesthetics of surfaces and

quantities’ it can be thought of as a field of affective excess that is able to ‘hypnotize, overexcite or paralyze

the senses’, in the words of Ash Amin (18). Working in the background, the urban unconscious nurtures

public feelings, shapes human reflex and affect in the city, regulates social response to difference and

mediates care between strangers.

This agency breaks the Marxist differentiation between infra and supra-structures, and enhances the

mediation properties of digital facades. Together with their “media content” they could inaugurate a new type

of urban structure: the “mediastructures”.

5. INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE COMMONS.

Digital facades as empowerment tools.

We have seen that this mediastructures facilitate creativity, social interaction or representation, and therefore

could be considered as public goods (19). But could they nurture the commons (20), and by which means?.

On the one hand, through different types of content they can slowly embed care for the commons in the

social unconscious, or reveal the value of a shared functioning commons by making connections and

dependencies visible.

On the other, they can be used as a tool for exchange and personal or group empowerment. As massive

media technologies, as Saasen argues, they can serve to support local initiatives and alliances across a

city’s neighborhoods, and therefore form new types of political subjects that do not have to go through the

formal political system (21). Digital facades can be then the space to make visible the invisible, to give voice

to hidden agents, to be used by all in many different ways while always revealing difference, and then

become a scenario of the collective where the production of collective imaginaries and resistance processes

can take place.

It can be suggested that their potential is enhanced when engaged or activated by this new type of political

subjects, eventually what Christopher Kelty has described as a “recursive public” (22). And then, “when the

feelings of imagined community start resonating around such a machinery of public being, the city of the

commons will be ready to play its full part” (23).

1. CONCLUSSIONS

What has been proposed is to try to find new potentials on one of the growing digital interfaces in our cities.

By hacking a medium we have tried to suspend judgment and challenge it to imagine possible futures, “more

suited to augment urban reality and to revise it than to represent it” (24).

As objects, they can become spaces for experimentation, urban laboratories that perform in the urban space

in real time. If switching attention to their performance and effects, they can be imagined as public

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infrastructures that facilitate or promote communal expression, information exchange, mediated experience

and the construction of a collective unconscious.

And, as Brea concludes in his Thousand Screens, “maybe now it corresponds to all citizens to, with these

new devices in their hands, build the narratives and the imaginaries to intertwine in the communal their

crossed lives, administering the economies of the self as identification and recognition that lie in all the

commons”.

1. Poposky gives this capacity to urban art, but we have transferred it to digital facades. Poposki, Zoran .The right to the city:

Reclaiming the Urban landscape by art and activism. Public Interfaces, 2011.

2. This concept is widely developed in Ram_city, (Thousand screens), the last chapter of Cultura_RAM.

Brea, Jose Luis. Cultura_RAM. Barcelona: Gedisa, 2007.

3. Lasén, Amparo and Gómez-Cruz, Edgar. Digital Photography and Picture Sharing: Redefining

the Public/Private Divide. Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009.

4. McQuire, Scott. “Mobility, Cosmopolitanism and Public Space in the Media City.” NYHEDSAVISEN Public Interfaces, 2011.

5. Bullivant, Lucy. “Alice in technoland.” In : 4d social: Interactive design environments. Arquitectural Design, 2007.

6. For more technical information of the digital facade: http :// medialab - prado . es / article / fachada _ digital _ informacion _ tecnica

7. For more information on Media(nera)Lab: http :// medialab - prado . es / article / medianeralab

8. For more information on the MFF2010 in Madrid: http :// medialab - prado . es / article / media _ facades _ festival _ europe _2010

9. McQuire ,Scott McQuire. Making Images with audiences. RealTime nº 89, 2009.

10. Sennett , Richard. The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism, London: Penguin, 2002.

11. Lasén, Amparo and Gómez-Cruz, Edgar. Digital Photography and Picture Sharing: Redefining the Public/Private Divide. Springer

Science + Business Media B.V. 2009.

12. Arendt, Hannah. The human condition .Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

13. Huthamo, Erkki. Messages on the wall, in Urban Screens reader. Institut of Network Cultures. 2009.

14. Thrift, Nigel. "Remembering the technological unconscious by foregrounding knowledges of position" .Environment and Planning D:

Society and Space nº 22, 2009.

15. Ava Fatah gen. Schieck. Towards an integrated architectural media space: the urban screen as a socialising platform, in Urban

Screens Reader, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009.

16. Yue, Audrey ‘Urban Screens, Spatial Regeneration and Cultural Citizenship: The Embodied Interaction of Cultural Participation’, in

Urban Screens Reader, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009.

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17. McQuire, Scott. “Mobility, Cosmopolitanism and Public Space in the Media City.” NYHEDSAVISEN Public Interfaces, 2011.

18. Amin, Ash. Land of Strangers. Cambridge : Polity Press . Cambridge, 2012.

19. By “public goods” we understand the resources that are of common interest. Because of their public nature they can´t exclude

anyone from using them and require negotiated rules and maintenance . They are generally payed by governments, but not necessarily.

20. We take the On The Commons definition of “commons”: “The commons are the things that we inherit and create jointly, and that will

(hopefully) last for generations to come.”. They can be a natural, social or cultural object, but also the social apparatus that permits its

creation.

21. Saasen , Saskia. “Reading the City in a Global Digital Age,” in Future City. London: Spon Press. 2005.

22. Much has been discussed on this topic about types of “publics” and the type of participation or involvement that would be desired.

Cistopher Kelty´s proposal of the “recursive public” is exciting: “publics concerned with the ability to build, control, modify and maintain

the ifrastructure that allows them to come into being”.

Kelty , Christopher. Two Bits: The cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2008.

23. Amin, Ash. Land of Strangers. Cambridge : Polity Press . Cambridge, 2012.

24. Massumi, Brian. “Urban Appointment.” In Making Art from Databases. Rotterdam: V2 Organisatie/ Dutch Architecture Institute, 2003.

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