Media@McGill collaborative event with the CRI, The Intermedial City, is an event which questions the notion of urbanity in today’s multiple mediations.
9-11 October, 2008, Thomson House (map), McGill University, 3650 McTavish, Montreal.
As described by the CRI: ‘By all counts, urban space has entered a period of transformation: the most recent phase of capitalist accumulation creates space and recreates cityscapes; neoliberal policies lead to a diminution of the State's capacity to direct urban growth; global cities gain relative autonomy from local sites; distension, fragmentation and conurbation blur the city's limits; new architectures open outward to information networks or redraw inner social boundaries; other landmarks and cultural indicators shift, making it impossible to project an image of the city. We propose to analyze and discuss how the city's multiple mediations, both a symptom and agent of these changes, signal continuities and ruptures with earlier forms of urban space.
The question of the city's mediality extends beyond the way in which cities contain media infrastructures or the way that distinct media produce and project images of urban space, touching on how the interactions of diverse media shape daily urban living. Since the confrontations of oral dialogue and writing in the Greek polis, historically variable media exchanges have framed how citizens engage with their built environment with changing modalities of cultural production, spatial perception, and (self-) knowledge. A properly intermedial space, the city is constituted by historic architectures and urban palimpsests, by a meshwork of transmitted codes and discursive encounters, and by material media forms whose convergence and collisions produce distinct significations and senses of place.
Through historical analyses or studies of today's urban landscape, the "Intermedial City" conference seeks to explore how media exchanges and encounters effectuate urban spaces and cultures. We propose three main axes that focus on:
(a) how distinct media practices form collective groups through disparate networks and infrastructures, defining the limits of the city conceived as a cultural or political space;
(b) how new communications technologies, each with its own signifying modes and spatial logics, reconfigure the medial dimension necessary to urban circulation and integration; and
(c) how these medial shifts affect city dwellers' perceptions and apperceptions, making possible new imaginaries and new forms of subjective experience.’