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Viva the façade as computer
screen! Viva façades not reflecting light but emanating
light—the building as a digital sparkling source of
information, not as an abstract glowing source of light! .
. . Viva iconography—not carved in stone for eternity but
digitally changing for now, so that the inherently dangerous
fascist propaganda, for instance, can be temporarily, not
eternally, proclaimed!
—Robert Venturi, Architecture as Signs
and Systems for a Mannerist Time (2004)
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Art Center Nabi,
Seoul, 2005. Background: Haemin Kim, Lyrics,
2004. Photo: Dong-Hoon Shin. |
SEOUL DOES NOT possess much of
what urban planners refer to as "legibility." Instead of a
compact center with recognizable landmarks and cohesive
neighborhood fabrics, it is an aggressively dispersed place
filled with tinted commercial towers and legions of cheaply
constructed housing blocks erected in the rush to
urbanization. As a city that endured numerous invasions only
to undergo one of the most explosive periods of urban growth
seen in the twentieth century, the civic landscape seems a
tabula rasa of generic urbanism, an endless loop of
smog-enshrouded modernity.
But after a few days spent navigating the
city's car-thronged streets, one distinguishing urban
characteristic began to stand out: the ubiquity of the screen.
It seemed that I was hardly ever out of view of some
billboard-sized display winking in the distance. There were
also screens in the subways, convenience stores, elevators—I
even spotted one in the floor of a casino, perhaps intended to
attract the downward glance of an unlucky gambler. At the
Aaron Tan–designed SK T-Tower in the city's financial
district, the base of the telecom headquarters was wrapped in
a thin band of LED. Along with a set of screens in the
building's lobby, the LED zipper was displaying a series of
works by Korean artists. A curator with Seoul's new-media
gallery Art Center Nabi had taken me to see the building, and
told me that the images in the lobby—which present
motion-triggered digitized representations of people coming
through the doors—would soon be interspersed with real-time
images generated from a similar lobby setup in another SK
building just south of Seoul. Was this "interconnectedness," I
wondered, or just an extension of urban displacement—the
teleconferenced anonymous crowd?
Not long after visiting the SK T-Tower,
driving one night through the fashionable district of
Apgujeong-dong, I came upon the Galleria Mall, a large, square
building whose entire exterior was a blazingly luminescent
green. Random animations scrolled across its pixelated
surface. The exterior of the Galleria—formerly a drab concrete
box—was the work of Dutch lighting designer Rogier van der
Heide of Arup Lighting, who clad the structure last year with
more than four thousand glass disks. Backed by an LED lighting
system that is capable of generating some sixteen million
colors, the building, which by day had simply seemed to have
an elegantly opalescent exterior, had become a screen in the
dark.
What was going on in this city of
screens? It was not, of course, merely limited to architecture
or signage. The residents of Seoul, urban theorist Anthony
Townsend notes, spend more time online than the inhabitants of
any other metropolis; traffic is five times higher on Korean
networks than anywhere else; and there are more homes wired
for broadband in Seoul than in the whole of Germany or the
United Kingdom. A combination of government policy, urban
density, and other technological and social factors has helped
create the most wired city on the planet. This means, of
course, more screens: The streets of Seoul are filled with
pedestrians peering into their latest-generation cell phones
(many now featuring live television broadcasts), and teenagers
snapping mobile-phone photos of one another at cafés
(presumably to send to friends in some other urban node). One
might only add that Korea is, of course, home to Samsung and
LG, two of the world's largest producers of television
monitors.
The screen, along with the skyscraper,
has for some time been one of the particular features of Asian
modernity. The screen-centric vision of Los Angeles famously
depicted by Ridley Scott in Blade Runner (1982) was,
the director has noted, inspired by his time in 1960s Hong
Kong, a paradoxical city whose pulsating electronic skyline
overlooked a harbor, as Scott has described, filled with
nineteenth-century fishing junks. But those screens were
merely static vehicles for the transmission of commercial
messages, mechanical upgrades of an older public-advertising
tradition. What is most interesting about the screens I found
in Seoul was that they were not merely architectural
appendages broadcasting messages but architecture itself; not
simply vehicles for delivering one-way information to a
passive public but an active layer of the city's matrices of
networks. To stand on a street was to stand on a street of a
hundred screens, and by "screens" I mean the external
manifestation—the collective user-interface—of the unseen
digital flow pulsing down that same street, invisible but as
much a part of the city experience as the concrete of the
sidewalks.
Seoul seems a fitting location to test
the theories put forth in Placing Words: Symbols, Space,
and the City (2005), the latest book from William J.
Mitchell, the architecture and media-arts professor at MIT who
has devoted much previous energy (e.g., City of Bits:
Space, Place, and the Infobahn [1996]) to studying the
intersection of technology and urbanism. Mitchell's new
collection of essays ranges across a wide swath of territory,
but he has several key themes of particular interest for the
city of screens. The most pertinent is the idea of the screen
itself as an architectural component, as at the SK T-Tower or
the Galleria Mall. Advances in pliable LED displays and other
technologies, Mitchell says, "enabled the fabrication of very
large assemblages of reliable, controllable light sources that
can be wrapped onto just about any sort of surface. . . .
Traditional distinctions between architectural lighting design
and computer graphics are beginning to disappear. Everything
that lights up can be treated as an addressable, programmable
pixel."
What happens to a building when its very
bricks are pixels and it becomes a screen? Can it be
appreciated as a building itself, or does the image it is
broadcasting simply swallow it whole? Do we judge the building
by the content of its display or the mechanism that houses it?
The medium or the message? Mitchell has a theory: "You can
argue, of course, that architecture has always been about
animated surface—classical effects of shade and shadow as sun
and clouds move (what are moldings for, after all), Barcelona
pavilion effects of reflection and transparency created by
glass, metal, and machine-polished surface, and subtle
combinations of the two, as at LA's new Disney Concert Hall."
Buildings, through their geometry, compute these effects. Now,
however, Mitchell writes, "we can separate the software of
architectural dynamics from the hardware, execute this
software at high speed on inexpensive digital devices, and
reprogram effects whenever we like."
And so, as the glass-curtain wall was to
modernism, the screen is becoming the iconic facade of the
digital age. The glass-curtain wall undermined the distinction
between public and private realms, but the screen offers
more-radical revisions of space. For example, this year the
Los Angeles architects Electroland proposed putting a series
of LED lights on a building's exterior. As the group
describes: "A matrix of LED lights embedded into the entry
walkway respond to the presence of visitors, while a massive
display of lights on the building facade mirror these
patterns. The building facade acts as a real-time visual
representation of the human activities within its physical
borders, turning the architectural concept of facades inside
out." At Austria's Kunsthaus Graz, to cite another instance,
Berlin-based realities:united installed an 8,600-square-foot
field of circular fluorescent lights that act as pixels on the
building's eastern facade. The museum aims to use this "urban
screen" not only to "project its communicative aspect into
public space" but to host installations that address "the
interaction between media and space." The screen is both local
facade—that is, a two-way intermediary between interior and
exterior—and another space that is nowhere in between: a
display plugged into global data networks. Most significantly,
the museum claims that since the margins of the screen are not
visible unless activated, the installation "gives the
impression that not a screen but the Kunsthaus itself
renders images and pictures" (italics mine). This is Times
Square triumphant: The screen has collapsed into itself,
folded into architecture, broken its own boundaries. As
new-media theorist Lev Manovich predicted in 2002, "In the
longer term every object may become a screen connected to the
Net, with the whole of built space becoming a set of display
surfaces."
The irony of the city of screens is that
the screen itself was supposed to make the city obsolete: The
World Wide Web would become a kind of metaurban nonplace, the
computer screen our constant interface with this locationless,
24-7 realm. And yet, as Mitchell writes: "Contrary to
once-popular expectation, however, ubiquitous digital
networking has not simply ironed out the differences among
places, allowing anything to happen anywhere, anytime.
Instead, it has provided a mechanism for the continual
injection of useful information into contexts where it was
once inaccessible, and where it adds a new layer of meaning."
In other words, the city and screen have fused, each informing
the other. Seoul, for example, is filled with myriad
bangs, roughly translated as "rooms," that act
essentially as transitional spaces between private and public
realms; they are intimate places where people gather to sing
karaoke, conduct affairs, or drink soju. The city of
screens did not kill off the "city of the bang" (as it
was described in an exhibition at the Korean pavilion of this
year's Venice Biennale); instead, it augmented, and perhaps
even accelerated, its growth. One of the most prevalent types
of bang is the "pc bang," where people play
massively multiplayer online games—people gathering in a built
space to participate in a virtual world. The slippages do not
end there, however; for it is not uncommon for a player,
having left the bang for a walk on the city streets, to
receive—via SMS on his mobile phone—updates on his progress in
the virtual world. An inverse example comes from Europe, where
tens of thousands participate in BotFighters, a
cellphone-based game that uses locative technologies to track
players as they move through the city, which on screen becomes
a virtual realm. The screen does not so much kill the city as
absorb it.
The extent to which the city of screens
is evolving and mutating was demonstrated on a recent
afternoon as I walked through Times Square, arguably the
birthplace of the city of screens. Among the many flashing
displays I took in was one for Nike iD, showing an athletic
shoe and a telephone number. I did not pay it much heed,
although I was to learn later that day I'd been looking at no
ordinary billboard: Passersby could dial the number by cell
phone and then, via prompting, use the phone keys to
custom-design a shoe. The fledgling designer would be sent via
SMS a picture of the shoe and a Web address where they might
order it. Here people were using their private screens to
manipulate a public screen, standing on a fixed urban spot
only to participate in virtual design and commerce. Somewhere,
the image of them interacting with the screen was recorded on
camera, viewed on some other screen. The edges of screens were
blurring into the city.
Tom Vanderbilt is a frequent
contributor to Artforum. |
