SPOTS, Berlin, Germany, 2005

摘要

Standing in front of the Realities United SPOTS project on Potzdammer Platz in Berlin recalls the Archigram Instant City project as well as later film versions of giant, urban moving-image screens such as those which have now become stock cliches in science-fiction films like Blade Runner and, more recently, Minority Report. High-resolution screens such as in Piccadilly Circus in London and Times Square in New York are privately owned and controlled despite their dominating corporate presence in the world's most significant public spaces. More interesting are the buildings such as the Lehman Brothers' headquarters on New York's Seventh Avenue, which sports a multistorey wraparound screen across a number of the lower storeys on its facade. Sadly, though, almost all of these big public screens carry bad advertising that is mostly neither socially engaging nor at the very least aesthetically innovative. A more arts-based, democratic and populist driven content for media facades in more everyday urban settings seems more likely, however, with the launch of second-generation hypermedia skins such as the SmartSlab system by Tom Barker (www.smartslab.co.uk).