Goldsmiths - University of London

Jan 2009 - July 2011

How do media and media usage shape their locations and how are they shaped by those locations? The earliest moving image screens for film projection and movie theatres brought the world into the neighbourhood, regularly gathering the inhabitants together as audience and as community. The cathode ray tube brought the world into the living room, reconfiguring the line between public and private as well as family relations. However, digitalisation has wiped out the technological distinctions between film and television and other technological and regulatory changes have taken both media beyond their original locations. Finally, the computer screen acts as a portal out of the neighbourhood, transporting people elsewhere and turning them from audiences and viewers into users.

Looking at developments like these, Rem Koolhaas claims that, "The Generic City is what is left after large sections of urban life crossed over to cyberspace." No doubt Koolhaas is onto something, but does this really mean that new media usage is helping to make all cities the same? Does it mean the moving image screen no longer plays any role in public life? Has the neighbourhood as a community disappeared? To examine these questions, our Screen Studies ethnographic project maps the changing location and use patterns of moving image screens in selected neighbourhoods of London, Shanghai, and Cairo.

We hypothesise that the very different cultural and political contexts into which new screen technologies have been appropriated has conditioned their role in different locations. For example, we know that in Shanghai the popularity of the internet and pirate DVDs is spurred by their ability to form informal "shadow" neighbourhoods within the authoritarian city; in Cairo stricter Islam with its prohibitions on representation has led to the withdrawal of moving image screens from public spaces into the domestic (changing gender relations in the process); and that in London the proliferation of public screens and screen events is directed less at building neighbourhoods than at serving tourist economies and art publics. But by adopting the ethnographic method, we expect to discover other hitherto unknown patterns.