Urban Screens & Mirjam Struppek

In case you had not noticed, media projects aren’t just for theaters and tellies any more. One of our central Roadtrip themes in Berlin is the emerging phenomenon of urban screens – the whole range of new public media practices ranging from massive commercial advertisements to more modest artists’ projects mounted in public spaces. One of the central international scholar-commentators on this topic is Mirjam Struppek, who gave Roadtrippers an illustrated talk and discussion about her work.

During her studies in urban planning, Mirjam developed an interest in how urban screens are articulating and transforming public space. She fired up a web site, Interactionfield, where she began to collect links to projects, and she wrote a major paper on the topic as part of her graduate studies.

When Mirjam started, her first posts on urban screens were like the first explosions of pop corn on the bottom of the pan: sharp reports, loosely spaced. In the last two or three years, however, projects like these have exploded, pushing the lid off the pot: “I can’t keep with up with it all any more!,” she says.

For anyone interested in this phenomenon, Mirjam has written an excellent, brief overview paper, which you can find here in PDF. She has also published an “image loop” with pictures from urban screen projects.

Many academics and media critics are alerted to this topic, and a regular yearly conference now tracks the phenomenon of turning the city into a fabric of images. In England, for example, the BBC is now working with local communities to borrow commercial sign spaces for the public projection of artists’ and other cultural works.

One of the most interesting areas in urban screen studies is the public policy debate that surrounds such projects: how does a community come to agreement about what images are appropriate in what contexts at what times and for what purposes?

Mirjam is particularly enthusiastic about the possibilities of projecting images into non-traditional spaces. Projection is temporary, and generally bypasses the massive public policy issues that accompany permanent displays.