Extreme Informatics: Toward the De-Saturated City

Introduction

One might argue that urban informatics takes as an implicit goal the expansion of information into ever-greater visual and aural fields of the ordinary urban citizen. For example, consider the current fascination with large-scale “urban screens”—programmable electronic billboards enveloping the facades of prominent urban structures. UN Studio’s Galleria West Department Store in Seoul, South Korea, realities:united’s SPOTS media façade on Berlin’s Potsdamerplatz, Klien Dytham’s Uniqlo façade in Tokyo, or Peter Cook’s Kunsthaus in Graz, Austria are but a few examples of media-architecture hybrids that demonstrate the transformation of entire architectural surfaces into information displays. Media artists have also explored the building façade as a site for mediated play and social interaction. Berlin-based Chaos Computer Club’s “Blinkenlights” (2001) transformed the façade of the Haus des Lehrers on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz into a low-resolution game board for playing pong with your mobile phone (http://www.christian-moeller.com/display.php?project_id=59). Interest in urban screens is also reflected by a number of recent conferences on the subject bringing together researchers and practitioners from the fields of media, architecture, information and communication technology (ICT) to identify issues and strategies for future development.²

At a smaller scale, signage displaying precise wait-times for busses, trams or subway trains equipped with GPS or other location-based technologies is becoming common in large cities such as Berlin, Rome, and New York. In 2000, New York City-based Adapt Media of Boston introduced AdRunner: a GPS enabled LED display designed for the roofs of taxi cabs that delivered location-based advertising customized for the neighborhood demographics they move through.³ In Toronto, 13,000 cabs have been outfitted with touch screen displays that use GPS to target customers as they drive by local businesses (GPS World, 2007) . Whether it be building-scale display surfaces or smaller mobile screens distributed throughout the city, the trend appears to be toward finding new and inventive ways for displaying real-time or demographically targeted information in physical urban space.

Visions of the future promulgated by popular media project this trend to the extreme. Take for example a scene from Steven Spielberg’s 2002 movie Minority Report, which projects the future of location-based advertising in the city of year 2050. In a chase scene depicting renegade cop Jon Anderton’s flight through a shopping mall, he is bombarded by advertising tailored to his specific location, time and identity as revealed through a retinal scan. Illuminated advertisements that recall his personal preferences and history of shopping transactions call out for his attention as he darts through a cacophony of sound and image. In developing this scene, Spielberg worked with a combination of advertising “creatives” and researchers from MIT’s media lab to extrapolate forward a vision of how advertising might work in the future (Rothkerch, 2002). What’s perhaps interesting here is less the imagined technical wizardry at work in, say, performing retinal scans on the fly and correlating the unique patterning of neural cells and capillary structure with a personal transaction history—all in real-time, and for a rapidly moving target. Rather, as with most science fiction, what’s striking is how this future scenario carries forward existing paradigms of advertising embedded within the present, and what that might tell us about the place of media and information within contemporary culture.