ABSTRACT
Chapter 6, “A City of Screens” takes the reader to Montreal, where the city’s 375th anniversary celebrations in 2017 drove the expansion of the once modestly scaled Montréal en Histoires app into a full-scale urban spectacle, with Cité Mémoire mounting towering night-time projections (designed to work with the app) onto the sides of buildings throughout the city’s Old Port. Looking at Montréal en Histoires offers us a unique chance to see what happens when the personal tour of streetscapes intersects with the creation of a mass-appeal spectacle – and the twinned but essentially different experiences of space that this intersection enables. Montréal en Histoires offers an example of the locative app as a branded content delivery system – where the content looks to manage not only the brand identity of the city/neighbourhood, but also that of various sponsors. Finally, it gives us a glimpse of what happens when the locative screen is offloaded onto city architecture, and how the city, thus observed, proceeds to look back.
