School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemUrban Digital Infrastructure, Smart Cityism, and Communication: Research Challenges for Urban E-Planning(IGI Global, 2021-07-01)This article takes stock of the smart city concept by locating it in relation to both a longer history of urban computing, as well as more recent projects exploring the vexed issues of participatory urbanism, data ethics and urban surveillance. The author argues for the need to decouple thinking regarding the potential of urban digital infrastructure from the narrow and often technocentric discourse of 'smart cityism'. Such a decoupling will require continued experimentation with both practical models and conceptual frameworks, but will offer the best opportunity for the ongoing digitization of cities to deliver on claims of 'empowering' urban inhabitants.
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ItemAmbient Images(The Nordic Society for Aesthetics, 2021)
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ItemVirilio, the ‘Infra’ Urban and the Logic of Big Data(Public Knowledge Project, Open Journal Systems, 2019-12-20)Drawing on the connection between Paul Virilio and Georges Perec, this essay argues that there is an historical transition in Virilio’s thought, in which his desire to recuperate the urban everyday using a combination of observational methods including photography and writing is overtaken by the growing role of the ‘vision machine’ in submitting urban space to new forms of surveillance and control. These conditions, which have further intensified as cities and urban social life have been remade by the growth of digital infrastructure, pose new questions concerning the role of everyday life as a possible site of ‘resistance’, and highlight the urgent need for a critical stance to the growing operational role of data in social life.
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ItemOne map to rule them all? Google Maps as digital technical object(SAGE Publications, 2019)Since its launch in 2005, Google Maps has been at the forefront of redefining how mapping and positionality function in the context of a globalizing digital economy. It has become a key socio-technical ‘artefact’ helping to reconfigure the nexus between technology and spatial experience in the 21st century. In this essay, I will trace Google’s evolving strategy in the mapping space. I will argue that the evolution of Google Maps exemplifies way in which a contemporary digital platform ‘succeeds’ by becoming embedded as a foundational resource for a variety of other uses and services. At one level, this can be understood in terms of what Gillespie has conceptualized as the ‘politics of platforms’, contributing to the emergence of what has recently been dubbed ‘platform capitalism’. At a deeper level, I will argue that Google Maps exemplifies the complex dynamics of what Simondon calls ‘technical objects’ that always exist in relation to both an evolving technical system, and the other systems constituting a more or less integrated social milieu.
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ItemImpact aesthetics: Back to the future in digital cinema? Millennial fantasies(SAGE Publications, 2000-12-01)This article engages recent debates about the future of cinema in the digital age. Firstly, it seeks to broaden the rather narrow terms in which the transition to digital cinema is often understood in film theory. Secondly, it tries to assess claims about the 'demise of narrative' frequently associated with the digital threshold. On one level, it is argued that a dialectical understanding of the relation between terms such as 'narrative' and 'spectacle' is needed to advance current debates. On another level, it is suggested that digital technology should not be wholly defined by the current dominance of 'blockbuster' films. In place of technological determinism, an understanding based on the politics of spectacle and distracted spectatorship is advanced.
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ItemMedia Theory 2017(Open Journal Systems, 2017-10-01)This article discusses the significance of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology for contemporary media theory
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ItemThe politics and praxis of media-city research: a duo interview with Myria Georgiou and Scott McQuire(http://obs.obercom.pt/index.php/obs/index, 2015)
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ItemImmersion, reflexivity and distraction: spatial strategies for digital cities( 2007)This essay focuses on the ways that cinema and the city have mutually constituted new immersive experiences of urban perception.
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ItemDream cities: the uncanny powers of electric light( 2004)In his famous 1919 essay, Freud (1955: 219-252) defines the uncanny to include experiences in which inanimate objects seem to come to life. In early modernity, this sense of the uncanny accompanied the spread of electric light, itself a manifestation of the near-miraculous powers of electricity. From the moment of its initial recognition as an independent phenomenon, electricity has been a source of profound wonder. Romantics rapidly identified it with a universal life force, dramatised in the archetypal modern creation scene of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel and distilled by Goethe into ‘the soul of the world’. A century later, the prospect of widespread electrification literally dazzled the world, inspiring entrepreneurs, artists and revolutionaries alike with visions of an irresistible electrical future. At the same time, electricity has always led a double life. Beneath the Promethean narrative of limitless possibilities lies a more utilitarian tale of practical development. Counterpointing the arcane myth of electricity’s magical properties — force without muscle or steam, light without flame — is the profane physical reality of its often cumbersome technical infrastructure. Supporting the spark of the incandescent lamp which shines brighter than any jewel are unsightly poles and criss-crossing wires, not to mention ferocious patent wars and internecine struggles to form some of industrial capitalism’s most powerful corporations.
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ItemThe politics of public space in the media city( 2006-02)What happens when the TV screen leaves home and moves back into the city? The public domain of the 21st century is no longer defined simply by material structures such as streets and plazas. But nor is it defined solely by the virtual space of electronic media. Rather the public domain now emerges in the complex interaction of material and immaterial spaces. These hybrid spaces may be called ‘media cities’. In this essay, I argue that different instances of the public space in modernity have emerged in the shifting nexus between urban structures and specific media forms. Drawing on the pioneering work of sociologist Richard Sennnett, I offer a critical analysis of the forms of access and modes of interaction, which might support a democratic public culture in cities connected by digital networks and illuminated by large urban screens.