ABSTRACT
In this essay I consider urban screens as mobile media architecture. Digital screens installed in the city, often in conjunction with location-based and mobile media technologies, provide interfaces that intervene temporarily, yet fundamentally, in the built environment. I take as my theoretical objects two urban screens that, while demonstrating the architectural principles of screen-based dispositifs, simultaneously challenge conventional ideas of architecture as fixed, stable, and permanent. They are a “selfie pillar” as an example of screen-based contemporary urban advertising and narrowcasting, and the public art project The Bridge, designed for a large, traveling urban screen. 2 These very different examples of urban screens both construct temporary and mobile architectures for spatial extension and connectivity. In so doing, they demonstrate a combination of architectural and cartographic logic. This twin logic is inherent in the intersection of spatial design (architecture) and mobile and location-based technologies that offer tools for spatial orientation (cartography). As mobile architecture these urban screens demonstrate how our current visual regime of navigation functions.
