Screens on Streets: Media for the Open City

Screens on Streets

Nanna Verhoeff

Inaugural Lecture1

Spoken at the assumption of the chair of Screen Cultures & Society at Utrecht University, Thursday the 23th of September, 2022.

1 This lecture has been translated from Dutch to English by Bresser-Chapple with financial support of the Creative Humanities Academy at Utrecht University.

Rector Magnificus, dear guests, Two-and-a-half years ago, the city went into lockdown. Images of empty streets were shared online across the world. Buildings, and even the sky, came to function as screens for messages and images about this special situation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we experienced how our screens have become fully integrated into all aspects of our lives: our school and work lives, our private and public lives. The use of our personal screens made it possible to maintain contact and to shape new social spaces. The contours of what it means to be together – connected through our screens, or in person while staying socially distanced – were drawn anew.

Figure 1: Projection on the Boekentoren in Ghent (2020), via a mobile screen. Copyright UGent, photo Anneke D’Hollander. beeld.ugent.be/nl/fotoalbum/corona-projectie-boekentoren.

In different stages of locking down and opening up, with ever-changing rules pertaining to distance and proximity, the city’s streets, squares, and parks were marked with myriad dots, circles, arrows, and lines. In an essay I wrote together with my colleague, theater and performance studies scholar Sigrid Merx, we called these marks “figurations of intermediacy”: temporary inscriptions made with ephemeral materials, such as chalk, tape, or light projections, which shape presence, mobility, and contact as a scenography for the city (Verhoeff and Merx 2020).

Over the past two years, the public space has been one of turbulence. Protests mobilized people and brought them together. These movements

flared up simultaneously in multiple places across the world – from Black Lives Matter and anti-racism demonstrations to climate marches, pride parades, as well as protests against the various Corona restrictions. Images of these protests reached us via the screens of our televisions, phones, laptops, and tablets. As such, these screens themselves also played a role in the sometimes fierce and hard-hitting discussions about the issues concerned, as well as about the part played by the media itself in such matters.

At the same time, the cultural and creative sector experienced its own crisis. Because the regular meeting spaces were forced to close

Figure 2: Photo: Sanne Leufkens (2020) for Platform Scenography. Figure 3: Jólan van der Wiel and Nick Verstand, Smart Distancing System (2020). Photo: Joery Verweij. dutchdesignawards.nl/en/gallery/smart-distancing-system.

their doors, exhibitions went online, performances were livestreamed, debates were live cast, and events Instagrammed. These alternatives made use of extant channels, platforms, and infrastructures. Also, the creative sector started to debate its own position and role within society, and it continues to do so today. Central to this discussion is the selfevident observation that the city is nothing without culture.

The academic response cannot be considered separate from this development, with its abundance of publications about the role of media and culture, as well as that of cultural inquiry itself, in these turbulent times. New phenomena are identified, as well as the methods and concepts to make sense of them. This reflection is inspired by a rethinking and redesigning of the forms and ways of education and academic debate. This includes experimentation with online formats and reflections on the possibilities and limitations of media in academic communication.2

In short, more than ever before, public space has become increasingly visible and tangible, and the subject of discussion and reflection. This intrinsically paradoxical space is both limited and open, regulated and ever-changing, and familiar as well as contested. It is a topic of, as well as a space for debate. And screens and media play a significant role in how its potential openness and continued transformation take shape.

It is not only because of its temporal coincidence with my appointment that I start my inauguration with a sketch of this situation, but also precisely because these developments illustrate part of my argument and vision for the Chair of Screen Cultures & Society. These both concern and address:

1. the plurality and increasing deployment of screens;

2. the way in which the use of screens and related media technologies is situated;

2 Examples are Pandemic Media (Keidl et al., eds. 2020); COVID-19 from the Margins (Milan et al., eds. 2021); The Digital Pandemic (Cachopo 2022).

3. the idea that precisely therefore, we must speak of “screen cultures” in the plural; and 4. how, from this multiple situatedness, screen use touches on broader societal issues – how it reflects them and comments on them, and how it helps to shape processes of social and cultural change.

I want to elaborate that situatedness through the meaning of “the street” and an agenda for the “open city”.

Projection & Intervention

Let me start at the beginning: with the idea of “screens in the plural”.

What we see, here (Fig. 4), is a still from a series of light projections on the statue of US General Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) in Richmond, Virginia. The artwork was created in 2020 as part of the initiative Reclaiming the Monument, which started after the murder of George Floyd in May of the same year. The initiative develops projections as a form of public, activist light art and solicits both local and international support for this art form.3

It is an example of how light projections meaningfully intervene in the materials, structures, and patterns of the city. Functioning as a screen for these projections, the historical monument itself disappears behind them. Its meaning being overwritten by another message in light and color, the monument only remains visible as a shadow. Situated in the city center, the work makes a statement about the city and our society today: about the historical sediments that leave traces in the present, about the possibility for new inscriptions, even if these traces will remain visible as scars. Such re-inscriptions urge us to maintain our historical consciousness, and to adjust it when necessary. As a “projection”, this

3 The series of projections was designed by Dustin Klein and Alex Cirqui. For more about Reclaiming the Monument, see https://www.reclaimingthemonument.com.

Figure 4: Projection from a series of Reclaiming the Monument (2020).

Photo: reclaimingthemonument.com/gallery

work speaks also about the screen medium itself, its potential as an urban intervention. It “says what it does” and “does what it says.”4

This contemporary form of projection art questions the way in which “the screen”, in its plurality and mutability, is both visible and invisible, both occupies and opens up space, creates new meanings and thereby literally and figuratively sets this space into motion.5 As a

4 This phrase references to the speech-act theory of philosopher of language, J.L. Austin (1960), who discussed the performativity of language and the inherent selfreflexivity of performative utterances and acts.

5 Theory about the diversity and specificity of screens is rich. Examples of work on the spatial aspects of screens are McCarthy (2001); Friedberg (2006); Cassetti (2015); Bruno (2016); Chateau and Mourre, eds. (2016); Sæther and Bull, red. (2020).

consequence, the work is reflexive about its own materiality (what and where it is), its mediality (what and with whom it communicates), and its performativity (what it does and what it effectuates). It thematizes how the screen and its projection are situated as both performance and event, in the multiple senses of that word. Hence, rather than talking about a “screen”, the plural “screens”, as well as the verb “to screen” are perhaps more suitable here. Screening takes place in a meaningful place, at a meaningful cultural moment, and within a meaningful series of projections. In this way the artwork thus reflects upon its own intervention in the existing “situation”, as well as on the possibility for intervention – the creation of new identities and relationships. This not only situates the work; it also situates us. It positions the viewer within the location, in relation to the work and its message. It gives us, as witnesses at a somewhat greater distance, a task.

In his inaugural address from 2002, my colleague the media historian Frank Kessler introduced a model that makes it possible to productively differentiate and compare media, not based on fixed characteristics, but based on their situated use. Central to Kessler’s model is the concept of dispositif. Borrowed from the French, the term means set-up or arrangement, and is often also translated as (part of the) “apparatus”. This concept was developed by the cultural philosopher Michel Foucault in relation to structures of knowledge and power and adapted specifically for film and the cinema by film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry.6 Based on the concept of the dispositif, Kessler develops a model for the analysis of historical difference. According to Kessler, such an analysis lays the foundations for important interventions into the rethinking of “progress” within the history of media.7

6 For example, see Foucault’s interview “Confessions of the Flesh” (1980: 194-228) and Baudry (1986). About the notion of dispositif specifically in relation to architecture and the city, see Gorny (2018) en Pløger (2008).

7 See Kessler (2002) or his more recent text (2018). In my earlier work on screens, mobility, and navigation (2012), I have adapted Kessler’s model for public space as composite dispositif. With my co-author Clancy Wilmott (2016), I have used it elsewhere for a perspective on the curation of urban dispositifs of networked and location-based interactive technologies.

This model makes it possible to analyze the relationality that is so characteristic of any media situation – that between material and technological conditions, the “textual” form or content of communication. Think, for example, of images, text, sound, or even various haptic signals, and the viewing, experiencing, thinking viewer or participant, who is positioned and addressed. This triadic situation is embedded within a broader and layered dispositif – here: the city – but it can also be extended further: within various site-specific or diasporic cultures, and at specific historical moments.

The strength of this model is that it does not present an essentialist approach to media, focusing instead on the specific interplay of several elements, such as spatial aspects, historical context, message, and audience. Therefore, it offers tools to think comparatively, in terms of similarity, specificity, and difference. In addition, the model also allows for comparisons over time and between different places. In doing so, it provides an analytical method based on the historicalcomparative approach to “new” media – or rather, media in transition – and technological innovation (both historical and contemporary), as introduced and developed at Utrecht University by William Uricchio, my supervisor and mentor, whose work has had a profound influence on my own.8

In the remainder of my lecture, I would like to build upon this model of the dispositif. I want to investigate, from a situational perspective on screens – specifically, those situated in the city – how they help shape the relationships between media and technology, and between the experiencing subjects and the layered social context in which this shaping takes place. I look at the role screens in the city play in researching,

8 William Uricchio’s inaugural address from 1997, Media, Simultaneity, Convergence: Culture and Technology in an Age of Intermediality, marks his perspective on the chair of historical media comparison in Utrecht. From 2000, he was also professor of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he founded together with Henry Jenkins the program of Comparative Media Studies, and more recently the Open Documentary Lab.

reflecting upon, and potentially changing the city. To this end, I will enrich the theoretical model of the dispositif with several concepts that specifically focus on its emergent (that which unfolds, either planned or unplanned) and performative (that is, effect-producing) aspects. Or, to draw them together: on the (literally) “creative” aspects of screens and media, both within, and for the benefit of, urban public space.

Architecture & Installation

To capture the specificity of the city as a layered dispositif, and the role that screens and media play within it, the first concept I would like to introduce here is that of “media architecture”. I propose this concept both as an object and a concept, and thus, as will become clear, also as a perspective. As an object, the term media architecture refers to those architectural elements in the city of which media technologies form a structural, material component. Here you may think of screens on buildings, buildings with media elements such as light or sound, objects with data sensors, columns with touch screens, and also more ephemeral interactive media installations on the street, mobile media, or forms of Augmented Reality. A clear definition is given on the website of the international Media Architecture Biennale, to be held in 2023:

Media Architecture is a broad term that encompasses the integration of sensors and screens, sonic, visual, and tactile interfaces, materials, and displays, and data capture and display in the built environment. Media Architecture includes, but is not limited to, urban screens, media facades, public projection, augmented reality, interactive multimedia installations, digital signage and wayfinding, and the physical, social, political, and technical systems and infrastructure that support them. Media Architecture, in its development, integration, management, and use, can support corporate advertisements, data extraction, and civic spectacle. Media Architecture can also serve as a means to foster civic engagement and empowerment, develop

appreciation and capacity in art and design sectors, and shape collective identity by directly addressing issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion in both content and form.9

This definition emphasizes specifically the usage of media-architectural elements that serve different purposes. These can be commercial (think of the many advertisements coming to us through the screens around us), or regulatory or surveilling (illustrated by the various gates we have to pass through, tracing our travel movements). They can also offer visual spectacle, or function as platforms for artistic expression, contributing to a sense of collective identity, citizen participation, and empowerment.

Precisely in this latter function – its visual and artistic use – an agenda for media architecture comes to the fore. Social issues, such as equality, diversity, and inclusion, occupy a central position on that agenda. Here, I would like to add the critique of anthropocentrism, ecological injustice, and climate issues. Or in other words: also fostering the inclusion of the so-called more-than-human inhabitants of the city – animals and plants, as well as other organisms and entities.10

The most recent edition of the Media Architecture Biennale in 2021 placed this agenda – or rather, “the fact of” this agenda – at center stage. It was held in Amsterdam, Utrecht, and online, and was organized in a collaboration between the research group [urban interfaces] of the Faculty of Humanities, represented by Michiel de Lange and me, colleagues from the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, Martijn de Waal and Frank Suurenbroek, and the international consortium of the Biennale. Centered around the theme “Futures Implied”, this edition revolved

9 See https://mab23.org/faqs.

10 For more about this perspective of more-than-human media architecture, see e.g., Foth and Caldwell (2018). About the public potential of urban screens and media architecture, see Colangelo (2020); Pop et al., eds. (2017); Wiethof and Hussmann, eds. (2017); McQuire et al., eds (2009). About socially and ecologically engaged urban media art that includes mobile screen media, see Hjorth et al., eds. (2020).

Figure 5:

about the current location of caterpillars, replacing information about train departures at Utrecht Central Station. Art project Arrivals/Departures (>2016) by Marcis Coates, based on a calendar of nature events for every day of the year. marcuscoates.co.uk/projects/104-arrivals-departures-nature-calendar

around the way in which design intrinsically harbors a type of futurity, and the question of how it can contribute to shaping a “better” future for the city. Or, as I would like to summarize it, here, how media architecture can contribute to social, cultural, and ecological values for an “open city”.11

Shortly, I will explain the notion of the “open city” in more detail. First, however, I would like to elaborate on the layer of meaning between the object (that is, the screen, or more broadly, media in the city) and the agenda (that is, media for the city). Or to put it more sharply, what is the inherent social, critical, and also political potential of media architecture.

11 See https://mab20.mediaarchitecture.org. As curators of the Biennale, we have published a statement in a special issue of Volume concerning the theme, Futures Implied. See De Lange et al. (2021). About the entaglements of present and future in a perspective on “the contemporary” in arts and design, see Lund (2022).

Announcement

Generally speaking, architecture refers to the material, built environment. As is true for other design disciplines (such as design, dramaturgy, or curation), the term encompasses both the disciplinary practice of designing, and its “products” – i.e., the designs themselves.

As a concept, architecture is often used to specify the construction of a broader diversity of objects, including material objects, such as buildings, dynamic systems, or discursive arguments. Here you might think of the architecture of a library, a digital game, or a public campaign.

These structural, spatial, and material characteristics also harbor possibilities for being present, moving, acting, and thinking. They do so as the outcomes of an architectural design, but also as the starting point for a conceptualization of what is conceived as “the architectural”. As a concept, architecture thus also acquires a “temporal” meaning as developing, embodied, and affective performative aspects and effects.

Various thinkers have considered the relations between these different characteristics of architecture. For example, influenced by the works

Figure 6: Geert Mul, Databased Dialogues in Algorithmic Landscapes (2018) during the Amsterdam Light Festival. Video: https://vimeo.com/290698280. Photo Bas Uterwijk

of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, feminist philosopher and theorist Elizabeth Grosz (2001) has explored the porous boundaries between architecture and philosophy in order to reconsider the idea of spatiality via perspectives on temporality and embodiment. She argues in favor of integrating the principle of time into architectural design – particularly, in terms of emergence (or “coming into being”) and transformation (or “change”). Architects and theorists Lars Spuybroek (2009) and Bernard Tschumi (2010) have also contributed to the understandings of material, built environment and architecture as event. 12

Figure 7: The pavilion Little Babylon by Dutch designers Rezone Art & Architecture has travelled to various locations and festivals since 2015. Photo: Tessa Peters.

12 The philosopher Manuel DeLanda has established a new-materialist line in architectural discourse with his notion of virtuality as an integral part of materiality, whereby the material is animated and moved by immanent patterns of “being” and “becoming”. His essay “The New Materiality” (2015) is specifically concerned with the topics of architecture and new materialism. For an interview in which he explicates his ideas, see Dolphijn & van der Tuin (2012). About new materialism and architecture, see also Voyatzaki, ed. (2020). About the meeting of the creative

These thinkers have primarily been concerned with a philosophical reading of the performative specificity of architecture as both a design practice and its objects. Instead, my proposition is to take this as a conceptual underpinning of the notion of media architecture, laying the foundations for the development of a “situated” perspective on screen media in the city – or better still, on the city and the role of screens and other media within it. With that proposal I establish a connection between the knowledge of situations (here specifically, screen situations) on the one hand, and the notion of situated knowledges formulated by Donna Haraway (1988) on the other. Haraway describes how knowledge is produced specifically in certain situations, and how knowledge is therefore always situated. According to Haraway, knowledge is never complete or neutral, but rather, always historically, culturally, and hence, also politically framed.

As well as drawing attention to the object (i.e., screens on the streets), as a concept, “media architecture” examines how the design of the situation – the dispositif – is both structural and material, both mediating and performative, for a given subject, be that a passer-by, a viewer, or a participant. It therefore compliments the closely related concept of the dispositif, which emphasizes the relationality of “situations” in a broader sense. As a concept, it shows how media architecture shapes situations, but also creates them – and thus, very fundamentally, implies futures.

Interfaces & Intra-Actions

In our research into the role of media, media technologies, and mediarelated art and performances in the city, the research group [urban interfaces], as the name suggests, makes use of the concept of interface to understand different and specific “situations” in relation to various theoretical and social issues. Hence, in addition to media architecture, this concept is my second proposal to enrich the concept of the dispositif as an analytical framework.

practices of art and architecture, and (new-materialist) philosophy, see Massumi (2019).

Let me briefly explain the concept of interface. Since the late 19thcentury in the natural sciences, the term points towards the separation of, as well as the point of convergence between, two materialities. Think, for or example, of the separation between water and oil. In the context of technological systems, since the 1960s the term has been employed primarily to describe the communicative layer between technology and humans, or between technological systems. The digital screen can be referred to as an interface between the complex digital system and the user, who provides input and reads output. In the terms of art and film theory, it functions like a frame that determines what we see and experience.13 Hence, “what you see” is literally “what you get”. In this way, interface determines our ability to understand and to act, our knowledge and experience. It offers access and orientation, delineates, and determines scale and form.

The interface is a phenomenological and epistemological force to be reckoned with, especially in this age of an increasing complexity of

13 About the meaning of the disciplinary traveling concept “frame”, see Bal (2002).

Figuur 8: Paint layers of graffiti. See: leoalmanac.org/enter-the-surface-interface-an-exploration-ofurban-surfaces-as-sites-of-spatial-production-and-regulation-sabina-andron. Photo: Sabina Andron (2018).

what we might refer to as the algorithmic condition. 14 This condition creates a society that is for a large part shaped by algorithmic processes, datafication, and mediatization. Wittingly or unwittingly, screen users help shape this condition. The concepts of interface, interaction, and –as I will show in a moment – intra-action, enable us to closely study this reciprocity. The concept of interface thus points towards the fact that we are not only positioned within screen and media dispositifs, but also act in relation to these screens and media, and communicate with them. This allows us to extend the relational concept of the dispositif with the processual aspect of the interface.

In our publication, Urban Interfaces (2019), edited by Michiel de Lange, Sigrid Merx, and me, we conceptualized interface and the verb interfacing as a lens to examine how the strategic and creative design of media, art, and performance in the city contributes to the experience of, but also to a critical perspective on, this environment. The contributions to the volume analyze objects such as shop windows, graffiti, mobile games and Augmented Reality, multi-sensory screens, and data dashboards. These analyses raise critical questions concerning the datafication of the “smart” city, the ecological complexity of the more-than-human city, historical awareness and living and contested heritage, and the societal issues around migration and diversity.

With our collection, inspired by media theorists such as Alexander Galloway, Johanna Drucker, and Branden Hookway, we wanted to emphasize that the concept of interface not only points towards concrete objects and situations, but also, and above all, to practices, and to the question of which relations and processes they generate.

In her 2011 article “Humanities Approaches to Interface Theory”, Drucker (2011: 3) similarly states that the interface is a designed, dynamic relational space. In her more recent book Visualization and

14 See Colman et al. (2018). Uricchio (2011) has spoken of an “algorithmic turn” in relation to contemporary visual culture.

Interpretation, Drucker makes a case for the humanities-led interface design, emphasizing once more how the directing function of interfaces raises critical questions about the often-hidden structuring principles in the design of this space, and the interrelated subject positions that take shape within it:

[t]he constructivist subject of the digital platform emerges in a codependent relation with its structuring features. This is the “subject of interface” when interface is conceived as a dynamic space of relations, rather than as a “thing”. (Drucker 2020: 128)

In interface theory and design, this fundamental relationality is often emphasized by pointing towards the fact that interface brings together different elements, entities, and subjects, productively establishes connections, and communicates. Here, however, we encounter an important paradox: the separation that is required for connection, communication, and interaction.

Talking about this seeming contradiction, Hookway states:

The interface is defined in its coupling of the processes of holding apart and drawing together, of confining and opening up, of disciplining and enabling, of excluding and including. The separation maintained by the interface between distinct entities or states is also the basis of the unity it produces from those entities or states. (2004: 4)

This paradox implies an inherent tension and friction – whether visible and knowable to the subject or not – that offers new possibilities, as well as limitations.

A recent public campaign in Utrecht against street harassment provides a good example. As opposed to the standard billboard that calls for money to be spent, this one loudly calls out to male passers-by with obscene slurs, with the intention to “turn the tables”, start conversations, and

thus contribute to changing behavior on the street. Admittedly, this example is perhaps a little simplistic, and also not entirely unproblematic, as it also fixes positions and relations.

A very different example at the intersection of art, activism, multimedia design, and science and technology studies is (urban) environmental art. This is a form of eco-art that address societal and political issues pertaining to the relationship between culture and nature, technology and climate – a relationship that is at times productive, and sometimes highly frictional.

For example, the work by Andrea Polli, guest and speaker at the 2021 Media Architecture Biennale. Energy Flow from 2016 visualizes wind power on the Carson Bridge in Pittsburgh, named after the American biologist and early environmentalist Rachel Carson (1907-1964). One of her other works, Particle Falls (2015) visualizes the scale of air pollution.15

15 For more about Polli’s work, see https://sites.google.com/andreapolli.com/main.

Figure 9: Speaking billboard. hartvannederland.nl/nieuws/politiek/he-jij-daar-ben-je-ook-kaalvan-onder-mannen-nageroepen-op-straat-in-utrecht

Hence, starting from this understanding of interface as interfacing, we see a relation between the “object” on the one hand, and a transformative “process” on the other – a relation that may benefit from some further explanation.

The physicist and feminist scientist Karen Barad (2007) makes a helpful distinction between “interactions” on the one hand, and what they refer to as “intra-actions” on the other. Whilst the notion of interaction is based on the meeting and exchange of predetermined and separate entities and identities (computer-human, human-human, environmentindividual, etc.), “intra-action” points towards the fact that these entities emerge and come into being both within and from these relations and situations – or “phenomena”, as Barad calls them.

Intra-action makes clearly visible the aforementioned tensions and frictions. For example, can we be sure that the billboard is calling out the right people? If a gender-sensitive man, woman, non-binary or trans person is being called out, what effect does that have on them? Further, while Polli’s work may alert us to the sometimes-clashing interests of

Figuur 10: Energy Flow (2016), Andrea Polli. Photo: Andrea Polli flickr.com/photos/ andreapolli/albums/72157675457833180.

humans and the environment, it also offers a visual spectacle that may not necessarily inspire us to think and act directly, but first and foremost stops us in our tracks simply to admire it. You could say that this too creates a tension between intellect and affect.

The concept of urban interfaces – understood as both connecting and articulating differences, and as producing perspectives and relationalities – is also fruitful for thinking about public space itself. This space can be characterized as a place of exchange and possibilities, but also of regulation, tension, and conflict. The public space is neither a static nor self-evident space. Rather, it is “in becoming”, as Deleuze would say. In Barad’s terms, intra-actions situate us within them, bringing forth new positions and possibilities.

Sometimes these positions and (im)possibilities may be intersectional –in other words, forcing us to face the fact that we too are, or are in the process of becoming, a combination of race, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, national and colonial histories, and that we are an integral part of the interlocking processes of commercialization, datafication, and climate change.

In short, we can conclude that, in any given screen situation, the concept of the dispositif situates the relation between screen, message, and subject center stage. Further, architecture emphasizes its design and organization, while interface makes visible the intraactive process that emerges and takes shape within it. Together these concepts form a robust conceptual framework that gives rise to an analytical and critical perspective on the material, mediating, and performative aspects and dynamics of screens in the city.

Hodos & Methodos

Now, let us return to the streets. This brings us to the question of how exactly screens in the city are able to reflect upon the city, make proposals for the city, and thus contribute to transformation processes that can benefit this social space.

Traditionally, classical Greek terminology has often been used as a conceptual framework for specific domains within urban societies and ecologies, and it continues to be so today. Well-known examples are demos (the public), oikos (house), agora (market), polis (city), and gaia (earth). In line with these other terms, I propose the term hodos to refer to the street, or “street level” of urban life, and to analyze it as potentially “open”. Etymologically speaking, hodos (ὁδός) means threshold, road, or street, but also “journey” or “way” – a combination of a “way of getting somewhere” and a “way of thinking”. This double meaning also becomes clear in the compound word methodos (μέθοδος), which links meta (goal) with hodos (road), meaning “the way to”.16

Hence, as a concept, hodos refers not only to the street as a location, or as a level at which we can situate “the public space” but, more specifically, it also refers to the situatedness of urban experiences, relations, and practices, which emerge both from and within a given location, while we traverse the public space – on the way. Positioned between locus and trajectory, between “street” and “road”, hodos articulates a vision of the city as a transformative space that emerges both in and through our moving, navigating, acting, and connecting.

At this point, a brief elaboration is needed regarding the relation between “hodos” as a certain word for a place, “hodos” as a concept referring to a process, and the “hodological” as a method or mode of working. In practice, methods are utilized in scholarly or creative practices that

16 See Liddell, Scott, and Jones (1940).

respond to a certain question or need. However, methods are already implied before being applied in such contexts, hidden in the concepts through which we understand the world, our direct environment, or the tasks at hand – the starting points and lenses that we apply and realize in our thinking and acting. By activating and mobilizing concepts as an answer to either concrete or abstract questions, their methodological, critical, and creative potential is actualized.

In our book Critical Concept for the Creative Humanities (2022) – a glossary of concepts for the exchange between cultural and media theory, philosophy and creative practices – Iris van der Tuin and I refer to this as the methodological heart (methodologicity) of concepts. Concepts are both theoretical and analytical, and creative. Concepts are mobilized –literally, prepared and activated – by our thinking, acting, and creating. With concepts, we build arguments, narratives, images, or other objects, from and with a vision. This is not only the creative, but also the critical potential inherent in the methodological function of concepts.

So, what about hodos as a concept for the creative humanities? If we understand the street as a situation in which things take place – a space that we not just happen to occupy, but, more importantly, in which we act, move, and connect – then the street can be conceived as the domain par excellence in which urban public life takes shape. In ontological terms, we may call this the instability of location specificity. The phenomenological and epistemological meanings of the street suggest that this is both situational (of experiences) and situated (of knowledge). Therefore, I propose that via a perspective of hodos, the city at “street level”, we bring together these three aspects. This way we can provide insights into how location-specific phenomena give rise to situations in which the subject, in relation to its environment, perceives its environment and can reflect upon it, as well as upon its own ambulatory, mobile position within it. Mobility, and possibilities for identifying a position, as well as changing it, go hand in hand. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze ([1985] 2005) refers to hodological space as a space that contains possibilities for diverse movements and directions, and a plurality of perspectives.

This specific meaning of hodos is particularly relevant when we consider how urban interventions work – be they practical, such as the temporary marks that regulate movement in times of Corona, or explicitly artistic and/or activist projects that take us out of our daily routine, surprise us, make us stop and think for a moment. Here you may think of the light projections that overwrite monuments, or responsive advertising billboards that call us out. In artistic or activist interventions, we can recognize experimental – and hence also temporary and provisional – strategies to enact change. These projects are intended to literally “project” realities or alternatives: they make them both visible and open to discussion, for example by reappropriating or repositioning the technologies that shape our public lives.

Or, in the words of Deleuze & Guattari ([1980] 1987), they do so through de- and re-territorialization. Different still, following the terminology I have introduced here, they do so by rearranging the urban dispositif and its interfaces. The same is true for more practical and everyday interventions (again, consider the public space during the pandemic): although they clearly serve a different purpose, here too, we can recognize comparable strategies.

This perspective on interventions of all kinds connects hodos with methodos, providing insights into the situated street level of the “method” of urban intervention. By definition, interventions are always temporary and experimental, in the broadest sense of the word. This allows them to identify a potential for change, starting from a situated perspective on the city from a creative-critical approach. Starting from a “hodological” engagement with, and within the contours of, the public space, such interventions differ radically from more distancing, dismissive forms of criticism.

Ideally, inquiring into, and experimental reactions to, the challenges and questions of contemporary urban public life should not just result in a reflection on the situation, as this would suggest that one is not also fundamentally a part of it. Rather, precisely by being situated

within the public space, the intervention also positions us as partners or participants. It invites us to partake in a self-reflexive and experimental process in which the potential for change – of ourselves, the city, and society – takes centre stage.

The Open City = A Project

Changing the status of the object also has consequences for the researcher and her methods. Therefore, I have arrived at my provisional conclusion: a vision for the ways in which we, as researchers in critical and creative cultural inquiry (or, the creative humanities), can contribute to research into the conditions and possibilities for the “open city”.

In my argument, I have already formulated some important premises for what we could call the conditions for the open city. The public

Figure 11: Venice, 2022. Photo: Iris van der Tuin

space should be open to performative practices that, either temporarily or more structurally, both change it, and enable change. A public space should be able to be openly frictional, inclusive, and diverse, with all the contradictions, debates, and objections that go with it. It is a space that can be overwritten and where statements, visions, and perspectives can literally be “imagined”. Further, it is also a space of care for a more biodiverse ecology – also within the urban environment. It is, however, also a space that supports socially engaged, public, intellectual, and creative reflections and proposals.

This is why the open city is never finished. Rather, it is a project that not only demands collaboration, but also includes many “inters”: interdisciplinary, inter-professional, inter-generational, inter-institutional, inter-local, and inter-national.17 It necessitates collaboration between inhabitants, activists, artists, designers, students, researchers, disciplines, and institutions. To conclude, I would like to mention some initiatives in which colleagues from media and culture studies collaborate directly in, as well as work on the foundations and design of, some interdisciplinary projects around the issues and questions addressed in this lecture.

Within Utrecht University, interdisciplinary and interprofessional collaboration is fostered by the university-wide so-called strategic themes that place research and education into urban issues high on the agenda – from education to immigration, and from diversity to sustainability. Within the strategic theme Pathways to Sustainability, Humanities’ scholars are collaborating in various interdisciplinary projects on sustainable cities. Together with the Social and Behavioral Sciences and Geosciences, we have conducted a pilot project on creative methods that can play a role in these endeavors.

17 Gretchen Wilkins and Andrew Burrow discuss the productivity of what they refer to as “open-to-ending strategies in architectural practice”, in the context of the design of, and for, the city. They pose the rhetorical question: “Isn’t keeping things unfinished the most open and the best way of getting things done?” (2013: 98). Hence, for them, the status of design as a “final draft” is an invitation or challenge for future work.

Within the strategic theme of Institutions for Open Societies, the recently launched Open Cities Platform facilitates a partnership for research into, and for, the “open city”. It comprises researchers from the Faculties of Humanities, Geosciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, of Law, Economics and Governance, and the Sciences. From this platform, we collaborate with social and cultural partners and institutions to develop methodological as well as practical proposals for the open city – from a perspective on, and exchange between, the Global North and the Global South.

Another initiative within the Faculty of Humanities that I cannot fail to mention is the Creative Humanities Academy – or CHA, in short.18 Here we offer an infrastructure for collaboration between humanities scholars, and cultural institutions or individual arts and culture professionals. In addition, we also offer a platform for exchange, for example on research into and with the cultural sector, on creative methods within the humanities and in interdisciplinary collaborations, and for developing “education for professionals”. In collaboration with colleagues from the Utrecht University School of Governance, we offer the course on artistic leadership (LinC A) as part of the Leadership in Culture program, the third edition of which will start later this year.19

For me, the experience and exchange with artistic directors and creators exemplifies how inspiring and important an engaged and “open” research and education culture is, both within and outside of, but also from, the academy. I am both happy and proud of the way in which we in Utrecht not only give shape to this, but also continue to actively keep shaping it. From my position as professor of Screen Cultures & Society, I will be committed, always also in collaboration with others, to furthering this agenda.

I have spoken.

18

https://www.uu.nl/onderwijs/creative-humanities-academy.

19 https://www.uu.nl/executive-onderwijs-recht-economie-bestuur-en-organisatie/ executive-programmas/leiderschap-in-cultuur-artistiek-linc-a.

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Curriculum Vitae

Nanna Verhoeff is Professor of Screen Cultures & Society at the Department of Media and Culture Studies, where she is currently head of department. Trained as a scholar in media and performance studies, she specializes in the analysis of screen media, with a key interest in transformations and diversity of screen and interface cultures. She has published on (early) cinema, mobile screens and location-based media, interactive installations, urban media art, and media architecture, and on concepts and methods for the creative humanities. Her monographs include After the Beginning: The West in Early Cinema (2006) and Mobile Screens: The Visual Regime of Navigation (2012), both with Amsterdam University Press. With Iris van der Tuin, she authored Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities (2022), published by Rowman & Littlefield. She has (co-) edited books and special issues on topics om (early) cinema, urban media, art and performance, and the creative humanities.

Her current research focuses on the development of concepts and methods for the analysis of performative technologies, situated media and media arts, and urban interfaces. She initiated and leads the interdisciplinary research group Urban Interfaces that brings together researchers that investigate situated media, art and performance in urban, public spaces. Her research on performative technologies is also part of the research platform Transmission in Motion. She is co-initiator of the Open Cities Platform for the strategic theme Institutions for Open Societies at Utrecht University. For the Faculty of Humanities, she has co-initiated the Creative Humanities Academy – an infrastructure for knowledge exchange with, and post-academic education for, arts and culture professionals. Together with colleagues

from the Creative Humanities Academy and the Utrecht University School of Governance, she develops and teaches continuing education for arts and culture professionals.

Copyright: Nanna Verhoeff, 2022

Design: Communicatie & Marketing, faculteit Geesteswetenschappen, Universiteit Utrecht

Portret photo: Ed van Rijswijk

Image title page: Projection from a series of Reclaiming the Monument (2020). Photo: reclaimingthemonument.com/gallery

Translation: This lecture has been translated from Dutch to English by Bresser-Chapple with financial support of the Creative Humanities Academy at Utrecht University.