Mediapolis Now

Voices 07: Caitlin Bruce on Graffiti Culture and Urban Institutional Attunement

In this episode, we speak with Caitlin Bruce.

Caitlin is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. Originally trained through Northwestern University’s renowned PhD programme in rhetoric and public culture, her research focuses on the politics and possibilities of urban public art, in settings including the United States, Germany, Colombia, and France. But one place Caitlin’s work has taken her for longer and more immersive durations is Mexico, which has been the basis for two book-length projects exploring the localisation of global graffiti practices in situated contexts. 

Our discussion centred on Caitlin’s more recent book project, Voices in Aerosol: Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement, and Graffiti in Urban Mexico. It is a book which explores how the city government of León, in central Mexico, went from fighting a war on graffiti in the early 2000s to a much different approach ten years later, when it turned towards sanctioning and valuing it. And, it seeks to understand how young people, engaging in such artistic practices, navigated these shifting conditions.  

We discuss the book’s origins as a research project, as well as its historical and global contexts – from Mexican muralism to American hip-hop culture – before moving on to its unique anchoring in a kind of sonic or aural perspective on graffiti and more broadly visual culture. We also end by discussing Caitlin’s recent efforts in social-engaged research, bringing the work with Leónese graffiti writers into contact with Latinx and other contemporaries in US urban contexts.

This interview, which was recorded on 28 October 2024, is Episode 7 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media.

A readable version of the interview has also been published simultaneously as part of the The Mediapolis Q&A series.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

Voices 06: Myria Georgiou on Competing Claims to Digital Urban Humanity

In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Myria Georgiou.

Myria is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has been working for more than two decades on the mediation of identity and citizenship. Myria’s work has spanned interests in: the relationships of media and cities; how media are implicated in identity construction for diasporic populations and migrants; and how diversity and difference are represented in the media.

Our discussion centred on Myria’s recent book Being Human in Digital Cities. It is a book which explores the curious resurrection of a kind of ‘people centrism’ in discourses about digital cities, analysing the rise of competing claims to urban humanity by a range of different actors, from technology companies to local governments to ordinary urban citizens.

Our discussion provides a good overview of the book’s thematic attention to three varieties of digital humanism in cities: popular, demotic, and critical. We also touch on the where Myria sees her arguments in relation to broader contemporary debates about the ‘human’ or ‘posthuman’.

This interview, which was recorded on 7 May 2024, is Episode 6 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media.

A readable version of the interview has also been published simultaneously as part of the The Mediapolis Q&A series.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

Voices 05: Rebecca Ross on Postcodes, Communication Design and Urban Media

In this episode, we speak with Rebecca Ross, director of the graphic communication design programme at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Her writing and practice are both interdisciplinary, extending from graphic and communication design to media studies, urban studies, the history of technology and creative computing. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Urban Pamphleteer, a publication which explores contemporary urbanism in the tradition of radical pamphleteering. Her work has also been seen in London’s public spaces, notably her 2015 digital billboard installation, London is Changing.

That installation is discussed in the podcast, but before we get there, we begin with a fascinating discussion of postcodes, as a form of spatial media. We dive into this with some detailed definitional and historical discussion initially, but then open out into a conversion about on the everyday life of postcodes, as a kind of social and cultural innovation, not to mention a shared spatial language between humans and machines.

Midway through our chat, we switched gears to talk about graphic design and communication as a practice and way of thinking, and the paradoxical distance that discipline oftentimes seems to have from academic media and cultural studies. This is unfortunate, since, as we discussed, the former provides ways of thinking about urban media in everyday life (for instance in the fine-grained ways typography shows up in urban environments), as well as how we come to know ‘the city’ as a larger entity (here Rebecca talks about the periodic London Plan, and in particular its public consultation processes).

We end by discussing Rebecca’s recent writing on how academic publishing could become more public, by working with media as much as writing about it.

This interview, which was recorded on 5 March 2024, is Episode 5 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

Voices 04: Monica Degen and Gillian Rose on the New Urban Aesthetic

In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Monica Degen and Gillian Rose.

Monica Degen is Professor of Urban Cultural Sociology at Brunel University London, in the UK. Her research focuses on the practices and politics of experiential urbanism. Largely through ethnographic approaches, Monica’s work explores how multi-sensory, temporal and emotional dimensions not only shape how we live in cities, but also, increasingly how planners, architects, place-branding professionals and others design them.

Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford. Gillian is well-known across humanities and the social sciences for her book Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, which published its fifth edition in 2022. She identifies first and foremost as a cultural geographer, and her multi-faceted work has centred on the techniques and politics of knowledge production about places. Most recently, she has devoted much of her attention to how digital visualising technologies are shifting urban life and its spatial and temporal organisation.

Our discussion centred on Monica and Gillian’s recent book The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change. It is a book which explores the coming together of new digital technologies and urban branding, and specifically how these are increasingly being geared toward new kinds of sensory, bodily experiences, in and across different urban sites and scales.

Not only do we discuss the central arguments of the book, or its fascinating cases studies. We also touch on the trajectories of work that brought them to write it in the first place, and where their work is heading next.

This interview, which was recorded on 1 November 2023, is Episode 4 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media.

A readable version of the interview has also been published simultaneously as part of the The Mediapolis Q&A series.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

Events 03: Julia Stolyar, Darshana Mini and Jaana Serres at Locating Media Industries 2023 in London

This episode, part of the Mediapolis Now Events series, brings together three scholars presenting at the conference Locating Media Industries, held 19th-21st June 2023 at King’s College London (KCL). At this conference, attendees from around the world gathered to think through the spatial organisation of different media industries, with a special interest in how that organization might be shifting in the long wake of digitalization, and the shorter wake of Covid-19, with its attendant rise of remote working, including in many media sectors. 

Our first guest was Julia Stolyar, who recently completed her PhD at SOAS, which investigated transnational TV drama remakes between South Korea and Japan. In the interview, you’ll hear her touch on her contribution to the conference, which focused on the development of Seoul as a center for media production, and particularly its Digital Media City, developed as a cluster for business, tourism, branding, and urban development. 

She was joined by Darshana Mini, an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. You will hear Darshana discuss her research on the role of financial intermediaries in procuring funding for production houses in the South Indian film industry, and the continuities and ruptures going hand-in-hand with the rise of what are called OTT platforms, that is, Over-The-Top streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Sony LIV. 

And, our third guest on the panel was Jaana Serres, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen, whose work centres on the relationships of grassroots artistic genres and placemaking. She spoke especially about themes emerging from her doctoral research at the University of Oxford, where she studied how the Nigerian music industry delineates an aspirational horizon for an Africa-based project of modernity and globalization. 

We recorded our group interview following lunch on the second day of the conference, 20th June, in a reasonably cozy, nearby teaching room in Bush House, a building KCL recently took over from the BBC, whose World Service broadcasted from the same site, for 70 years. The host Scott Rodgers arrived later than planned, due to frustrating traffic on Kingsway, the wide road leading to Bush House, and a bus driver who unfortunately, but probably responsibly, wouldn’t let him off. Because of this, you will hear that one of our participants, Julia Stolyar, needed to leave two-thirds of the way through, so she could present her paper. But the discussion was interesting. It starts a little descriptive, with the guests outlining the research topics they were presenting at the conference. Once things get going, though, you’ll hear us move onto a range of interesting themes, around placemaking and place branding, cultural and linguistic complexity, postcolonialism and geopolitical relations, temporality and speed, and the production of mediated locality.  

This interview, which was recorded on 20 June 2023, is Episode 3 within the Events podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we feature recordings of recent talks and symposia at the junction of cities, culture and media. Host: Scott Rodgers.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

Voices 03: Amy Y. Zhang, Asa Roast and Carwyn Morris on Wanghong Urbanism

In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Amy Zhang, Asa Roast and Carwyn Morris. Amy Zhang is based at a The University of Manchester, in the UK, where she is Lecturer in Urban Planning. Her research focuses on urban politics and governance, urban knowledge and policy mobilities, postcolonial urban theory, and state-society relations in China. Asa Roast is based at the University of Leeds, UK, where he is Lecturer in Urban Geography. His work focuses on urban transformations in China, with an emphasis on housing, informality, verticality and urban agriculture in the city of Chongqing. Carwyn Morris is based at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he is University Lecturer of Digital China. His research examines the spatialization of digital relations, including digital displacement, digital territorialization projects, digital mobilities, and internet celebrity urbanisms.

The host (Scott Rodgers) first came across this episode’s guests a couple of years back, reading a substack discussion among them, playfully titled ‘We Built This City on a Camera Roll’. He soon found himself introduced to a new notion of ‘wanghong’, and wanghong urbanism. Focused on developments in the Chinese urban context, the discussion was asking: what happens when places achieve celebrity status online?

Late last year, in issue 4 of Mediapolis Volume 7, Amy, Asa and Carwyn co-authored a Deep Dive essay fleshing out some of these ideas, which was then followed earlier this year, in issue 1 of Mediapolis Volume 8, in a Dossier (or collection of essays) exploring the broader notion of an urban-digital spectacle. Our discussion in the episode ranges from how they first encountered the phenomena of wanghong in Chinese urban contexts, how the notion might be defined, and what it might tell us about the emerging relations of social media and cities around the world.

This interview, which was recorded on 27 April 2023, is Episode 3 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

Events 02: Media, Cities and Space at ECREA 2022 in Aarhus

This episode includes excerpts from four interviews from the 9^th European Communication Conference, held in Aarhus, Denmark, 19^th-22^nd October 2022. The ECC is the biennial conference of the European Communication Research and Education Association, and in 2022, the conference theme was ‘Rethink Impact’, exploring how communication studies (broadly defined) interacts with, impacts on, and reflects society. The four interviews here are with scholars who presented at the conference, in one of the sessions organised through ECREA’s Section on Media, Cities and Space.

Each of the interviews were recorded in a compact, mobile podcast van - a collaboration between the Aarhus public library Dokk1 and the newspaper Jyllandsposten. During the conference, the van was parked outside one of the main conference buildings on the Aarhus University campus.

All four interviews were facilitated by Christoph Raetzsch, executive produced by Jay-vee Marasigan Pangan, with Chance Dorland as audio engineer and trainer. The interviews themselves were hosted by the Erasmus Mundus Journalism students from Aarhus University. The hosts are credited below, alongside the guests, producer and support staff.

Lisa Schulze

The first interview is with Lisa Shulze, who spoke with Martina Hrgović. The producer was Saskia Reimann, with Nariman Moustafa on staff. Lisa is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Salzburg, in Austria. We jump in here with Martina briefly asking Lisa about her background, before turning to the research she presented at the conference, exploring how wheelchair users in five German cities navigate their movements with the help of digital and other media.

Karin Larsson

In the second interview, Karin Larsson speaks with Marcela Sánchez. The producer was Abhishek Kumar, with Ramisha Ali on staff. Karin is a doctoral candidate in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, in Stockholm, Sweden. We join Marcela asking Karin about her background, before turning to the research she presented at the conference, around VDNKh, a Stalinist exhibition area in Moscow. They discuss how Karin came to study this site, and what it reveals about urban mediations of authoritarian and national-conservative tendencies in Russia today.

Mortiz Schweiger

In our third interview, you will hear Moritz Schweiger speaking with Malene Solheim. The producer was Andy Peñafuerte III, with Abhishek Kumar on staff. Moritz is a doctoral candidate in the Department for Media, Knowledge and Communication at Augsburg University in Germany. We come in with Malene asking Moritz about his main object of research, augmented reality. They go on to discuss the many possibilities and problems of these technologies for urban life, and even societies in general.

Derya Özkan

Finally, we join Derya Özkan being interviewed by Radha Puranik, with Saskia Reimann producing and Nariman Moustafa on staff. Derya is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Communication at Izmir University of Economics in Turkey. We pick up here with Radha turning to the feedback Derya received at the conference, before they move on to exploring her research project, which created an ambitious, publicly accessible digital map of former movie theaters, presenting them as cultural heritage sites in İzmir, Turkey.

This is an episode within the Events podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we feature recordings of recent talks and symposia at the junction of cities, culture and media. Host: Scott Rodgers.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

Voices 02: Christian Olesen on Film Sound, Soundscapes and the ‘Listener’s Rights’

In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Christian Olesen. Christian is based at the University of Amsterdam, in The Netherlands, where he is Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Cultural Heritage. His work has focused on archiving theory and history, film and media historiography, digital methods, found footage, remixing and practice-based research. We discuss with Christian various was of thinking about the film sound and soundscapes, extending from the experimental ends of film theory and cinephilia (e.g. Michel Chion, Rachel McBrinn, Robin Rimbaud, Noël Akchoté) to the creative appropriations of sonic film material in hip hop music (e.g. MF DOOM, Wu-Tang Clan and The Prodigy). Throughout, we pay a lot of attention to kinds of environments and atmospheres sound creates and makes possible in and through film, and the practice, politics, and ethics of sonic appropriation.

Throughout the interview, we discuss and play short sections of recorded material, for which we do not own the copyright. The use of this material is strictly for the purposes of criticism, commentary, teaching, scholarship and research, and hence covered under the legal provisions for ‘fair use’ or ‘fair dealing’. All credits go directly to the rightful owners, and no copyright infringement is intended.

This interview, which was recorded on 17 June 2022, is Episode 2 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

Events 01: Predictive Cities with Manu Luksch, Melissa Butcher, Sarah Keenan and Joel McKim

This episode is an edited version of the Predictive Cities colloquium, held online on July 1st 2021. The colloquium involved a roundtable discussion of the Predictive Cities exhibition, sponsored by the Urban Intersections Working Group of Birkbeck’s Institute for Social Research. 

Especially for Mediapolis listeners and readers, the exhibition's run has been extended until the end of 2021, so that you can take it in before, after or even while you listen to the roundtable. 

Access the exhibition: http://www.manuluksch.com/project/augmented-reality-virtual-reality-cryptart/predictivecities/ 

The Predictive Cities exhibition is situated in the virtual space of a Mozilla Hubs VR chatroom. It contains two kinds of objects. First, memes that spawn a selection of artworks by Manu Luksch, which interrogate networked urbanism and citizen agency. Second, the exhibition includes a series of spherical photographs of Songdo, South Korea, internationally famous as a case study of greenfield smart cities. The series Songdo is custom-made for VR (if you have access to a VR headset do use it!).

At the roundtable even, we were very fortunate to be joined by the creator of the exhibition, Manu Luksch. Manu is an artist and filmmaker who researches the effects of emerging technologies on daily life, social relations, urban space, and political structures. Her current work focuses on corporate-governmental relationships and the social effects of predictive analytics in the algorithmic city.  Her work is included in the Collection de Centre Pompidou, the BFI National Archive, and the Core Collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. 

In the roundtable, Manu is in conversation with a panel, all people based at Birkbeck, University of London. including:

• Professor Melissa Butcher, who is a social and cultural geographer that uses ethnographic, visual and participatory methodologies to examine questions of identity and belonging within contexts of cultural change and contested urban space. 
• Dr Sarah Keenan, who works at the intersection of legal and political thought, geography, feminist theory and postcolonial studies - and has a particular interest in the expansive and politically potent concept of property, and the ways in which it might be rethought.
• Dr Joel McKim, whose inter-disciplinary research draws together architectural and urban studies, digital media theory, memory studies, philosophy of aesthetics and communication theory – and who is currently studying digital images, animation, and machine vision.

The original recording has been edited, for length and clarity, but also to remove some of the host's (Scott Rodgers') interjections and housekeeping notes for the audience of the live event. Also added in are some sound clips from artworks mentioned in the discussion.

This is an episode within the Events podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we feature recordings of recent talks and symposia at the junction of cities, culture and media.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

Shannon Mattern on '5000 Years of Urban Media'

This is a repost of Mack Hagood’s conversation with Shannon Mattern in 2017 on her book Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. When it was first published, it was the first audio interview to appear on Mediapolis. It was also a preview of the podcast Phantom Power: Sounds about Sound, co-hosted by Hagood with poet and media artist cris cheek in 2018. This episode was written, edited and musically scored by Hagood. Special thanks to Orfeas Skutelis at the New School for his production assistance. [Disclosure: Mattern served at the time on the Mediapolis advisory board]

Interview summary:

Media archeology is a field that attempts to understand new and emerging media by examining old and often dead media technologies. Shannon Mattern takes inspiration from the field but notes that most of its “digging in the past” is metaphorical. “What if we took media archeology literally,” she writes, “and borrowed a few tricks from archeologists of the stones-and-bones variety?” Her book Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, released in November 2017 by University of Minnesota Press, pushes us in that direction.

Each chapter moves us farther back in time in an examination of old urban media infrastructures, starting with the sonic technologies of the telegraph and radio, then moving to the urban emplacement of the printing press, followed by an examination of the earliest surfaces for writing—clay and stone—and finally, perhaps the oldest medium of them all, the human voice. Each of these media reorganized the city around itself and each of them is still with us today, as past and future media co-mingle in the present. – Mack Hagood, www.phantompod.org