Abstract
The landscape contains messages—about the living environment, climate, culture, society, and history. Reading the landscape reveals different information transmitted directly to the observer. The landscape exists in the eye of observer, and it must be seen to be understood and represented. This chapter debates how the messages are inserted in the urban landscape and the relationship developed between society, landscape, and information. The tendencies from the last decade manifest toward inserting the media message in the architectural object, of harmonizing the information transmitted through the urban landscape with the environment. Using urban digital mediatization, its organic integration into the urban landscape can help create a consciousness for the spirit of the place by communicating “stories”—historical, cultural, urban, and local, by organizing spontaneous urban events or attractive activities, by appealing to the community’s latent knowledge. It produces practically a media landscape—a space of transmission, in which the individual is not only receiver (as it was happening until recently) but also a transmitter of information; the user also generates content.
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Notes
- 1.
The term knows a large series of definitions. Generally is defined as “facts provided or learned about something or someone; what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things; data as processed, stored, or transmitted by a computer; a mathematical quantity expressing the probability of occurrence of a particular sequence of symbols, impulses, etc. as against that of alternative sequences” (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com). The term and problematics of information and communication have been studied by one of the authors of the article in her doctoral thesis. The urban landscape in the Informational Technology context (Cristina Enache 2010).
- 2.
Taylor and Chang (1992) The history of outdoor advertising. Regulation in the United States, Villanova University, p. 284. The first recorded use of outdoor advertising occurred in Egypt, were notices of reward for the captures of runaway slaves were printed on papyrus and posted. The Egyptians were also known to have inscribed hieroglyphics on obelisks to direct travelers and merchants were known to carve sales messages into stone tablets which they placed along public roads.
- 3.
McQuire (2008) Media City, Sage Publications Ltd, 2008 ISBN 1412907934. Rather than treating media as something separate from the city—the medium which ‘represents’ urban phenomena by turning it into an image—I argue that the spatial experience of modern social life emerges through a complex process of co-constitution between architectural structures and urban territories, social practices and media feedback.
- 4.
McQuire (2006) The politics of urban space in the media city, available online http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1544/1459. Electronic screens do not form part of a building’s memory in the way frescoes or stained glass windows could; rather their restless constantly changing imagery contribute to a dematerialization of architecture, a sense of ephemerality which is pervasive in twenty-first century urbanism.
- 5.
de Lange and de Waal (2011) Ownership in the hybrid city, Virtueel Platform, available online http://virtueelplatform.nl/english/publications, p. 7—information technologies play a major role in the urban experience, saturated as it is by mobile communication, Wi-Fi, GPS navigation RFID cards, camera surveillance, urban screens in the public space, and so on. For a long time the domain of digital media was viewed as virtual, as something separate from physical reality. But now these two worlds are tightly interwoven. The contemporary city is a hybrid city with physical and digital infrastructures, services and processes at all levels.
References
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Enache, C., Căplescu, O.A. (2014). Media Landscape. In: Crăciun, C., Bostenaru Dan, M. (eds) Planning and Designing Sustainable and Resilient Landscapes. Springer Geography. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8536-5_16
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