The mediation of place and locality is one of the key aspects of the advent of urban screens especially in the way that they have been deployed throughout major city centres the UK. Their site specific qualities, for example, the physical location of the screens (location and proximity to key features in public space, architecture, other forms of display etc.) and the structures employed in their management and maintenance (the partnerships that occur to support this, programming, curatorial practices etc.) as well as the actual design and delivery of content of urban screens are all features that give rise to the mediation of place and locality.
This is especially true when considering the evolution of the BBC’s network of screens. To date the BBC’s network of screens amounts to 18 across the UK all located in major city centres. The fact that they are networked makes them unique in that there is no such similar network elsewhere. What follows is a brief case study based on the consideration of the BBC’s screen in Centenary Square, Bradford and considers the site specific nature of the screen – its local context – and in the light of this the way in which place and locality are mediated via these screens as part of the overall experience of the cityscape.
Consideration of the actual physical context of these screens is critical and each one is unique in the sense that the physical location in each case is itself unique in its design, evolution and the variable nature of the local environmental context. Even relatively simple physical features such as the height of the screen can have an impact on its reception. Its position in the built environment and its relations to passers-by will also have an impact and will be determined by features in the landscape such as the position and direction of pedestrian walkways or the location of bars and cafes, as in the case of the Bradford screen.
Screen management and curatorial practices are also often determined by the local context. The BBC’s Big Screen network – aka “Public Space Broadcasting” – involves partnerships between the Broadcaster, local authorities, hardware developers. Programming of content is now managed centrally by Locog and supported by local content managed by individual screen managers across the network. In addition to this local partnerships for content providers and artist groups have enabled more informal and home grown content to be provided for these screens.
Site for video art
Similar to the rest of the network then in Bradford, the screen is owned by the local authority, managed by the BBC and maintained by Phillips. In addition, many local organisations are involved in presenting content. Similar arrangements occur across all of the screens where local organisations, schools, universities and arts organisations can influence, to some extent, the nature of at least some of the content and in many instances there is a local flavour to these offerings. A local arts development agency – Fabric – regularly screens content created by local artists in regular curated ’slots’. In addition, the screen is used for projecting content for live events, including public art.
- BBC’s Screen, Bradford
In addition, with the framing of content and it formal arrangement and composition on these screens clearly marks of the locality in each instance and there are, therefore, many cues to indicate location.
Framing location on screen
There are other ways of applying the concept of locality to Augmented Public Space. For example, as discussed in Allen (2008), the site specific nature of place and locality and the fixed and contextual nature of all media representations – as true of augmented public space as any other place – rests ultimately on the location of the body and the body will always be located in real space-time however much it might be in interaction with representations outside of the physical location. The body in many discourses, especially those generated largely across visual, spatial and tactile modalities, is the ultimate frame for information.
To add to this, “both the building upon which an urban screen is placed, and the space in which a building is located can be considered to be a form of multimodal text“, and the consequence of this is that it “leads to considering how only a blurred distinction seems tyo exist between space and information, as elements of space increasingly are powerful conveyers of information, whilst information – materialised into them – becomes more and more spatially related”.
Another important distinction here is that between the Real and the Virtual.