Medien|Denken – Angela Piccini – Archival Traces of Urban Screen

The impacts of mega events on cities are seemingly well understood and framed in terms of financial deals and international markets, displacements of marginal communities, land grab and regeneration and technological innovation. Since the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, the mega event has been extensively documented and shared while formal, official media have expanded into multiple interactive live feeds and large-scale sport and culture events on urban screens. Urban screens are attracting the attentions of scholars and practitioners as key materialisations of multi-scalar network relations. However, how might these screens be approached conceptually and methodologically? Given their multiplicity and their diverse livelinesses, how might urban screens be apprehended as they move across planning regulation, technical specification, live experience, entangled infrastructure and online archive? By what means can we think through the materialities of urban screens as participating in the worlding of the world? In this talk, I’ll discuss recent research that attempts to use a range of archaeological methods to enact new forms of media archaeology, with the urban screen as constitutive of the cityscape.