Medialab Prado

How did the public space become "mediatized"? How did walls, and even the sky above them, become media interfaces? How did media become "tall"? These are the kinds of issues this lecture will discuss from a media-archaeological point of view. It shows that the mediatization of the public space goes back much further than the twentieth century. The nineteenth century witnessed the development of the urban "adscape," where posters and billboards not only grew in size, but were enhanced by new technology. Even earlier, spectacular light effects had already been introduced into the urban environment by fireworks displays and son et lumière presentations. Magic lanterns were used for public projections on walls or screens erected on rooftops. Electricity was harnessed by advertisers to create kinetic billboards and "sky-signs". Even the sky itself was integrated into the mediated urban space by giant searchlights.

In the first half of the twentieth century avant-garde visionaries like László Moholy-Nagy, Zdenek Pesanek and Thomas Wilfred imagined - and in a few cases, realized - light spectacles and other technological enhancements to the emerging modern city. They longed for a new unity that Moholy-Nagy called "total work" (Gesamtwerk), obviously referring to Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, but dropping the word "art" - the distinction between "art" and "design" was becoming superfluous, and Moholy-Nagy's concept embraced nothing less than life itself. The avant-gardists drew inspiration from billboards, electrified signs, sky projections, and other media spectacles that had already been realized for commercial and civic purposes. They wanted to raise these on a new level both when it comes to their effect and their cultural and social relevance. Their dreams were rarely realized, and the fact that Albert Speer's architecture of light was effectively used in the service of Nazi propaganda, cast an ambiguous and ominous shadow over their plans.