This temporal bi-polarity brings us back to Johannesma’s virtual antiquities in the library window. That example self-reflexively addresses the space-making aspect of screens, specifically with respect to domain, through raising a primary ques-tion:‘what is inside and outside?’. The very act of asking this question unhinges a primary distinction between real and virtual, fact and fiction. The installation, a simple ersatz window, performatively does this in the space itself, which is why it must be seen as an installation and not simply an artwork.
Lev Manovich (2006) conceptualizes the uncertainty or mixing of space as aug-mented space, a physical space that is overlain with layers of data. The word augmen-tation emphasizes the extension of space, the ‘becoming more’ by the use of media technologies. This presupposes a stable essence of something to which a supplement is being added. This brings into tension a sensitivity to the layered-ness of space with a fixation of that same space in terms of origin and essence.
The opening up of space, in this conceptualization, is based on hierarchical terms that presuppose a stable domain on top of which a layer can be added, as supple-ment. While this supplementary thinking can be useful to discern the layers that cooperate, a next step would be to consider this cooperation as establishing a new whole, in which the layers are part of a hybrid entity. As Michiel de Lange asks in his essay on locative media:
The question is whether this quantitative (by which I mean additive) property of augmentation – an extra layer, more information, multiplying spaces – becomes a qualitative change, and if so, how. (2009: 59)
While his case is pervasive gaming, using mobile media for playful engagement within urban space, to which I will return in the next chapter in relation to loca-tion-based and augmented reality applications for mobile screens, I think this question is relevant for urban screens as well.
Taking the literal framing of screens on site, a physical framing of different spatialities, it is perhaps useful to recall an older observation launched by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s. The French philosopher argued for the impossibility to dis-tinguish texts from their“outside”, be it literary of visual texts. Everything sur-rounding the text is itself subject to structuring, interpreting, and connecting.
This idea leads to the notion of thesupplement. Every sign, text, or“interpretable object”(Scarry 1985) is connected to what it lacks to be complete. Hence, the hors-texteis also textual in nature. This structure is what Derrida (1976) calls supple-mentarity. Moreover, the distinctions between one object or text and what sur-rounds it are never absolute nor stable. The delimitation of the object by its frame is fraught by a two-way permeability. The frame is both part of the painting and its outside. This structure is called parergon, a term Derrida (1987 [1978]) borrows from Nietzsche. Very simply put, there is no outside-the-text. But there is more to this Derridean reasoning.
Jonathan Culler points out that supplementarity has the status of an inevitable law. (1997: 11) He quotes Derrida inOf Grammatology:
Through this series of supplements there emerges a law: that of an endless linked series, ineluctably multiplying the supplementary mediations that pro-duce the sense of the very thing that they defer: the impression of the thing itself, of immediate presence, or originary perception. Immediacy is derived.
Everything begins with the intermediary. (1976: 226)
This endless series of supplements can be seen in our context as a form of aug-mentation. And where space is concerned, as it is here, this augmentation of space, or augmented space, is, according to the analogy with supplementarity, by definition unlimited. This makes the stability of space not only unreal, but
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sirable. For it is thehors-texte, the supplement, that occasions the possibility of a sense of space as here-now, in other words, as delimited. When we consider the layers of augmentation to be supplements in the Derridian sense, it becomes clear that presence is constructed, not ontological in essence; and not fixed, but emerg-ing out of the performance of connectivity that technology allows. This notion of augmenting, which remains ontological, is less relevant here than the performa-tive undermining of spatial certainty and the resulting construction of ambiguity.
This, I surmise, is the qualitative change de Lange suggests: the change is in the status of space; the how is in the performance.
Like de Lange, others usehybridityfor this phenomenon of spatial ambiguity, with an emphasis on building connections. Adriana de Souza e Silva uses the term hybrid space, which emphasizes the movements and connections between spatial realms. She defines hybrid spatiality as follows:
Hybrid spaces are mobile spaces, created by the constant movement of users who carry portable devices continuously connected to the Internet and to other users. A hybrid space is conceptually different from what has been termed mixed reality, augmented reality, augmented virtuality, or virtual reality […] The possibility of an“always-on”connection when one moves through a city transforms our experience of space by enfolding remote contexts inside the present context. (2006: 262)
In this framing of hybridity, it is essentially in the experience of connectivity that the“enfolding”manifests itself. Or to reverse this: it is the aspect of connectivity that is at the center of the conception of a hybrid spatialexperience.
Above I considered connectivity at the root of a mobile sphere that takes us out of the obstinately maintained dichotomy of private versus public spheres. This sphere between public space and private sphere is a consequence of individuals being connected, either to other individuals or more diffusely, to an ‘online’
domain. This sphere in itself has traits of both public space and private sphere.
This connected state, and the possibility for communication and traffic between the different realms that together establish our ‘reality’ exert influence on our experience of physical surroundings. This mobile sphere is a consequence of communication, feedback and interactivity–yet, the feeling that results is neither individual nor communal. It is a paradoxically individual experience of being con-nected and plugged-in. You are in touch, but not together.15
This networked principle makes the mobile sphere not public in the more tra-ditional sense: individual nodes are connected to others, but never simultaneously present either physically or temporally. This notion of a mobile sphere builds on de Souza e Silva’s notion of“hybrid space”that is a result of always being con-nected and online. Of the parasynonyms‘sphere’,‘realm’, and‘domain’, I prefer the term ‘sphere’ because it refers to an experience as a consequence of this
hybrid spatiality, not to the spatiality itself–that just lost its ontological status in the process of this discussion. De Souza e Silva also emphasizes that her notion of hybridity is the result of augmentation of space, to which the practices this involves and makes possible should be added. As a useful concept in this context she puts forward the importance of practices. That is what makes her conceptua-lization of hybrid space attractive to me. I want to extend this emphasis to my notion of mobile sphere, precisely because it confirms that practice and spatial experience reciprocally constitute each other. In this sense, a notion of mobile sphere works well with ideas of how screensspacemobility.16
This experiential hybridity can be recognized in practices of reactive or interac-tive programming of urban screens. This involves screen content that responds to passersby or that can be actively modified, for example by using computer term-inals, through Internet, or by text messaging. Again in Amsterdam, we can find a contemporary (and temporary) example.
Until 2008, the interior of the restaurant Club 11 on the top floor of the Post CS building in Amsterdam offered a screen situation that, like Johannesma’s win-dows and like most urban screens, played with an inversion of inside and outside.
Like virtual windows, screens were mounted above the real windows that show the grand panorama of the city’s skyline. While these screens were indoors, I do consider them as urban screens because they are situated in a public place. They were large, and they were visible to a large number of passing or temporary spec-tators. Moreover, they were silent, like outdoor screens, and had a similar effect of showing images that seemed to subtitle the space that surrounded them.
Because they hung above the windows, they reflected, almost literally, the trans-parent property of glass windows.
Rather than surfaces we can see through, the virtual windows were emphati-cally opaque, yet showed an array of moving images, entirely unlike the static and distant panorama of the skyline below.
The programming of the twelve screens was varied, but mostly consisted of video art installations. A particularly intriguing aspect was the interactive pro-gramming of these screens, like thePlaying Flickrinstallation, organized by Med-iamatic in 2005. Like photo DJs, visitors could individually call up (public) screen content by sending tags or keywords by text messages, upon which images were selected from the online, public photo archive/database Flickr.17
The working of this installation is based on the integration of physical pres-ence, agency of viewers-participants, and access to and display of archival mate-rial–in this case an online‘presence’of photographs that is activated in a context of display: the screens in a public space. Whereas Johannesma’s Library windows showcase the treasures that are hidden behind the façade of the library’s archive, the mesmerizing and partly abstracted play of lights in the still projection of the images ofPlaying Flickrvisualize the visitors’picks. The selection itself is what is displayed, self-reflexively highlighting the selection as act.
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Fig 4.9:Playing Flickr(Mediamatic, 2005). Photo: Nadya Peek for Mediamatic.
This installation shows us how connectivity as part of programming results in a dialectic binding of spaces: in this case of on-screen space to online space. Screen practices such as these problematize a clear-cut, oppositional distinction between private and public spaces– a dominant dichotomy in debates about the spatial properties of contemporary screen media. Instead, they encourage an active
bind-ing by the urban subject of these realms. Specific sites negotiate a certain sense of the relationship between public and private: media shape our experience of sites in these terms, affecting that experience differently from site to site and from time to time. This binding–as procedural activity, not as end result–can be consid-ered as a form of navigation. Navigating screenspace is the continuous construc-tion of space through screens that, in turn, infuse physical space and material architecture. Navigating, then, is not winding your way through a pre-existing space. In the transformed city where such screens occupy more and more visual space, navigating becomes an active construction of spaces that were as yet non-existent, or not quite existent.