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Media & Society

Rethinking media events: large screens, public space broadcasting and

beyond
Scott Mcquire
New Media Society 2010 12: 567 originally published online 24 November 2009
DOI: 10.1177/1461444809342764
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Article

Rethinking media events:

large screens, public space
broadcasting and beyond

new media & society

12(4) 567582
The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1461444809342764
nms.sagepub.com

Scott Mcquire

University of Melbourne, Australia

Abstract
The current deployment of large screens in city centre public spaces requires a
substantial rethinking of our understanding of the relationship of media to urban space.
Drawing on a case study of the Public Space Broadcasting project launched in the UK
in 2003, this article argues that large screens have the potential to play a significant role
in promoting public interaction. However, the realization of this potential requires a farreaching investigation of the role of media in the construction of complex public spaces
and diverse public cultures.
Key words
broadcasting, large screens, new media art, public culture, public space, surveillance,
television, urban spectacle

Relocating The Screen: Large Screens, Public Space

Broadcasting and Beyond
During the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany, millions of people gathered in public
spaces across the country to watch live telecasts of the games on 25 large video screens.
Each of the 12 host cities had at least one large screen, partly as a way of catering for
overflow audiences who were unable to buy tickets to the game, but also as a deliberate
strategy to extend the festival atmosphere beyond the boundaries of the sports arena into
city centre locations. In Frankfurt, crowds on both sides of the Rhine watched a floating
screen, while Berlins fan mile, stretching to the Brandenburg Gate, boasted four large
screens to cater for crowds up to 1 million strong. Such gatherings, while striking, were no
longer novelties. They built on a recent history of public viewing of major global sporting

Corresponding author:
Scott Mcquire, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Melbourne,VIC 3010,
Australia
Email: mcquire@unimelb.edu.au

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events, which had become prominent with the Olympic Games in Sydney (2000) and the
FIFA World Cup matches in Seoul (2002). More surprising, in 2006, was the extent to
which enthusiasm for public viewing was not confined to the host cities or the host nation.
As far away as Australia, crowds estimated at 16,000 turned out in pre-dawn Melbourne
to watch the Socceroos play Croatia on two city centre screens. Even more surprising was
the fact that large screens in Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds drew thousands to watch
England play Argentina in a 2005 friendly match.1 As Mike Gibbons, chief project director of BBC Live Events, which programmed the screens, recalled: there was this real
feeling of why is there 8000 people in Victoria Square in Birmingham and 10,000 people
in Manchester and 10,000 in Leeds all standing there in the pouring rain?2
If domestic viewers watching from their own homes continue to vastly outnumber
those watching in public spaces, the emergence of this new form of collective consumption of live events is worth noting. Large screens are currently being constructed at a
rapid rate in cities across the world, particularly in Asia, where China announced an
ambitious programme of construction for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. More importantly, many of the newer screens, such as those in Melbourne, Manchester and
Amsterdam, are deliberately situated in traditional public spaces such as city centre
squares. This positioning creates new possibilities for programming, as the imperative to
capture the fleeting attention of transient spectators is lessened. Enhancing this potential
for new modes of spectatorship is the increasing integration of large screens with digital
networks, enabling both a new range of content and new modes of interaction between
screens and spectators. In conjunction with mobile and networked media platforms, such
as cell phones and laptops, large screens belong to a paradigm shift in the place of media
technologies that is rapidly altering both the ambience and the dynamics of public space
in contemporary cities.
In this article, I will begin by contextualizing the emergence of these new forms of
public viewing in relation to the history of television spectatorship. After describing
significant phases in the public deployment of large screens, I will then focus on the most
ambitious programme for their use as a civic initiative, the Public Space Broadcasting
project launched in the UK in 2003. From this vantage point, I will argue that if large
screens are to play a significant role in the revitalization of civic life, there needs to be a
more fundamental and far-reaching investigation of their capacity to contribute to rich
and complex public spaces through the active construction and reconstruction of shifting
and heterogeneous publics.

Television and the Privatization of the Public Sphere

Public forms of television consumption were, in fact, relatively common prior to ownership of television receivers becoming widespread. Watching through the windows of a
department store is an oft-recalled rite of passage. As Urrichio (1989) points out, initial
experiments with television broadcasting in 1930s Germany were directed towards collective viewing situations. The Nazi state, arguably the first to fully recognize the political importance of simultaneity as a means of generating national unity, favoured public
television halls seating between 40 and 400 as an ideal mechanism for relaying important
events to a mass audience. However, in the face of financial and technical difficulties,

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Hitler and Goebbels were forced to content themselves with putting a radio in every living room (McQuire, 1998).
As Spiegel (1992) has analyzed at length, the eventual entry of the television set into
the private home in the US demanded significant realignment of both furniture and family relationships. Nevertheless, the uptake of the new medium was spectacular, and near
universal penetration was achieved within a decade, a trajectory subsequently followed
in most other national territories. While limited forms of public consumption continued,
private consumption became the norm. This dominance has been reflected by theoretical
understandings of television as a domestic technology primarily characterized by home
viewing (Morley, 1986; Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992; also cf. McCarthy, 2001). It is also
evident in the way that Dayan and Katz (1992) conceptualize what they term media
events public events consumed primarily in the private home via television. While
viewers often choose to watch these events in groups, the bounds of the house sequester
each group from the multitude.
The growing role of television in distributing public events for private consumption
dovetailed with widespread concern about the demise of public space in the second half
of the 20th century. Influential writers such as Jacobs (1961), Sennett (1976), Berman
(1982), Habermas (1989), Sorkin (1992) and Virilio (1994) have all argued that the public culture that characterized an earlier modernism has been displaced by a pervasive
withdrawal into the private sphere. Alongside the profound impact of the private car in
promoting suburbanization, the rise of television as the dominant media platform has
often been set in a causal relationship with the decline of public culture.
However, the explanatory value of such a narrative is declining. In some respects, it
always had notable limits, including the nostalgic idealization of an older public culture
and the attribution of a rigid set of effects to television technology. Nevertheless, the current expansion of media screens from predominantly fixed and private locations to
mobile and public sites has introduced a new set of questions. At the very least, the trajectory describing the privatization of public culture by television needs to be situated as
belonging to a specific historical conjuncture.

From Large Screens to Media Buildings

A comprehensive history of the development of large screens for public use is yet to be
written. Such a history would need to traverse a number of distinct sites, such as sports
stadia, department stores and shopping malls and ephemeral events such as rock concerts, as well as the public locations in the city centre which are my primary concern
here. For the purpose of this article, I will merely indicate the key technological shifts
contributing to the rapid spread of screens over the last decade.
The first significant threshold occurred in 1976, when the landmark Spectacolor
board was erected on the old New York Times building at One Times Square. Rather than
a television screen, Spectacolor was a programmable animated electronic sign that used
an array of krypton incandescent bulbs to produce what now seem to be fairly rudimentary monocolour graphics. Its key innovation over existing signage was its capacity to
display variable content, lending it a novel hybrid identity. As George Stonbely, the driving force behind Spectacolor, put it: We had the idea of creating a broadcast medium on

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a sign (cited in Gray, 2000). The new medium attracted keen interest from a range of
advertisers and was also exploited by artists such as Jenny Holzer, who famously used
the Times Square screen (among others) to display text-based works from her iconic
Truisms series in 1982.
A second significant threshold was crossed in the mid-1980s with the release of
Sonys JumboTron and Mitsubishis Diamond Vision, which each used a matrix of small
cathode ray tube (CRT) displays instead of incandescent light bulbs. An outdoor
JumboTron, measuring 82 131 feet (25 40m), was famously exhibited at Expo 85 at
the science city of Tsukuba near Tokyo. While screens of this scale were very expensive
to purchase and to operate, their capacity to display full colour video at much better resolution meant that they soon began to find a home at premium sporting venues.3 By 1986,
the first large screen was in place at the famous Hachiko Crossing in Tokyos Shibuya.
Tokyos bubble economy was also the incubator for new uses of the video wall, which
began to migrate from the interior to the exterior, refiguring the streetscape of opulent
shopping districts. As Australian video artist Peter Callas (1999: 71) recalls: The Sony
consumer headquarters in Ginza, built in the early 80s, sported an entire wall of monitors
that was seven or eight stories high.
The third major threshold, which is driving the current rapid expansion of large
screens, was the maturation of LED (light emitting diode) technology. While monocolour LED technology has been used in signage since the mid-1970s, it was not until the
1990s that LED became a viable video format. The primary advantages of LED large
screens are, first, their lower operating and maintenance costs compared to their predecessors such as incandescent bulbs, neon or cathode ray tubes; and, second, their capacity
to generate sufficient brightness for effective daylight as well as night display (Vazquez,
2002). LED screens now dominate many famous streetscapes such as Manhattans Times
Square, where they feature on landmark buildings such as Disneys Times Square Studios
used by its ABC television network (1999) and Nasdaqs MarketSite building at the northwest corner of Four Times Square (2000). The structural flexibility of LED screens,
enabling the construction of media faades cladding entire buildings, has propelled
architecture towards a new role providing what Paul Virilio (in Ranaulo, 2001: 7) aptly
terms media buildings: structures with the primary function of providing information
rather than habitation.

The Electric Cityscape as Commodity Space

How should we understand the emergence of the electronic screen from the interior
space of the private dwelling onto the streetscape of contemporary cities? In particular,
how should we understand the contemporary merging of screens with architecture, which
reconstitutes static buildings into active information surfaces and creates an overlap
between the spatial experiences of streetscape and datascape? From initial experiments
in cities such as Tokyo and New York, the migration of electronic screens into the cityscape has become one of the most visible and influential tendencies of contemporary
urbanism. The old television set has morphed from a small-scale appliance a material
object primarily associated with domestic space into a large-scale screen, less a piece
of furniture than a surface, resident not in the home, but in the street outside. This

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mutation has intersected with the other major transformations of media technology and
culture over the last two decades: first, the formation of distributed global networks
using satellite, cable and fibre optic transmission, which multiply channels and erode
regional and national boundaries; and, second, the emergence of mobile media devices
that displace the social relations accreted around fixed media forms. The cumulative
impact of these developments on the relation between media and public space has been
profound.
And, yet, despite the chameleon-like qualities of the contemporary media building,
its break with the streetscape of the modern city is not as abrupt as might first be imagined. It is notable that the first wave of large screens emerged on sites that had earlier
pioneered novel forms of electric and electronic signage. In sports stadia, for example,
electric scoreboards were used in professional baseball parks in the US from the 1930s.
By the 1960s, the growing importance of statistical analysis to the consumption of sport
underpinned the gradual upgrading of an array of incandescent bulbs to CRT-based
scoreboards, which enabled increased provision of information to spectators. The subsequent transition of the electronic scoreboard into a fully functioning large-scale video
screen during the 1980s reveals a further shift in spectatorship, fuelled by the increasing
importance of television coverage of sports. Competition with home viewing necessitated that stadia provide the augmented vision enabled by television close-ups, slow
motion and replays.
The first city centre sites on which large screens were deployed, such as Manhattans
Times Square, are also notable in enjoying a long history of pioneering media displays.
Manhattans Broadway gained world renown in the early 20th century for the intensity
of its electric advertising signage. The New York Times building at One Times Square,
which later housed the Spectacolor board, was previously famed for its Motograph news
bulletin service, better known as the zipper. This 400-foot reader board, comprising
14,800 light bulbs capable of 260m flashes per hour, was launched on election night
1928. It delivered up-to-date news bulletins literally news flashes to the crowds
moving through the streets below.
Like the other forms of electronic signage that formed Broadways great white way,
the zipper was both a new information source and also part of the novel electric landscape that dramatically changed the social experience of urban space in the early 20th
century (McQuire, 2005). Electric signage helped to introduce what Leo Marx (1964)
aptly called the technological sublime into the modern city life.4 It also registered a
fundamental alteration in the pulse of city life. Historian David Nye (1994: 191) discusses a 1931 newspaper cartoon based on the zipper, in which three men, distracted
by the sign, are hit by a taxi. They are thrown into the air and, as they return to earth, see
the accident recorded in the headline, 3 Hit by Taxi in Times Sq. The zipper cartoon
offers a succinct index of the manner in which the electric sign is the harbinger of media
platforms which move so fast that they no longer merely represent events, but become
part of them, foreshadowing the role of near instantaneous feedback loops in shaping
contemporary experience of public space.
Relating the emergence of large screens since the mid-1970s to the history of urban
spectacle created by electric signage situates the extent to which large screens have
often been deployed as an upgrade to the spectacular brandscape of modern capitalism.

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However, it is equally important to recognize the limits of this comparison. Where

income from signage was usually a negligible factor in the 1920s, property development
at prime urban locations is increasingly based on earnings generated by advertising displays such as large screens (Brill, 2002). The iconic former New York Times building at
One Times Square is indicative of this trend, remaining virtually tenantless since 1996.
Instead, its 23 storeys are completely encased in vinyl signs on three faces, while the
world famous north side is plastered from top to bottom by electronic screens and a neon
billboard. The building at the opposite end of the square is now similarly clad from pavement to penthouse in 11 giant LED screens. These examples indicate one likely contemporary function for Virilios media building.
The increasing commercialization of urban space carried by the spread of advertising
signage has been controversial since its inception. In retrospect, it can be seen that many
of the early arguments against signage reflected a conservative stance privileging a beaux
arts aesthetic of rational design over the messy realities of the industrial city. Nevertheless,
legitimate concern over commercial dominance of public space should not become an
alibi for sweeping and hasty condemnation of public screens. As cities across the world
are turning en masse to large-scale screens as a popular strategy for reinvigorating public space, it is vital to reiterate some of the traditional questions about the relationship
between media and public culture. Who has access? Who are the gatekeepers? How are
judgements about content made? What range of voices is heard? Even commercially
driven initiatives, such as the screens in 1980s Tokyo and New York, supported a range
of alternative content at different moments.5 The existence of such spaces, as partial and
flawed as they might be, reinforces the relevance of Alexander Kluges (198182: 214)
dictum concerning the need to keep probing even highly circumscribed public arenas,
such as commercial broadcast television, for openings:
[T]he fence erected by corporations, by censorship, by authority does not reach all the way to
the base but stops short because the base is so complex so that one can crawl under the fence
at any time. Even television producers and board members can be examined in light of this
calculation of marginal utility.

In particular, the dominance of commercial content on publicly sited screens in the US

should not be read as an inevitable trajectory. The historical dominance of commercial
broadcasting in the US makes the predilection for commercially operated screens unsurprising. The Public Space Broadcasting initiative in the UK builds upon the different
tradition of publicly funded broadcasting and provides a contrasting example for thinking about potential uses of public screens.

Public Space Broadcasting

The big screen Public Space Broadcasting project began in Manchester in May 2003. By
2007, eight out of 10 planned screens were operating and the pilot phase of the prog
ramme was drawing to a close.6 The screens predominantly display BBC content, including
live events, but they also show a range of cultural content and public information and are
integrated into site-specific events programmed by local partners such as city councils.

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The BBCs original desire to broadcast via a large screen in Manchester over an
extended period (initially a year) grew spontaneously out of the success of the temporary
screens that had been used for a series of events in conjunction with the Commonwealth
Games and the Queens Golden Jubilee in 2002. As Bill Morris (director of BBC Live
Events) recalls:
We managed to secure 10 screens just for a week around the country and put them into lots of
different cities, including Manchester. And in essence they took off. We saw people turning up
to watch the screens, not just for the big events, but they were wanting to do other things with
the screens the screens were becoming a bit of a focal point in themselves.

The Manchester big screen was erected in Exchange Square next to the site of the old
Corn Exchange building. Redeveloped following the 1996 bombing, the location provided
a ready-made amphitheatre capable of accommodating up to 10,000 people. This was crucial to the ambition to provide a different range of viewing experiences. Morris stresses that
a big screen should not simply be television, nor, for that matter, broadcasting:
I think there is a risk that, because the BBC is involved that, until people get under the skin of
it, they think it must be a big television on the wall. And were actually working very hard to
make sure its not that. Because, without getting too pompous about it, what were really talking
about is a digital canvas [] There are loads and loads of ways in which you can interact with
the screen so its not just one way traffic.

Working hard to make sure its not just television involves drawing on a range of content, including internet and community-produced video, as well as piloting interactive
experiments such as virtual game playing. Morris notes:
There are some experiments that John Moore[s] University in Liverpool are doing and another
team at a university in Birmingham, working with putting cameras on screen facing the space,
the square, where you can play games, you can vote, you can play music, you can interact with
one screen to another. We had a virtual golf tournament a couple of weeks ago with a team
playing golf in the centre of Birmingham and a team playing golf in the centre of Manchester
and theres no golf courses, no holes, it was all done through virtual games [] Now we think
weve only just touched the surface there, its really early days, but that kind of thing is just
really opening up.

A key aim of the pilot project has been to learn more about what sort of programming
might work in the context of public space. Dividing the operation broadly between the
event mode of established crowd pullers like live sport, where the screen is the pinnacle
of attention, and ambient mode where the audience tends to be more transient and distracted, Morris argues, the challenge for us is to make sure the screen is earning its keep,
I suppose, in both those modes. He adds:
The event mode is the obvious one, but what are the range of other content which, when its in
ambient mode, are still useful in terms of the normal warp and weft of peoples daily life? []

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What happens if you put on a soap opera, so theres Neighbours or EastEnders? Is that actually
going to make people stop and watch the screen? Against, say, a news information programme?
What happens if you put a local, non-broadcast, non-commercial film, or a professional artist
on, will people watch it?

One of the most striking outcomes of the pilot project has been its demonstration of the
capacity of the screen to serve as the site for the collective enactment of public rituals,
including celebration and mourning. Morris observes:
Weve learnt a lot about the fact that there is a really enduring need for people to share some of
those opportunities for having a bit of fun, celebrating a great moment, be it a sporting moment
or a cultural moment. Weve done relays with the opera house and things like that. Or indeed a
moment of concern and sadness. With the London bombings people not just in London, but
in the other cities around the country were gathering around the screens to watch what was
going on. Now, in a few cases those will be people who will simply not have access to the news
in any other way, they walk into the city and just want to find out whats going on. But, in other
cases, you actually feel that you want to be with other people. When there was the three-minute
silence that happened after the London bombings, maybe a week later, people gathered in quite
large numbers at each of the screen sites to observe the silence.

It is important to demarcate these public rituals from the older social function of television. As broadcast television became the dominant institution of the public sphere in
Habermass terms, it played an increasingly important role in the construction of a common cultural terrain, albeit one that was unequal and contested. Television viewing, particularly watching live events, still provides one of the most powerful symbolic
enactments of the putative unity of the national community, in which the act of watching
performs the connection of the individual to the wider community. However, recent
decades have been marked by the fragmentation of national audiences as new technologies have enabled the proliferation of channels, the rise of narrowcasting and the expansion of transnational media flows. This shift has occurred in a broader social context in
which older forms of belonging, based on shared experience gained primarily through
physical contiguity from lifelong jobs or long-term residence in a single place to membership of a union or church have become increasingly precarious for many. The consequence of increasing demands to reflexively construct ones identity on the fly is
greater individual responsibility for negotiating the risk of different life choices at all
levels. While enhanced individual autonomy can be experienced as freedom of choice,
the corollary has been the loss of many older forms of collective encounter and the
attenuation of social bonds. The desire for new forms of collectivity can be read symptomatically across a wide range of contemporary media phenomena, from the popularity
of online gaming and dating sites to the explosion of social networking using so-called
Web 2.0 technologies. The emergence of large screens as a focal point for collective
gatherings in public space belongs to a similar trajectory, with the significant difference
that the screen does not so much substitute for a public gathering as become the occasion
for one. Morris recalls:

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In Liverpool there was a guy called Ken Bigley, a guy from the city who was out in Iraq who
was murdered in a particularly gruesome way. They really took it to heart and they held a oneminute silence and there was a service and there were more people gathered in front of the
screen in Liverpool than there were at the cathedral. And to our astonishment, people were
putting flowers at the bottom of the screen. Now this wasnt planned or our assumption at all.
Weve been constantly surprised and challenged by what people are doing.

The use of large screens to provide services whose success cannot be measured
simply by commercial revenue can be seen as a direct outgrowth of the BBCs public
broadcasting charter. But, as much as the big screens reflect the heritage of public
service broadcasting, they also represent a significant recasting of its institutional
arrangements. While the BBC is the dominant content provider, Mike Gibbons points
out that we dont claim it as a BBC project. Rather, the BBC has entered strategic
partnerships with local councils who provide sites and capital funding, technology
partners such as Philips, who provide the screens, and arts organizations such as the
Cornerhouse arts centre in Manchester, which provides alternative content. This preparedness to develop partnerships reflects a new phase in the BBCs operation, as it
recasts itself as a more open institution in order to negotiate the more fluid institutional context of contemporary society. As Morris puts it:
[T]hirty years ago we could have run the screens entirely on our own. We would have paid for
the whole thing ourselves via the licence fee and we would have said exactly what was going on
them at any time of day or night and that would have been it, wouldnt it? That would have been
the way the BBC would have done it. Now, you can argue that not only would that now be
wrong, it just wouldnt be possible. You couldnt contemplate it now [] Thirty years ago it
would have come through the BBCs marketing arm and it would have been run just with BBC
content and wed have run trailers all over the place and adverts with BBC on it. You certainly
wouldnt have wanted to worked [sic] with community projects, arts projects, run local events
and things of that sort. So the approach that weve taken is, I think, just one small bit of evidence
that the BBC has to work in that more porous way now and that its a two-way street.

If the key advantages to the BBC of forming these partnerships include fostering relationships with different audience fractions and consolidating their position in community
life, their strategic partners also perceive a range of benefits. Cultural institutions are also
able to address new audiences and gain higher profiles for experimental work, while
municipal authorities gain access to a new platform for local information and publicity
and a new facility for staging city centre events. Closer relations among all the partners
can also be leveraged into longer term strategies for urban regeneration.7 In this respect,
it is worth noting that while the project is not explicitly commercially orientated, the
screens have demonstrated a capacity to deliver commercial outcomes. Gibbons recalls
that installation of the Liverpool screen in 2004 was originally opposed by the local
shopping centre manager, who basically did the over my dead body speech. He adds:
He is now captured on camera saying over my dead body if they take it away because
its had such a positive impact on the way in which people view this bit of the city.

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Nevertheless, the longer term viability of the project remains to be seen. Despite the
technological changes described above, large screens are not cheap. They occupy valuable city centre space, require significant capital investment, ongoing maintenance and
technical support, as well as provision of specialized content.8 The big screens initiative
remains unique in the scale of its attempt to provide a linked network of non-commercial
screens operating in public space. While the screens are sponsored, they do not run
advertising or aim at making a profit. Instead of producing an income stream, their payoff is to be measured in civic terms. As Morris puts it:
We would like to think that this project is creating something that is a new bit of civic
architecture a bit like a decent size city expects to have its art gallery, its culture, its swimming
pool, its library that were in that kind of territory, rather than just creating another means of
contacting target consumer groups.

Urban Spectacle and Surveillance

From an urban planning point of view, the difference between a large screen displaying
advertising content and a screen involved in non-commercial uses such as public space
broadcasting is not yet well understood. This reflects the fact that establishing large
screens for public use is a recent initiative with an experimental intent.9 How might public screens contribute to civic culture? Or is the proliferation of such screens merely
another register of the rise in audiovisual noise, the urban counterpart of Debords
society of the spectacle, in which social relations are increasingly reduced to commodity relations mediated by images? If the initial significance of public screens is less the
specific content they display than their capacity to attract people into public space, this
basic orientation might challenge the normative signature of private media consumption,
but it offers little purchase in addressing the more widely identified question of a decline
in public space (McQuire, 2008: 13248). This suggests a need for closer examination of
the modes of social interaction that constitute a rich public culture and investigation
into the ways in which different media platforms and interfaces might promote new
modes of social agency in public space.
One of the chief virtues of modern cities has been their capacity to produce a confluence of strangers. As Georg Simmel famously noted over a century ago, the characteristic experience of the modern city is living among strangers who remain strangers (see
Frisby and Featherstone, 1997). In other words, these strangers do not simply pass
through, as they might once have traversed a village, but frequently take up residence.
However, in staying, strangers do not necessarily become familiar to those around them.
Instead, social life in the modern city comes to include routine negotiation of social interaction with those who remain strangers. It is the cultural effects of this gathering of
strangers, with its tendency to produce unexpected conjunctions enabling the dynamic
reassessment of tradition, which underlies Richard Sennetts optimistic rationale for
modern urban life. Sennett (1976: 296) argues that individual experience is inevitably
subjected to multiple collisions or jolts, which are necessary to a human being to give
him that sense of tentativeness about his own beliefs which every civilized person must
have. In other words, the structural conditions of modern urban life, in which people

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from different backgrounds mingle in a shared space, militate against absolutism and in
favour of cosmopolitanism, the cosmopolitan being the perfect public man in Sennetts
(1976: 17) terms.
Of course, the society of strangers also leads towards other destinations than cosmopolitanism. Anthony Giddens has noted the way that routine social interaction among
strangers elevates questions of trust to new importance. Once personal reputation and
identity are no longer secured through the knowledge generated by face-to-face networks, more abstract forms of identification and evaluation gain in prominence. Drawing
on Simmels concept of the blas attitude developed by city dwellers trying to cope
with overstimulation, Giddens (1991: 152) elaborates the notion of civil indifference
that emerges, as trust dependent on personal knowledge gives way to administrative
control and increased reliance on technical systems. Sociologist David Lyon (2001)points
out that the society of strangers is also the precondition for the contemporary surveillance society in which technological tokens of trust, from PINs and passwords to DNA
samples, replace other forms of identification. Lyon stresses that modern surveillance is
not undertaken primarily with the intention of instituting police functions. Rather, surveillance society emerges in the nexus of demands for economic and administrative
flexibility, an outgrowth of the quest for efficient economic circulation and enhanced
spatial mobility characteristic of contemporary capitalism.
Alongside the spectacular brandscapes inaugurated by electric signage, technological
surveillance has become an increasingly prominent aspect of the experience of contemporary public space. New media platforms, such as mobile phones or the internet, enable
precise tracing of user movements in both physical space and dataspace. Moreover, the
digital networking of older forms of surveillance changes their function. Urban CCTV
systems are no longer separate islands located at specific sites, such as banks or casinos, but belong to integrated systems permeating wide swathes of urban space. The
speed of data circulation, combined with the development of pattern recognition software, inaugurates a paradigm shift in the temporality of surveillance, as the retrospectivity of re-presentation is increasingly recalibrated onto the prospective orientation of
risk management.

Reinventing Public Space?

In this context, in which spectacle and surveillance constitute the dominant poles shaping the contemporary reconstruction of public space, it remains critically important to
imagine and articulate other headings. One of the most productive insights of Sennetts
work is his insistence that forms of public behaviour are not natural; civility, like suspicion, needs to be learned and practised. Cosmopolitanism, conceived less as the worldliness of the well travelled than the capacity to sustain productive relations with
strangers in public, requires reinvention in the present. In contrast to the identity fixation of security policing or the reduction of citizenship to commodity consumption
under the aegis of spectacle, forms of public interaction that promote qualities such as
sharing and collaboration, negotiation, surprise and unpredictability can all play a vital
role in challenging the dominant habitus of public space. As Andreas Broeckmann has
argued (2000: 167):

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The challenge to the creative use of media technologies is fostering the diversity of public actors
and terrains and to develop strategies of articulating the new public domains that connect physical
urban spaces and the potential public sphere of the electronic networks. This public sphere will
only come into being if there are complex forms of interaction, of participation and learning, that
use the technical possibilities of the new networks and that allow for new and creative forms of
becoming visible, becoming present, becoming active, in short, of becoming public.

Experiments towards this goal can exist on a range of levels. A simple instance is the
system that enables SMS to be displayed on the ticker running across the bottom of the
large screen in Melbournes Federation Square. While it is easy to dismiss such an initiative in terms of the triviality of most of the messages (which have to be manually filtered for offensive content), it is worth recognizing that most users of these services are
teenagers, whose voice and presence are traditionally marginalized in public space.
Moreover, as Ursula Frohne (2002: 256) points out, visibility in the media stands as an
increasingly important affirmation of subjectivity in media-based cultures.
More sophisticated interfaces have the potential to instigate a wider range of experiences, including the complex negotiation between individual and collective agency.
Many of the best examples have been the result of experimental uses of new media in
public space by artists. Exemplary in this context are Rafael Lozano-Hemmers relational architecture projects, Body Movies and Underscan.10 Body Movies was first staged
in 2001 in Schouwburg Square in central Rotterdam and subsequently in a number of
other cities, including Hong Kong in 2006. It involved the projection of a series of largescale portraits onto the faade of the Path cinema. However, the portraits were rendered
invisible due to saturation by powerful xenon lights at ground level. It was only when
pedestrians walked through the square and interrupted the light that the projected portraits were revealed in the silhouettes of their interposed shadows. The more recent
Underscan project, displayed in Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Northampton and Nottingham
in 200506, similarly used shadows as a mode of revelation. Underscan involved thousands of video portraits projected onto the ground in city centre thoroughfares and
public spaces. Rendered invisible by intense white light projected from above, the portraits appeared intermittently in the shadows created by pedestrians, their absent subjects
turning to look straight at the passerby. As the passerby left the scene, the portrait subject
also turned away.
These projects are striking in a number of respects. Although they produced spectacular visual images, they also emphasized the physical presence of participants bodies.
This orientation plays an important role in limiting capacity to appropriate them simply
as abstract spectacle. The work is not just about watching images, but depends upon
interaction with others in order for things to happen. Both projects also demonstrate the
possibility for counter-intuitive uses of surveillance technology by utilizing sophisticated tracking systems as a feedback mechanism. In Body Movies, the location of all
shadows is monitored in real time, so that whenever all the portraits in a given scene
were revealed, the control computer immediately changed to another set. In Underscan,
pedestrian movement was tracked so that portraits could be placed in a pedestrians
predicted path. Most importantly, both works sought to displace the linear trajectory and
recognizable point of completion on which conventional use of the panoptic logic of

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tracking systems is predicated. Instead of the logic of taking turns, where single users
control the apparatus and produce representations that others watch, multiple spectators
could simultaneously explore a multitude of different pathways. Rather than stylizing
public behaviour into the kind of false totality that Kracauer (1995) aptly dubbed the
mass ornament, Lozano-Hemmer uses media technology to create ludic public spaces.
Play becomes a means of reinventing relations with others in an experimental public
space characterized by contingent and unpredictable encounters.
For Lozano-Hemmer (2005: 5), one of the most important affordances of digital
media is the new range of possibilities for programming without teleology, in which
the artist cannot dictate the outcome:
By means of non-linear mathematics, like cellular automata, probabilistic ramifications,
recursive algorithms or chaos strategies, its possible to write programs whose results will
surprise the author. Thats to say, the machine can have certain autonomy and expression because
you simply capture initial algorithmic conditions but do not pre-program the outcome. This is
for me a gratifying post-humanist message; a message that invites humility, but one that also
marks a crisis in authorship and opens a wide problematic area, and I say welcome to that!

Insofar as the interfaces in Body Movies and Underscan constructed a delicate balance
between personal participation and collective interaction, between active engagement
and reflective contemplation, these works facilitated playful encounters among groups
of strangers who came together in public space and discovered that, by enacting a collective choreography, they could alter the ambiance of that space. Designing interfaces
that are visually arresting, but not immediately comprehensible, is crucial in promoting
a mode of interaction that is not simply instrumental. Passersby arent initially sure
what is going on, but can best learn by joining in. Habit is suspended in favour of
kinaesthetic experimentation. Unexpected conjunctions emerge. Through mutual participation, the public are able to intervene, albeit ephemerally, in the look and feel of
city centre public space.
Perhaps most critically, these works do not depend on the personal identity of the
participants, but on their actions, on their willingness to engage with other people in
public space. In contrast to the paranoia about strangers that constitutes so much official
rhetoric, as the war on terror grinds on, these artworks celebrate the spontaneous alignments that can make genuine public encounters in Sennetts terms, encounters with
strangers so memorable.

Conclusion
It remains to be seen whether large screens can and will be utilized in similarly engaging
ways. If their primary function continues to be displaying adverts or relaying live events
originating elsewhere, this new platform seems unlikely to engage audiences on more
than a sporadic basis. Realization of the broader potential of public screens in contributing to civic culture demands a critical research agenda investigating a range of issues
linking urban design to cultural policy, and innovation in media technologies to an understanding of social agency. What public policy mechanisms should be adopted for the

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control and regulation of screens in public space? How should screen infrastructure and
new forms of cultural content be funded? How can innovation in the meshing of urban
design and media through experimental interfaces facilitate more interaction between
different publics?
A critical element of any future research agenda is the need for sustained empirical
research into the use of new media technologies in public space. In the absence of such
research, conservative policy jockeys with speculative theory in an unproductive dance.
For instance, the size and positioning of large public screens are pivotal to the ambivalence often expressed towards them. On the one hand, they can all too easily dominate
public spaces, serving as an Orwellian platform for commercial or state propaganda. But
this scale can also be an advantage over the contemporary profusion of small screens,
precisely because of the capacity of large screens to promote new forms of collective
experience. This indicates the need for situated analysis of the functioning of different
screens and interfaces across a variety of specific sites. Finally, the capacity to link
screens not only within national networks (such as in the UK), but also between cities in
different national territories raises intriguing questions about the emergence of a new
form of cross-cultural exchange. How might a networked platform of large screens contribute to the formation of a transnational public sphere, which cannot be understood in
terms of simple oppositions between the local and the global, but is constituted at the
intersection of the older tradition of embodied public space (those physically assembled
at a specific site) and the more recent tradition of the electronic public sphere (those
gathered in shared time rather than contiguous space)? Addressing these questions would
not only offer important insights into the dynamics of urban public life in the 21st century, but would contribute to a new understanding of the global as comprised of specific
instantiations of networks and physical spaces.
Acknowledgement
I acknowledge the role of the Australian Research Council, through the Discovery Project
Grant Public Screens and the Transformation of Public Space, in supporting this research.

Notes
1. A friendly is a one-off international match that is not part of a competition.
2. Interview with Mike Gibbons and Bill Morris (director, BBC Live Events) conducted in
London on 14 November 2005. All further quotes from Gibbons and Morris are from this
interview.
3. An early version of Mitsubishis Diamond Vision used CRT technology in a large screen at
Dodger Stadium in 1980. However, since it lacked the necessary resolution for broader application, the release of the Diamond Vision Mark II in 1985 provides a more apt technological
threshold.
4. Marx utilizes the technological sublime to conceptualize the transference of the awe felt in
face of natural grandeur onto aspects of the modern technological world.
5. In the US, the Public Art Fund supported interventions, such as Jenny Holzers use of the
Spectacolor board in 1982, an orientation kept alive by contemporary initiatives such as

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6.

7.

8.
9.

10.

the 59th Minute project, which showcases minute-long artworks on the NBC Astrovision
screen in Times Square. In the context of the bubble economy of 1980s Tokyo, a number of
department stores employed in-house video artists to generate original content for their street
screens.
The first big screens were established in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Hull, Leeds,
Rotherham, Bradford and Swindon. Responding to submissions from around 70 other cities
that expressed interest in being included in any future extension of the project, the BBC has
since entered a partnership with the London 2012 Olympic organizing committee to install a
second tranche of screens, which will provide Live Sites around the nation for the Olympics.
By mid-2009, there are 17 screens operating.
For Morris, the goal of urban regeneration explains the northern orientation of the pilot
project, as northern cities were much keener to support the establishment of screens to address
relative deprivation of investment and cultural infrastructure.
A screen planned for Wrexham, for which planning permission had already been granted, was
cancelled in January 2006, when the council decided it was unable to meet its share of the cost.
The Contemporary Art Screen in the Zuidas district of Amsterdam, which opened in 2007, is
one of the only screens dedicated to showing art and cultural content (see: http://www.caszuidas.nl).
An image and video archive of these projects is available at: http://www.lozano-hemmer.com

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Scott Mcquire is Associate Professor and Reader in the School of Culture and Communication at
the University of Melbourne.He has a strong interest in interdisciplinary research linking social
theory, new media, art and urbanism. His most recent book is The Media City: Media, Architecture
and Urban Space, published by Sage in the Theory, Culture & Society series (2008).

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