seeing the city digitally, or, animated urbanism

I gave a talk at the Berkeley Center for New Media last November, and the recording and transcript are now available here.

I called the lecture ‘Seeing cities digitally: processing urban space and time – or – animated urbanism’. The first bit of the title was a nod to an open-access book I edited, published last year by Amsterdam University Press. It’s also called Seeing the City Digitally and has what I think is an amazing collection of essays by its contributors. You can find it here.

The second part of the title – animated urbanism – is something I’m working on at the moment, thinking about what it means to live in cities that are increasingly visualised through what Thomas Elsaesser described as the ‘default vision’ of a digital visual culture: urban life as free-floating, anchorless mobility often in non-Cartesian spaces, in a nutshell. The lecture builds on a cluster of advertisements, all but one for apps, that show floating bodies doing just that – the photo above is from a Spotify ad campaign.

Thanks to BCNM for hosting me, the great audience, and to Emma Fraser for chairing. If anyone has other examples of ads that show people flying through urban space, please let me know!