Contemporary Urban Media Art—Images of UrgencyA Curatorial Inquiry

This dissertation unfolds through an inquiry into human perceptual experience in media aesthetic conditions of our contemporary, communicative existence, namely in urban contexts of highly technologically developed environments. It examines overall, from a combined academic and curatorial perspective, how urban media art—media aesthetic art forms situated in an urban context—may be considered contemporary in the understanding of art that departs from, responds to and coexists with “time” and temporal experience, and as engaging with perceptual structures and mediated conditions in particular contemporaneities. In inquiring into three media aesthetic tendencies today: intensity, intelligence and immersion, this dissertation examines the art’s contingent relations with our technological contemporaneity. Contemporary conditions of “immersion” are especially problematized in terms of a tendency of spectacularization of behavior (rather than conditioned by spectacles), characterizing our “duration” today, and in terms of images we live through rather than “images” we look at, in light of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of images as sense-impressions. The author suggests that urban media art—as images of urgency oscillating between presence effects and meaning effects—may be considered contemporary by way of its potential real-time interference with site-contextual, environmental-relational and future-virtual realms of distributed sensibility today, levels at which the art’s images potentially affect human perceptual experience and duration.

Lucas Bambozzi, Coisa Lida (2014), large-scale responsive video installation, SP Urban Digital Festival 2014, São Paulo.

(© Verve Cultural. Courtesy of Lucas Bambozzi and Verve Cultural. Photo by Bia Ferrer.)