eca graduate research school

Over the past decade, we have witnessed the massive changes on our society, economies, culture, art and architecture. The growth of digital technologies plays a crucial role among them and has been particularly influential in changing our everyday life. The current phenomenon of urban space creates a series of virtual exchanges where signs and information are ubiquitous in our surroundings. The city has become the spectacle of information exchange. Under this background, urban screen is a pioneering area, which has gathered great attention in the past ten years. By transforming architecture into the form of digital media, urban screen reveals the function of symbolic exchange in postmodernism and recalls the key themes of urbanism: communication, networks and information. Urban screen can not only be seen as a tendency to digital city, but also a reflection to information society. A major assumption of urban screen as an appearance of urban landscape and a medium to the public sphere – a double-coded language in both technological and semiotic aspects – has become a representation of urban space.  The questions are: when a screen is erected in the public space, how does urban screen affect urban environment and function its symbolic meaning over the space? What is the relation between symbol, images, perceptions and space? What are the properties of urban screen and how do these properties define or redefine the properties of urban space? This research attempts to criticize and analyze the context of urban screen from a more cultural and theoretical perspective to emphasize its impacts and influence in different layers of urban environment.

Before addressing the impacts of urban screen and its future, this paper begins with an enlightened speech by Rem Koolhaas at the Pritzker Prize ceremony in 2000. Koolhaas said, “ For the first time in decades, and maybe in millennia, we architects have a very strong and fundamental competition. The communities we cannot imagine in the real world will flourish in virtual space. The territories and demarcations that we maintain on the ground are merged and morphed beyond recognition in a much more immediate, glamorous and flexible domain – that of the electronic. […] Unless we break our dependency on the real and recognized architecture as a way of thinking about all issues…liberate ourselves from eternity to speculate about compelling and immediate new issues […] architecture will maybe not make the year two thousands fifty.”[1] After ten years of IT development, Koolhaas’s sensationalized prediction not only becomes reality, but also in more comprehensive, more vigorous and more rapid way changes the immediate environment. Today, urban space presents a complex structure where the symbiosis between real world and virtual world, humanity and technology, sensitivity and rationality, the past and the future dissolves with each other and merges into a new relation of time and space. The boundaries of the territories, cultures and histories are dispersed due to the dynamics of globalization, digital technology, the Internet and capitalism. The appearance of urban landscape is full of signs, images and information. The city has become even more complicated than before. The 21^st century could be seen as the end of the industrial age and the beginning of the information age.

From one aspect, the society is more about what Debord describes in Society of Spectacle[2], the whole social life is dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy (1967:11). The ubiquitous of branding and advertising occupied the urban space represents the spectacle of capitalism’s consumer logic (Nevarez 2010:165). The real world is defined by the images where the images become real beings in that the society is only understood by what it is “appearing” rather than “having”. The spectacle presents itself as an appearance of the accumulated productions (i.e. news, propaganda, advertising) in which the image of the product will never correspond with the reality of product whereas the image only presents itself by its appearance. In the other words, the spectacle is a place where the image is placed and becomes another reality – an image reality. Somehow we can imagine the whole society is like “The Truman Show”. There is an artifical stage built upon the real world, therefore everything is concealed from the reality. However, the point is not about true or fake, it shows an ambiguous condition of social life. The reality is the presence; the presence is the reality. Debord tried to give the spectacle an isolation position against the traditional dualism between true or false, real world or virtual world. Furthermore, Debord also reveals the nature of the image in the postmodern society. The image is constituted by symbol and signs, at the same time symbol and signs becomes the purpose for the images.

From another aspect, the society at present serves as an evidence of Baudrillard’s assumption in “symbolic exchange”.[3] In postmodern society, the behavior of consumption is not only based on the value of production but also the added values including symbol, identity and images. The price is not equivalent to the quality of the product; furthermore it demonstrates an additional value behind brand, style, design, concept and philosophy. When a virtual object is placed into the market as a real object through trading and exchanging, the consumer purchases an image, an ideology, a story or an aura instead of a real thing. Images, signs and information become real beings in the consumer society. The content of product is redefined by symbol and images; the form of exchange is operated beyond the geographic boundary, cultural differences and the power of hierarchy. It represents the characteristics of postmodernity: individual, uniqueness, diversification and nomad on the one hand, and the power of public on the other.

Today urban screen can be regarded as a phenomenon of symbolic exchange transformed by visual representations into urban landscape. Since the early 2000s, a number of pioneering groups including realities: united, UNStudio, urbanscreen, ag4, LAb [au] and Diller Scofidio + Renfro have explored the notion of urban context with a variety of experiments in media facades, which transform architecture into the form of media. On the one hand, urban screen is an architecture of communication over the space which identities the meaning of urban space and itself; on the other hand, urban screen is a media approach to data exchange which expresses the nature of postmodern society – a culture of symbolic consumption.