I ended the first chapter of this book with an injunction to consider the aesthetic qualities of the moving image as guidelines for the design of spatial arrangements as the scripting of perceptual experience. That general point was meant to connect the everyday mobility of people moving through space to a problematic of mobility as an aesthetic practice of performative visuality. Diachronically, this study builds on both continuities and contrasts between historical moments. In this chapter I look at mobility and vision in this combination of everyday efficacy and aesthetic experience, from the other end of that two-way street: the contemporary transformations of space as it is subject to new technologies and media. In terms of the integration of everyday technology and aesthetic experience, it is, moreover, noticeable that mobility receives a different status when it is no longer the subject's doing. When driving on highways, for example, or navigating the screen of a handheld gadget, the subject is to an extent in charge of his own mobility. But this becomes a different experience when the movement comes from the environment to the multi-paced pedestrian, who is distracted or focused, rushed or relaxed. I examine the presence of screens in public spaces, particularly in cities, to understand how these screens function and what they do; how they make hitherto stable architecture mobile, rendering the city-user a participant rather than an initiator of mobility; and how they compel an aesthetic experience infused into the everyday.

Places of Transit

Urban spaces are places of transit of the kind mentioned in Chapter 1, or, as Marc Augé paradoxically calls them, non-places that are characteristic of supermodernity and radically different from the spaces of modernity: