Introduction

Activating exUrbanScreens: Applying Curatorial Design toward Affective Experience in Civic Media Spectacles

“…In certain ways, exUrbanScreens can be seen as adding yet one more manifestation to the growing typology of “civic spectacles” most clearly identified with the Nuit Blanche , or White Night . As posited by Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher in their introduction to the recent special issue of the journal Public dedicated to the topic, this cultural phenomenon “challenges conventional understandings of audience, spectacle, and what it means to ‘view’ art” (Drobnick and Fisher , 6).…”

“…The overwhelming popularity of this large‐scale media spectacular and other events like it that have proliferated over the course of the past decade clearly promotes a heightened mode of accessibility, inclusivity, and social engagement that features prominently in relation to “public art,” but also, more broadly, in a range of contemporary art practices . However, the seemingly unabating populist appeal of such “performance spectacles” is challenged if a more critical vantage is taken, particular given that such events might be said to enact—or perform—a form of “civics” that demonstrates “an instrumentalizing turn in the culture industry where civic branding and promotion work in concert with urban revitalization and gentrification to reap the socio‐economic benefits that presumably accrue to the ‘creative city’” (Drobnick and Fisher , 6). While our practice‐based insights will serve as a basis for turning discussion onto more generalizable issues to do with media art, contemporary curatorship, and exhibition design, we will draw upon them to extend the critical basis for understanding the nature of audience participation in exhibition events of this format and how the social dynamics of their attendant program architecture underwrites art's reimagining as “an ideal model for engagement and sociability” (Diack , 10).…”

“…While observations like these celebrate the transformative potential of such “performance spectacles” (Drobnick and Fisher , 7), the interpretation offered by Max Haiven (also included in the special issue of Public ) is much more critical of the conspicuous participation that these events promote. He incisively draws attention to the way that these post‐public events form a new public‐private paradigm promoting complicity “with the city and its populations (the civus ) towards a moment of market supremacy, privatization, and securitization organized along intersecting axes of wealth, gender, race, citizenship status, and occupation” (Haiven , 79).…”

“…Opening directly onto the street as well as an arcade, this repurposed shop provided an arena for active engagement as well as casual viewing by passersby. In an effort to give form to the observation that, for the Situationists, daily life replaced the painted canvas as an “arena in which to act” (Lutticken , 127), this mode of presentation was designed to encourage direct participants and viewers alike to “reconceive their city as well as their own sense of agency while in the midst of the spectacle” (Drobnick and Fisher , 7). Embracing the rhetoric of community arts, the playful appeal of the artwork itself is (apparently) complicit with a neoliberal sense of “civics.” Drawing upon a definition of civility as a project performed in a range of cultural arenas as well as through the practices of everyday life, Max Haiven elaborates how the routines associated with “civic spectacles” operate by placing expectations upon individuals that are reinforced by their interactions:

Civics is a timbre of performativity.

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