engleski

Domesticating the Screen-Scenography: Situational Uses of Images and Technologies in the Tunnels of the London Underground

Proposing a grounded spatial epistemology in studying everyday interactions with urban screens, I present findings of ethnographic research done in the London Underground. While the tunnels architecturally encourage moving straight, their surfaces, covered, almost entirely, with advertising screens, invite looking around. Contrary to the institutional imaginations of passengers as ‘captive audiences’, commuters routinely compensate for the lack of control switches through myriad ethno-methods of appropriating the screens to their situational ends. While seen merely as progressing through “scruffy”, “narrow” and “crowded” space (a price many must pay in order to move through their city efficiently), passengers silently make use of screen-images as representations of more pleasantly looking elsewheres, and screen-objects in avoiding eye-looks from others, focussing thoughts, or aesthetically assessing graphic design as social practice. I identify those habits as situational uses of urban screens and put them in conversation with some assumptions of phenomenological geography about experiential place-making, and de Certeau’s ideas about users’ ‘tactics’. I argue that everyday interactions with urban screens are predicated on dynamic negotiations of the sense of place through episodes of incidental media consumption that is always ‘enveloped’ in the circumstances of particular microsocial situations. Since, in the Underground’s tunnels, there is, experientially, more space with representations of other space, the passengers can, while interacting with the screens, temporarily “escape” not only the advertisers’ messages, but also the space covered with them. Perfecting those skills to the level of taken-forgranted habits allows the passengers to domesticate the ever-changing screenscenography, while habituating the (underground) space in anticipation of reaching desired (overground) place.

media; public space; city; london underground; screens; audiences; advertising

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