Urban Media Aesthetics is an ongoing curatorial research project that investigates subject matters relevant to artistic and curatorial practices with digital art forms in urban environments. 

The notion of urban media aesthetics as a curatorial subject relates to the presentation and integration of artistic, visual digital content in urban contexts. This materializes in various contemporary examples, such as digital art installations, media facades, pervasive and mobile displays, big screens, projections of moving images, architectural mapping and animation, responsive architecture, and other types of “exhibition forms,” which take the urban environment as their exhibition space while integrating digital content, infrastructure and digitally-inspired forms into the urban ecology. 

Una piattaforma di scambio per artisti, urbanisti, architetti e studiosi. E sono molto orgoglioso di aver dato un mio contributo…

Mark Amerika, Simone Arcagni, Maurice Benayoun, Ulrik Ekman, Lev Manovich and Christiane Paul have contributed with critical responses to various aspects of the spectacle in relation to urban software art. The writing series, which will continue with different topics, include 500-word critical responses from scholars that seek – from multiple viewpoints in this discourse – to investigate the themes and subjects particularly relevant to urban media aesthetics now.

Urban Media Aesthetics is launching with the theme Confronting Spectacle, which brings into question the recent "technological optimism" in artistic production for public space while challenging the usual (Guy) Debordian rhetoric of "the blame" of the spectacle as illusion, commodification, and fetishization. This theme is proposed with the aim of addressing the notion of spectacle from a variety of critical perspectives and contributing to a contemporary discourse that acknowledges an expanded aesthetic realm for the spectacular.

A couple of events will take place next week to activate the theme Confronting Spectacle. Alice Arnold's poetic documentary ELECTRIC SIGNS (2013) will be screened at Harvestworks in New York City on December 3rd. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the director on spectacle, politics and future critical engagement with urban screens.

The first UMA salon, a guest salon for Leaders in Software and Art organized in collaboration with Isabel Draves, will take place on December 4th at 475 Kent Avenue in Brooklyn. Artists Eric Corriel, Kacie Kinzer, Rune Madsen, and YesYesNo/Molmol Kuo will respond to the notion of spectacle in relation to their artistic practices with software art in urban public space.