2008 Taipei Biennial - A case study
Urban screens have become a kind of meta-architecture. Through their ubiquity and fluidity, these screens, especially the large ones, constantly redefine the spatial relationships of the urban environment. They are new defining architectures of architecture. The 2008 Taipei Biennial utilized some of these screens as part of its venue for showing video-based works. On the one hand, this presents both an opportunity for more unpredictable encounters between art and urban space users, and offers challenges for the recontextualization of these works. On the other, it also poses the question of whether art is able to destabilize a public space generated and maintained by these meta-architectures, to add ambiguities to the certainty of information, of the social dream of the capitalist society. Aside from these curatorial and artistic aspects, my presentation will also touch on practical and technical aspects such as the technology of display, timing and encountering.
'Intimate Publics. Memory, Performance, and Spectacle in Urban Environments'
Cities are sites of spectacle. We walk around, looking into faces, checking out shop windows, posters, screens and facades, scanning for the new, the unexpected, the beautiful, and the wicked. The 'screen' of the city is cluttered with surfaces and items, vying for attention. A barely distinguishable mix of mediated messages we either look for - whether as street signs, clues we want to find again, or maybe as oversized TV screens during a popular sports event - while other items we barely notice, or learn to ignore. What does it mean to 'look' in public space? Are we being cheated, or caressed, by the empty billboards whose surface time no advertiser has rented? Do the large video screens testify to the triumph of a post-urban anonymity, or are they mere signs of a failed attempt at competing with the intimate media that vibrate in back pockets, and that cocoon the gaze and the listening mind? What does Josef Robakowski's 1978 video, From My Window, tell us about the multiple layers of public and private observations, about the interlacing of personal curiosity, voyeurism, and state surveillance? Who are the subjects of viewing in public space? And what does it mean to perform the city space, furrowed with surveillance technology, like those people in Noise (1998) who left their anonymous video messages to the recording box that Zoran Todorovic placed in the streets of Belgrade? The view from the window of Berlin's Staatsbibliothek cafeteria in 1998, out onto the wasteland of Potsdamer Platz, before the fall of the Wall, an age before the construction of the Sony Center: a personal memory, shared by many, a lost image reflected in Wim Wenders' movie, Wings of Desire (1987), that has Curt Bois stumbling across what used to be Potsdamer Platz, unable to find a real equivalent for his half-century old memories of the city's face. Each city, wherever people live, is rife with such imaginations, a cultural stage, and a container of mediated memories.
