Public Space, Media Space

Public Space, Media Space asks how public space is being mediatised in different ways in different cities around the world today. Urban public spaces today are saturated by media, perhaps more than ever before. These range from highly visible large LED screens in cities like Tokyo, through the cassette sermons one hears in the streets of Cairo, to the invisible, inaudible satellite surveillance systems that are everywhere. They include personal media like MP3 players and mobile phones, public information systems, commercial advertising, and more. How do these media shape, interconnect, or constitute physical public space, and how do they connect to virtual public spaces? How should we understand these phenomena? Is this simply a process of ever greater degradation of the public as direct face-to-face communication is replaced by ever more mediated and commercialized forms of communication among strangers? Or are new publics, new public processes, and new public spaces being constituted?

CHRIS BERRY is the professor of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. His academic research is grounded in work on Chinese cinema and other Chinese screen-based media, as well as neighboring countries. His primary publications include: Cinema and the National: China on Screen (with Mary Farquhar, Columbia University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2006); Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: the Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2004); The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (edited with Lu Xinyu and Lisa Rofel, Hong Kong University Press, 2010);), Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology, and Social Space (edited with Kim Soyoung and Lynn Spigel, University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes (edited with Nicola Liscutin and Jonathan D. Mackintosh, Hong Kong University Press, 2009); TV China (edited with Ying Zhu Indiana University Press, 2008); Chinese Films in Focus II (British Film Institute, 2008); and Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After (edited with Feii Lu Hong Kong University Press, 2005).

JANET HARBORD is a professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of several books on film and philosophies of screen technologies in the digital age including Chris Marker: La Jetée (Afterall Books & MIT, 2009), The Evolution of Film: Rethinking Film Studies, (Polity Press, 2007) and Film Cultures, (Sage, 2002) and editor of Temporalities: autobiography and everyday life, (with J. Campbell, Manchester University Press, 2002) and Psycho-politics (Taylor and Francis, 1998).

RACHEL MOORE is a lecturer in International Media at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She is the author of (nostalgia) (Afterall/MIT Press, 2006), Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Duke, 2000), as well as articles on Patrick Keiller (LUXonline), James Benning, and Kenneth Anger (Afterall).

Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Introduction; C.Berry, J.Harbord & R.O.Moore
What Is a Screen Nowadays?; F.Casetti
Multi-Screen Architecture; B.Colomina
Mapping Orbit: Towards a Vertical Public Space; L.Parks
Cairo Diary: Space-Wars, Public Visibility and the Transformation of Public Space in Post-Revolutionary Egypt; M.Abaza
Shanghai's Public Screen Culture: Local and Coeval; C.Berry
iPhone Girl: Assembly, Assemblages and Affect in the Life of an Image; H.Grace
In Transit: Between Labor and Leisure in London's St. Pancras International; R.Moore
Encountering Screen Art on the London Underground; J.Harbord & T.Dillon
Direct Address: A Brechtian Proposal for an Alternative Working Method; M.Lewandowska
Domesticating the Screen-Scenography: Situational Uses of Screen Images and Technologies in the London Underground; Z.Krajina
Privatizing Urban Space in the Mediated World of iPod Users; M.Bull
Publics and Publicity: Outdoor Advertising and Urban Space; A.M.Cronin
Index