Provocations on Media Architecture

Media architecture, the field where media and public space meet, bring up urgent topics today:

How does media architecture distribute suspicion and trust?

What is a collage of media architecture?

How is media architecture vectored?

How can media architecture address privilege?

These questions -or more broadly, conceptual provocations- aim to challenge the binary of techno-optimism and technological agoraphobia, offering a platform upon which to construct new, critically- and contextually rooted theories upon which media architecture might grab hold.

Intentionally open-ended and dialogical, Provocations on Media Architecture brings together twenty-one thought leaders across architecture, visual arts, design, curation, academia, and public policy to address these ideas and themes. Authors respond with images and brief texts, incorporating the perspective of their own creative and scholarly practice. Entries range from descriptions of relevant artworks and design projects to reflections spawned from first-person encounters with media architecture in situ to scholarly analyses to AI-assisted theory. These themselves transfigure into a set of provocations, supplanting the original questions which inspired their construction, through which to encourage further theory and practice. Across the diverse and at times contradictory arguments and methods employed, new constellations and connections emerge.

This edition is devised as an extension of the Media Architecture Biennale 2023.