ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concepts of emptiness and mediation in media architecture, an area of research and practice focused on the convergence of media technologies and cultures with building constructions. Focusing on a number of primarily North American examples, we argue that emptiness plays an important role in media and architecture as a communicative, affective, and mechanical device; that is, as a major factor in the organization of economic, political, cultural, and social capital. Urban screens, public projections, media facades – their underlying embedded ideologies and their associated hybrid digital/physical environments increasingly stitched together by ubiquitous computing, sensing, processing, and prediction – are argued to be mechanisms of spatial obfuscation, expropriation, and exploitation. Defined by both absence and distance, we consider how architectural-scale media environments are targeted as points of contention that are informed by deeper colonial and capitalist projects of extraction and domination. Finally, we consider how recent conditions of pandemic and protest have both intensified spatial and social inequities through spacing and media architecture, while also stimulating critical and creative approaches to mobilizing emptiness toward more equitable ends. Alternative perspectives on and practices of spacing and emptiness in media architecture – such as The Projectemos Collective in Brazil, Black Lives Matter projections in the United States, and The Digital Bricks in Melbourne – can shift power and control toward those historically and currently dispossessed and discriminated against, render dominant ideologies of expulsion and coverage tangible, as well as the acceleration of colonization and capitalization.
