Urban Media Now (event at Birkbeck, 31 March 2020)

I’m happy to announce that on 31 March 2020, I will be hosting a public discussion with Charlotte Brundson (Warwick), Zlatan Krajina (Zagreb), David Rowe (Western Sydney) and Deborah Stevenson (Western Sydney) on the notion that media studies might be experiencing an ‘urban’ moment. The discussion is inspired by the release of the Routledge Companion to … Continue Reading

City Maps: Ben Fraser on ‘Urban cultural studies: getting oriented, getting published’

Workshop 5 was the concluding workshop of the CHASE City Maps series, and was led by Ben Fraser (University of Arizona). It had two aims. On the one hand, it offered reflections on the emerging field of Urban Cultural Studies and its interdisciplinary approach, bridging the Arts and Humanities and the Social Sciences. On the … Continue Reading

City Maps: Shannon Mattern and Rebecca Ross on ‘Mapping urban media infrastructures’

In Workshop 4 of the CHASE City Maps series, Shannon Mattern (The New School) and Rebecca Ross (Central Saint Martins) examined methods for exploring, excavating, observing, testing, and notating urban media infrastructures, broadly defined. Participants developed a shared infrastructural question and cartographic strategy, before heading out to Bloomsbury’s Russell Square and environs to make observations. … Continue Reading

City Maps: Clancy Wilmott on ‘Urban spaces and scalar traces’

In Workshop 3 of the CHASE City Maps series, Clancy Wilmott from the University of Manchester (now at University of California Berkeley) began with an outline of her own work on mobile mapping, and the emerging relationships between space, cartography and digital technologies. These themes were connected with the research projects of workshop participants, who … Continue Reading

City Maps: Iain Borden on ‘The transdisciplinarity of urban experience’

In Workshop 1 of the CHASE City Maps series, Iain Borden from University College London focused on ‘experience’ as a transdisciplinary urban concept. As depicted in the film from the workshop, his introduction to the concept of experience was both via his own work – on topics ranging from skateboarding to automobile driving – as … Continue Reading

Data Materiality Episode 1: Vicki Mayer on Data Centres, Media Aura and Jobs

At very long last, the first episode of Data Materiality is out. Data Materiality is a podcast series I co-host with Joel McKim, and is related to our three-year research project running under the same name, co-sponsored by Birkbeck’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture and the Vasari Centre for Art and Technology. … Continue Reading