Scott Mcquire
Biographic Data
| ID | 122106 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Scott Mcquire |
| GIVEN NAMES | Scott |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcquire |
| SIGNATURE | MCQUIRE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7698-987X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 52 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 29 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Medium Rare. Photography and Media Theory
Photography’s definition as a distinctive medium has often been contested, but seems increasingly challenged in foundational terms in the 21st century. This article will explore photography’s rather unsettled relation to media and media theory by drawing on the writings of Vilém Flusser, Friedrich Kittler, and Bernard Stiegler, who have all — albeit in different ways — positioned the emergence of photography in the 19th century as a signal event …
Seeing Photographically
This Introduction to the ‘Seeing photographically’ special issue begins with four vignettes drawn from (nearly) two centuries of photographic history. These examples are leveraged to pose critical questions about photography’s transformation since the 19th century, and especially in the first decades of the 21st century, as trajectories associated with digitization, networked distribution, the widespread integration of cameras into mobile devices…
Beyond the smart city
Digital media technologies, from networked sensors to large video screens and mobile devices, have become pervasive urban infrastructure in the twentyfirst century. The dominant framework for understanding the integration of digital technology into urban space has been smart city discourse. In this article, I will argue that this framework, as it has so far been articulated, is inadequate to maximizing the social potential of digital urban infras…
The city without qualities
Smart city approaches which seek to utilise large-scale flows of urban data have become an exemplar of contemporary geomedia. In this article, I trace the migration of systems analysis and computational modelling from the RAND Institute’s pioneering nuclear war scenarios in the 1950s to their application to a broader set of social and urban problems in the 1960s. Focusing on the influential New York City-RAND Institute established in 1969, I anal…
Urban Communication
Urban communication is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the wide range of communication practices and technologies that constitute urban social life. It has become more prominent with the growing impact of networked digital technologies such as smartphones on urban environments.
One map to rule them all? Google Maps as digital technical object
Since its launch in 2005, Google Maps has been at the forefront of redefining how mapping and positionality function in the context of a globalizing digital economy. It has become a key socio-technical ‘artefact’ helping to reconfigure the nexus between technology and spatial experience in the 21st century. In this essay, I will trace Google’s evolving strategy in the mapping space. I will argue that the evolution of Google Maps exemplifies way i…
“More than just a library”
Libraries as redistributive technology
Australia is currently rolling out one of the most expensive and ambitious infrastructure projects in the nation’s history. The National Broadband Network is promoted as a catalyst for far-reaching changes in Australia’s economy, governmental service provision, society and culture. However, it is evident that desired dividends, such as greater social engagement, enhanced cultural awareness and increased civic and political participation, do not f…
Platforms and public participation
The concept of the ‘platform’ has recently received extensive analysis in media studies and urban planning. This paper explores the platform’s contemporary emergence as an expression of a new archival logic that questions the possibility of a democratic politics of participation. ‘Public participation’ in the platform invokes the individual in the form of a consumer with a profile rather than as a citizen of a state. This paper returns to Claudio…
Media technologies, cultural mobility, and the nation-state
The Handbook of Cultural Sociology provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary scholarship in sociology and related disciplines focused on the complex relations of culture to social structures and everyday life. With sixty-five essays written by scholars from around the world, the book draws diverse approaches to cultural sociology into a dialogue that charts new pathways for research on culture in a global era. Contributing scholars addres…
City Times
Large screens as creative clusters
Translating Gesture in a Transnational Public Sphere
Translation is a key concept for interpreting cross-cultural exchanges. In this article, we track the development of an artistic project that we developed in conjunction with Federation Square Melbourne and Art Centre Nabi in Seoul. It involved the performance of a live telematic dance that occurred in both cities and was transmitted via the use of large screens. The interaction across these physical and mediated spaces produced a dynamic exchang…
From Glass Architecture to Big Brother
In this essay, I want to reposition the Big Brother phenomenon in the context of an earlier debate about domestic space which occurred during the emergence of architectural modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century. At issue then was the physical reconstruction of the home, particularly through the increasing use of glass as a design element. While glass architecture is even more prevalent in the present, its spatial impact-particul…
Photography's afterlife
In the 1980s, the deployment of digital cameras inspired widespread concern about the 'death of photography' and the loss of the evidentiary value of photographic images. In retrospect, it is easy to see that many of these fears were either overstated or simply misplaced. Nevertheless, the digital threshold has enabled enormous changes to the way in which images are produced, circulated and stored. In this article, the author considers how images…
Mega Screens for Mega Cities
This article considers how networked large urban screens can act as a platform for the creation of an experimental transnational public sphere. It takes as a case study a specific Australia-Korea cultural event that linked large screens in Federation Square, Melbourne, and Tomorrow City, Incheon, 1 through the presentation of SMS-based interactive media art works. The article combines theoretical analyses of global citizenship, mobility, digital …
City Times
In his landmark essay ‘The Overexposed City’, Paul Virilio1 argued that media and communications technologies were leading to the collapse of the historically distinctive space-time of the city as a habitable human milieu. Virilio attributed this collapse directly to the way in which ‘telematics’ was producing a new logic of spatial organisation, in which older modes of boundary formation were being re-routed according to a new topology.
City Life by Adrian Franklin. London
From Object to Platform
In this article we argue that the upsurge of digital technology in contemporary art practice is requiring artists, art institutions and audiences to engage with time in new ways. Beginning with the way institutions such as New York's Museum of Modern Art broke with the museological paradigm of only displaying 'dead' art, we then examine how the emergence of video art in the 1960s created new practices of time-based spectatorship and altered exhib…
Rethinking media events
The current deployment of large screens in city centre public spaces requires a substantial rethinking of our understanding of the relationship of media to urban space. Drawing on a case study of the Public Space Broadcasting project launched in the UK in 2003, this article argues that large screens have the potential to play a significant role in promoting public interaction. However, the realization of this potential requires a far-reaching inv…
The Media City
Introduction The Uncanny Home PART ONE: THRESHOLDS OF THE MEDIA CITY The Territory of Images The City in Fragments Liquid Cities PART TWO: PUBLIC SPACE: STREETS, LIGHTS AND SCREENS Electropolis Performing Public Space PART THREE: PRIVATE SPACE: FROM GLASS ARCHITECTURE TO BIG BROTHER The Glass House The Digital Home Conclusion
Immersion, reflexivity and distraction
Commencing with the history of cinema and of communicative technology, this essay focuses on the ways the cinematic sensibility and urban existence have influenced the contemporary experience of surveillance and complexity. And vice versa
The politics of public space in the media city
What happens when the TV screen leaves home and moves back into the city? The public domain of the 21st century is no longer defined simply by material structures such as streets and plazas. But nor is it defined solely by the virtual space of electronic media. Rather the public domain now emerges in the complex interaction of material and immaterial spaces. These hybrid spaces may be called ‘media cities’. In this essay, I argue that different i…
Technology
This essay traces the increased centrality of technology to social life across the period of modernity. It examines major shifts in thinking about technology which underpin the shift from industrial to post-industrial society, and the emergence of concepts such as 'technoscience' and 'technoculture'. It argues that a critical analysis of technology must probe the way that histories of technological progress have been implicated in colonial hierar…
Immaterial Architectures
Since its invention, electric lighting has had a decisive impact on the psychogeography of urban space. Concentrating on the period from 1880 to World War II, the author argues that electrical lighting has been a major factor in the emergence of modern urban environments, in which the traditional function of architecture as a stable ground has increasingly given way to a growing mutability of forms and fluidity of appearances. This tendency both …
Immaterial Architectures
Since its invention, electric lighting has had a decisive impact on the psychogeography of urban space. Concentrating on the period from 1880 to World War II, the author argues that electrical lighting has been a major factor in the emergence of modern urban environments, in which the traditional function of architecture as a stable ground has increasingly given way to a growing mutability of forms and fluidity of appearances. This tendency both …
Mega Screens for Mega Cities
This article considers how networked large urban screens can act as a platform for the creation of an experimental transnational public sphere. It takes as a case study a specific Australia-Korea cultural event that linked large screens in Federation Square, Melbourne, and Tomorrow City, Incheon, 1 through the presentation of SMS-based interactive media art works. The article combines theoretical analyses of global citizenship, mobility, digital …
One map to rule them all? Google Maps as digital technical object
Since its launch in 2005, Google Maps has been at the forefront of redefining how mapping and positionality function in the context of a globalizing digital economy. It has become a key socio-technical ‘artefact’ helping to reconfigure the nexus between technology and spatial experience in the 21st century. In this essay, I will trace Google’s evolving strategy in the mapping space. I will argue that the evolution of Google Maps exemplifies way i…
Photography's afterlife
In the 1980s, the deployment of digital cameras inspired widespread concern about the 'death of photography' and the loss of the evidentiary value of photographic images. In retrospect, it is easy to see that many of these fears were either overstated or simply misplaced. Nevertheless, the digital threshold has enabled enormous changes to the way in which images are produced, circulated and stored. In this article, the author considers how images…
Rethinking media events
The current deployment of large screens in city centre public spaces requires a substantial rethinking of our understanding of the relationship of media to urban space. Drawing on a case study of the Public Space Broadcasting project launched in the UK in 2003, this article argues that large screens have the potential to play a significant role in promoting public interaction. However, the realization of this potential requires a far-reaching inv…
Technology
This essay traces the increased centrality of technology to social life across the period of modernity. It examines major shifts in thinking about technology which underpin the shift from industrial to post-industrial society, and the emergence of concepts such as 'technoscience' and 'technoculture'. It argues that a critical analysis of technology must probe the way that histories of technological progress have been implicated in colonial hierar…
Digital Dialectics
Gary looked like he had no legs because we eliminated them.We had Gary wear bluescreen stockings over his feet and lower legs that tucked into the ends of his pants.We did blank plate passes of each location to add back to the information Gary's lower legs blocked.After we removed his lower legs, we did some 3-D work and added shadows to make the ends of his legs blend organically
Binded by the (Speed of) Light
This article traces the significant links that Virilio's dromological analysis posits between the social and political impact of mechanical vehicles and communications media. Focusing on the way that the 'revolutions' of transportation and transmission have fundamentally altered contemporary experiences of space and time, the article explores the implications of Virilio s concept of spatio-temporal 'overexposure'. My contention is that Virilio's …
From Object to Platform
In this article we argue that the upsurge of digital technology in contemporary art practice is requiring artists, art institutions and audiences to engage with time in new ways. Beginning with the way institutions such as New York's Museum of Modern Art broke with the museological paradigm of only displaying 'dead' art, we then examine how the emergence of video art in the 1960s created new practices of time-based spectatorship and altered exhib…
The city without qualities
Smart city approaches which seek to utilise large-scale flows of urban data have become an exemplar of contemporary geomedia. In this article, I trace the migration of systems analysis and computational modelling from the RAND Institute’s pioneering nuclear war scenarios in the 1950s to their application to a broader set of social and urban problems in the 1960s. Focusing on the influential New York City-RAND Institute established in 1969, I anal…
Libraries as redistributive technology
Australia is currently rolling out one of the most expensive and ambitious infrastructure projects in the nation’s history. The National Broadband Network is promoted as a catalyst for far-reaching changes in Australia’s economy, governmental service provision, society and culture. However, it is evident that desired dividends, such as greater social engagement, enhanced cultural awareness and increased civic and political participation, do not f…
Platforms and public participation
The concept of the ‘platform’ has recently received extensive analysis in media studies and urban planning. This paper explores the platform’s contemporary emergence as an expression of a new archival logic that questions the possibility of a democratic politics of participation. ‘Public participation’ in the platform invokes the individual in the form of a consumer with a profile rather than as a citizen of a state. This paper returns to Claudio…
From Glass Architecture to Big Brother
In this essay, I want to reposition the Big Brother phenomenon in the context of an earlier debate about domestic space which occurred during the emergence of architectural modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century. At issue then was the physical reconstruction of the home, particularly through the increasing use of glass as a design element. While glass architecture is even more prevalent in the present, its spatial impact-particul…
Immersion, reflexivity and distraction
Commencing with the history of cinema and of communicative technology, this essay focuses on the ways the cinematic sensibility and urban existence have influenced the contemporary experience of surveillance and complexity. And vice versa
Digital Dialectics
Gary looked like he had no legs because we eliminated them.We had Gary wear bluescreen stockings over his feet and lower legs that tucked into the ends of his pants.We did blank plate passes of each location to add back to the information Gary's lower legs blocked.After we removed his lower legs, we did some 3-D work and added shadows to make the ends of his legs blend organically
Binded by the (Speed of) Light
This article traces the significant links that Virilio's dromological analysis posits between the social and political impact of mechanical vehicles and communications media. Focusing on the way that the 'revolutions' of transportation and transmission have fundamentally altered contemporary experiences of space and time, the article explores the implications of Virilio s concept of spatio-temporal 'overexposure'. My contention is that Virilio's …
Slow Train Coming? The Transition to Digital Distribution and Exhibition in Cinema
Throughout the 1990s, digital technology entered film production and rapidly altered both the production process and the audience's experience, as complex soundscapes and special effects became the hallmark of cinematic blockbusters. By 1999, the prospect of an end-to-end digital cinema, or cinema without celluloid, seemed to be in sight. Digital distribution and exhibition were extolled as particularly attractive prospects, and a number of test …
Immaterial Architectures
Since its invention, electric lighting has had a decisive impact on the psychogeography of urban space. Concentrating on the period from 1880 to World War II, the author argues that electrical lighting has been a major factor in the emergence of modern urban environments, in which the traditional function of architecture as a stable ground has increasingly given way to a growing mutability of forms and fluidity of appearances. This tendency both …
From Code to the Everyday
This is an electronic version of an article published in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies is available online at
The politics of public space in the media city
What happens when the TV screen leaves home and moves back into the city? The public domain of the 21st century is no longer defined simply by material structures such as streets and plazas. But nor is it defined solely by the virtual space of electronic media. Rather the public domain now emerges in the complex interaction of material and immaterial spaces. These hybrid spaces may be called ‘media cities’. In this essay, I argue that different i…
Technology
This essay traces the increased centrality of technology to social life across the period of modernity. It examines major shifts in thinking about technology which underpin the shift from industrial to post-industrial society, and the emergence of concepts such as 'technoscience' and 'technoculture'. It argues that a critical analysis of technology must probe the way that histories of technological progress have been implicated in colonial hierar…
Immersion, reflexivity and distraction
Commencing with the history of cinema and of communicative technology, this essay focuses on the ways the cinematic sensibility and urban existence have influenced the contemporary experience of surveillance and complexity. And vice versa
The Media City
Introduction The Uncanny Home PART ONE: THRESHOLDS OF THE MEDIA CITY The Territory of Images The City in Fragments Liquid Cities PART TWO: PUBLIC SPACE: STREETS, LIGHTS AND SCREENS Electropolis Performing Public Space PART THREE: PRIVATE SPACE: FROM GLASS ARCHITECTURE TO BIG BROTHER The Glass House The Digital Home Conclusion
Rethinking media events
The current deployment of large screens in city centre public spaces requires a substantial rethinking of our understanding of the relationship of media to urban space. Drawing on a case study of the Public Space Broadcasting project launched in the UK in 2003, this article argues that large screens have the potential to play a significant role in promoting public interaction. However, the realization of this potential requires a far-reaching inv…
From Object to Platform
In this article we argue that the upsurge of digital technology in contemporary art practice is requiring artists, art institutions and audiences to engage with time in new ways. Beginning with the way institutions such as New York's Museum of Modern Art broke with the museological paradigm of only displaying 'dead' art, we then examine how the emergence of video art in the 1960s created new practices of time-based spectatorship and altered exhib…
City Life by Adrian Franklin. London
City Times
In his landmark essay ‘The Overexposed City’, Paul Virilio1 argued that media and communications technologies were leading to the collapse of the historically distinctive space-time of the city as a habitable human milieu. Virilio attributed this collapse directly to the way in which ‘telematics’ was producing a new logic of spatial organisation, in which older modes of boundary formation were being re-routed according to a new topology.
From Glass Architecture to Big Brother
In this essay, I want to reposition the Big Brother phenomenon in the context of an earlier debate about domestic space which occurred during the emergence of architectural modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century. At issue then was the physical reconstruction of the home, particularly through the increasing use of glass as a design element. While glass architecture is even more prevalent in the present, its spatial impact-particul…
Photography's afterlife
In the 1980s, the deployment of digital cameras inspired widespread concern about the 'death of photography' and the loss of the evidentiary value of photographic images. In retrospect, it is easy to see that many of these fears were either overstated or simply misplaced. Nevertheless, the digital threshold has enabled enormous changes to the way in which images are produced, circulated and stored. In this article, the author considers how images…
Mega Screens for Mega Cities
This article considers how networked large urban screens can act as a platform for the creation of an experimental transnational public sphere. It takes as a case study a specific Australia-Korea cultural event that linked large screens in Federation Square, Melbourne, and Tomorrow City, Incheon, 1 through the presentation of SMS-based interactive media art works. The article combines theoretical analyses of global citizenship, mobility, digital …
City Times
Large screens as creative clusters
Translating Gesture in a Transnational Public Sphere
Translation is a key concept for interpreting cross-cultural exchanges. In this article, we track the development of an artistic project that we developed in conjunction with Federation Square Melbourne and Art Centre Nabi in Seoul. It involved the performance of a live telematic dance that occurred in both cities and was transmitted via the use of large screens. The interaction across these physical and mediated spaces produced a dynamic exchang…
Media technologies, cultural mobility, and the nation-state
The Handbook of Cultural Sociology provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary scholarship in sociology and related disciplines focused on the complex relations of culture to social structures and everyday life. With sixty-five essays written by scholars from around the world, the book draws diverse approaches to cultural sociology into a dialogue that charts new pathways for research on culture in a global era. Contributing scholars addres…
Platforms and public participation
The concept of the ‘platform’ has recently received extensive analysis in media studies and urban planning. This paper explores the platform’s contemporary emergence as an expression of a new archival logic that questions the possibility of a democratic politics of participation. ‘Public participation’ in the platform invokes the individual in the form of a consumer with a profile rather than as a citizen of a state. This paper returns to Claudio…
Libraries as redistributive technology
Australia is currently rolling out one of the most expensive and ambitious infrastructure projects in the nation’s history. The National Broadband Network is promoted as a catalyst for far-reaching changes in Australia’s economy, governmental service provision, society and culture. However, it is evident that desired dividends, such as greater social engagement, enhanced cultural awareness and increased civic and political participation, do not f…
“More than just a library”
Urban Communication
Urban communication is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the wide range of communication practices and technologies that constitute urban social life. It has become more prominent with the growing impact of networked digital technologies such as smartphones on urban environments.
One map to rule them all? Google Maps as digital technical object
Since its launch in 2005, Google Maps has been at the forefront of redefining how mapping and positionality function in the context of a globalizing digital economy. It has become a key socio-technical ‘artefact’ helping to reconfigure the nexus between technology and spatial experience in the 21st century. In this essay, I will trace Google’s evolving strategy in the mapping space. I will argue that the evolution of Google Maps exemplifies way i…
Sociology (23 works) · Computer Science (22 works) · Political science (15 works) · Media studies (13 works) · Art (11 works) · Engineering (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Visual arts (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Geography (8 works)