engleski

The Sense of Place in the Mediated City

Habituating contemporary urban spaces, increasingly overlaid with electronic representations of various elsewheres, requires everyday passers-by to develop skills of negotiating the sense of place. Urban screens, appearing in ever-surprising forms, both take space, as material objects embedded in the physical structures, and represent other space, as suggestive moving image interfaces. In this presentation I read visual appearances of screens in the city as spatial appearances, and ask how ordinary people negotiate their senses of space, when – without having the power of operating a remote control – they find themselves near luminous surfaces that provide gateways to various elsewheres. I reflect on my ethnographic research of diverse cases such as street advertising, advertising in the underground transport, installation art on a square (in London), and media façade architecture (in Zadar, Croatia), and inform my findings with the perspectives of spatial habituation (Seamon) and appropriation (de Certeau), and sociology of television consumption (Meyrowitz, Lull and Morley). I draw attention to what has remained a considerably under-researched field of urban media audiences, and demonstrate that everyday passers-by have developed – to the level of taken-for-granted routines – a wide-ranging array of ethno-methods of negotiating the sense of place in mediated environments. Although images of other spaces, such as faraway resorts in holiday advertisements, do not cross walkers’ ways materially, their availability in the pedestrian vista informs how bodies move and what passers-by do (keeping a sideway glance on an image while moving, or turning the head away while standing). Walkers strategically make use of electronic presences as beautifying augmentations of urban space, or in escapist travels away from the space of interaction to more pleasantly looking elsewheres. By raising the issues of the sense of place in the conference concerned primarily with corporeal senses, I invite a wider consideration of the experiential dimension of interaction with media. Negotiations of the sense of place, in conjunction to all other sensory channels of interaction, are one fundamental resource in our understanding of how people cope with the spatial arrangements of their everyday lives in technologically mediated cities.

media; audiences; place; space; city; senses

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