Mobile Media Architecture: Between Infrastructure, Interface, and Intervention

Abstract

The category mobile media architecture, mobile design between “media” and “architecture” consists of urban interfaces: digital screens used in urban public space, often in conjunction with location-based and/or mobile media technologies. These interfaces intervene temporarily, yet fundamentally, in the city’s built environment. I consider the spatiotemporal logic of two installations that challenge more traditional ideas of spatial design and architecture as fixed, stable, and permanent: the selfie pillar as example of (temporary) urban advertising and narrowcasting, and the art project The Bridge, designed for a traveling screen. These very different examples of urban screens both construct temporary and mobile architectures for spatial extension and connectivity. In so doing they demonstrate an intersection of architectural and cartographic logic. This twin logic is inherent in the intersection of spatial design (architecture) and mobile and location-based technologies that offer tools for spatial orientation (cartography). Between infrastructure, interface and intervention, these forms of mobile media architecture exemplify our current visual regime of navigation.