engleski

Taming the Heterotopia: Screen-Place and the Strategies of Appropriation’

As part of my PhD project on how people engage with urban screens when they incidentally encounter them in daily rounds through the city, which I study at a number of different locations in London, UK and Croatia, I present findings from my research at the “the Sun Monument” architectural installation in the town quay of Zadar, Croatia. The long-awaited refurbishment of the promenade included at its far end a 22-meter wide moving-image screen, inserted in the pavement. The cherished traditional Mediterranean collective evening stroll culture of seeing other fellow citizens and being seen by them, was complicated by an electronic screen, which invited individual visual indulgences of “relaxing” or “leaving the place” whilst standing on and gazing at the images, whereby, as the locals accentuate, “one is thankfully separated from the surrounding others”. However, as I seek to demonstrate, the creation of the screen-place did not lead to abandonment of the traditional evening stroll, but to inclusion and appropriation of the screen in the promenade as its constituent part, which was an outcome of a complex process of ‘domestication’ of the piece of media technology in the locals’ habitual lifeworlds.

media facades; heterotopia; screen; uses; domestications; city; public space

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