The book by Australian media theorist Scott McQuire "Media City" was published not so long ago - in 2008, but it will be useful to remind in what context it appeared. The reality show "Big Brother", which was first shown in 1999, along with other reality TV series, has firmly established itself in the daily television coverage of millions of viewers around the world. The number of active users of the social network Facebook in just 4 years of its existence soared to 100 million worldwide and continued to grow. Against the background of forecasts of rapid global urbanization, IBM Corporation announced the development of the Smarter City concept, which should be based on smart grids and other advanced technologies. Mobile phones and other gadgets have given people freedom of communication and instant access to information.
In general, new media and types of content have entered the life of the city, simplifying and enriching it. Or maybe, on the contrary, by driving it into a new framework? McQuire is looking for an answer to this question, relying on his own observations and resorting to the works of such prominent theorists as Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Paul Virillo, Henri Lefebvre, Siegfried Krakauer, Scott Lash, Richard Sennett. “The fusion of media and urban space creates a complex spectrum of possibilities, and their results have not yet become a reality,” the author argues, recalling that media is just a tool that, like a knife in the hands of a housewife or a murderer, can serve a variety of purposes. “The image of the digital stream, bringing new freedom, is everywhere opposed to the use of digital technology to improve forms of control over space,” - words are truly visionary, if we recall the revelations of Edward Snowden, “The Great Firewall of China” and surveillance cameras that turned the city into a space of total surveillance.
But the transformative influence of media on the city itself and its perception by residents began long before the digital age - since the advent of photography in the mid-19th century. Therefore, McQuire guides the reader along this "chronological arrow", telling how gradually serial photography, electric street lighting, cinematic editing and cybernetics have transformed the image of the city as a stable space with rigid social ties into a "fluid" environment of an ambivalent "space of relations" - media cities. Of particular interest are reflections on the relationship between the private and public spheres, which have changed beyond recognition over the past century and a half - especially with the arrival of television in every home.
Strelka Press translated Media City for the Russian reader only six years after the book was published in the original, and this slowness seems like an annoying omission, given how much attention it devotes to Russian / Soviet architectural and media experience - in a global context. Here is the most interesting comparison of the creative method of Dziga Vertov, used in "The Man with the Movie Camera", with the cinematic language of Walter Ruttmann in the film "Berlin - Symphony of the Big City"; and the parallels drawn between the unrealized concept of Sergei Eisenstein's The Glass House and American modernist skyscrapers; and criticism of "transparent architecture" in the novel "We" by Evgeny Zamyatin; and the socio-architectural experiments of Moses Ginzburg mentioned in connection with this dystopia. However, such books, and even not in the original, are not fun reading (with all due respect to the work of a translator). Indeed, texts that claim to explain reality not for a narrow circle of researchers should be written (as far as possible) in human language. And reading "Media City" - in places, if not torment, then at least a lot of work.
Judge for yourself:
“Cinema, in fact, borrowed active framing from photography and transformed it into dynamic, narrative forms that favored multiple vantage points. As I noted in Chapter 3, the cinematic experience became the model of the shock aesthetics that prevailed in the culture of the modern city. The Renaissance model of geometric perspective developed in conjunction with the humanistic order in architecture, in which proportions were calculated in accordance with the scale of the human body. Hollis Frampton talks about the structural relationship between painting and architecture: “Painting 'presupposes' architecture: walls, floors, ceilings. The illusory picture itself can be viewed as a window or a door. " In contrast, the dynamic mode of perception in the cinema - “perception due to shock” [chockförmige Wahrnehmung] - “presupposes” not a stable location of a stationary building, but a variable vector of a moving car. The view from the cinematic window can be called "posthumanistic", since it no longer corresponds to the human eye, but is produced with the help of technical equipment, not only enhances the perceptual capabilities of the classical subject, but also contributes to the replacement of the human body by technology as a measure of existence. The continuous expansion of space, which was assumed in the Renaissance world, which determined the stable position of the humanist subject, is increasingly being replaced by a phenomenon that Virillo dubbed "the aesthetics of disappearance." The technical "vision" of cinema is an essential element of experience in the modern era, where the continuous space of Cartesian perspective gives way to a space of relations, consisting of fragments that will never come together into a stable whole. A modern industrial city, fueled by electricity and traversed by dynamic traffic and media streams, is the material expression of this complex spatiality. Villa Le Corbusier, with an architectural "promenade" designed to coordinate a series of "cinematic-type" views, is a symptomatic response to this state of affairs. Through mass production, Le Corbusier aims to transform the modern home into a mobile viewfinder frame that can be placed anywhere. It is into this area of uncertainty - the repressed or "uprooted" home space - that electronic media invades."
