For many years now, the urban setting has become the stage for experimenting not only architectonical and design projects, but also installations by artists, performers and designers who want to reach an as much wide public as possible. The "site-specific" installations coexist with a clear need to regain cities, out of different reasons. Urban design culture spread in US metropolises and in many European capitals. It derives from the graffiti phenomenon, a means of communication that seems to be as expressive as at the beginning of this trend, though now technology offers many different expressive potentialities even in this sector. The use of lasers and projectors enables to create extraordinary visions. According to them, daily signs or seducing images magnified in huge metropolitan scale end up interacting with the city skyline: modulated streaks of colours cover huge, anonymous facades I or design the neutral surfaces of endless architectures; lighting drops unexpectedly appear on scraped walls; textures of words and signs catch people's sight. And still, a tram clad in coloured diodes crosses the city leaving an iridescent wake, or a truck parked in the corner of a road turns into a screen off which essential, though penetrating messages are projected. They are all powerful images, vibrating as lighting, with monumental dimensions though never irreversible. On the contrary, they are ephemeral and ever-changing, never definitive. The shocking and at the same time transitional character of such installations is enhanced by the possibility given to the public to use this device to project their own messages and signs, thus becoming the protagonists of the urban setting even for just some minutes. Sentences, logos and games alternate on the plastering, As if it were a board that can be instantaneously wiped.
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