On Adjacent Infrastructural Tactics for Urban Screens (Shanghai version)

Abstract

This paper addresses what media art can do in a context (here, Shanghai) in which urban screens and related architectural facades seem ubiquitously present – nearly inescapable in some areas of the city – yet in which media artists and curators have limited means through which to occupy such screen spaces, as state and commercial interests contingently limit their public access, as well as potentials in language and address.

A number of media art efforts in Shanghai have recently made newly visible or experienced the infrastructures that dominantly form urban screens in the city. Working through tactics of adjacency, these projects re-perform and re-frame the urban screen within adjacent infrastructures. In so doing, they often enable more speculative affects and dispositions to be realized. Media artist Xu Zhifeng’s “Look Through Me” project is a central case in point. As he walks along Nanjing West Road in Shanghai – a central site for large-scale screens – Xu straps a video screen on his back, inviting passersby to “look through” him and out through the camera view on his chest. This project engaged urban inhabitants with an adjacent screen to evoke more exploratory modes of engagement within the more spectacular contexts of the city. Projects discussed also include ongoing efforts by the Screens Collective, an interdisciplinary arts collective dedicated to developing the full range of languages and linkages potentiated in Shanghai urban screens. In so doing, the collective considers how urban screens might be linked, transformed, and reframed across adjacent languages, expressions, infrastructures, and occasions.