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Seeing-and-Being-Seen: Affordances of Sensors and Screens

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Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square

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Abstract

This chapter addresses the topic of VISIBILITY in digitally mediated urban public space. To see and be seen is a central aspect of public space. The suffusion of public space with digital sensing and surveilling apparatuses adds new dimensions to this economy of visibility. The roles of technologies of sensing and display in regimes of social control, in citizen witnessing and manifesting, and in the formation of urban imaginaries are discussed. The incursion of digital screens, both personal and public, into urban public space, enhances the reconfiguration of relationships between public and private, local and remote, while providing sites for the incubation of future forms of publicness.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Before seeing this as a disqualification of non-visual types of interaction from being considered public in nature, it must be allowed that one can also make oneself present to others via other means, such as text and voice exchanges.

  2. 2.

    The 2007 film “Look,” by Adam Rifkin, had used a similar conceit. Rifkin’s film, however, was not actual found surveillance camera footage, but was performed by actors and shot using digital video cameras placed at the locations of actual surveillance cameras to simulate their perspective.

  3. 3.

    This number was expected to increase by 450 million by 2020.

  4. 4.

    The French title of this work was “A+.”

  5. 5.

    Remote public screens had previously been erected in cities throughout the host countries of the Olympics in Sydney (summer 2000), Salt Lake City (winter 2002), Torino (summer 2006), Beijing (summer 2008), Vancouver (winter 2010), and, subsequent to the London event, in Sochi, Russia (winter 2014), Rio de Janeiro (summer 2016) and Pyeongchang (winter 2018). They have become a fixture of the Games and an integral component of the planning for the upcoming events in Tokyo (summer 2020).

  6. 6.

    A documentary by Mattia Pagura on this project is available at http://moritzbehrens.com/2014/screens-in-the-wild-documentary/.

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  1. University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

    Timothy Jachna

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Jachna, T. (2021). Seeing-and-Being-Seen: Affordances of Sensors and Screens. In: Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_8

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