The Media Architecture Biennale 2023 (MAB23) takes place June 14-15 (online) and June 21-23 (in-person) in Toronto, Canada. The event, which features keynotes, roundtables, and awards, aims to offer a platform for communities of research and practice concerned with media and the built environment. MAB23 will bring together students, academics, and professionals from architecture, art, design, urban planning, media and communication, urban informatics, and public policy to share new ideas and shape this evolving field.
One of the themes for MAB23 is (Dis)engagement.
In 2017, Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs tried to sell Toronto on its vision of a more “efficient” and “enjoyable” urban future built through a suite of interconnected embedded urban sensors, platforms, protocols, and displays. Facing strong local resistance, the project eventually collapsed. MAB23’s thematic focus on (Dis)engagement asks: How is media architecture situated and mobilized within the proliferation of “smart city” plans and platforms of data representation and capture? How and why is it being resisted, reworked, or rejected in theory or in practice? This theme considers lessons learned from media architectural “failure” as a countermovement to the drive towards urban expedience and endless, frictionless growth. On the other hand, it also explores the potential role of media architecture in addressing issues of trust, safety and consent in digitally mediated urbanism.
The MAB23 award category associated with the (Dis)engagement theme is Participatory Media Architecture and Infrastructures, one of seven MAB award categories. This award seeks digital, physical, or hybrid projects that engage with the social and political life of the city and empower citizens to take part in collaborative city-making, especially through processes of placemaking and placekeeping. This category also highlights projects that encourage exchanges between citizens for the purposes of civic engagement or the management of urban infrastructures and shared resources.
Two illustrative examples of this category are Megaphone and Guerrilha Projects against Bolsonaro, both nominees for MAB20 awards. Megaphone was a large-scale urban installation staged by Moment Factory in Montreal’s bustling Quartier des spectacles during the fall of 2013. Visitors were invited to speak into a giant megaphone, and their voices were then translated through a voice recognition interface into images projected directly onto the façade of the Université du Québec à Montréal’s Kennedy Building. In the months leading up to the mayoral elections that November, Megaphone prodded visitors to consider the importance of one’s voice, and more pointedly, the impact of voices shared collectively in the public sphere. The choice of the University façade was especially resonant, as the year before, the province-wide “Maple Spring” student strikes to protest tuition hikes led to government attempts to ban protest on university campuses.[i]
Another evocative example is the more recent Guerrilha Projects against Bolsonaro, created by Alexis Anastasiou at the height of the COVID pandemic. Stuck in his São Paulo apartment during the city’s months-long lockdown in 2020, the artist projected protest images against the Bolsonaro government onto nearby buildings in the dense downtown area. Accompanied by the sonic cacophony of São Paulo residents protesting in the background, images of Bolsonaro—some masked, some stamped with words “Genocida" "Impeachment"—illuminated the night sky. These projections spread quickly on social media and were picked up by international media. At a time when Brazilians, enraged with Bolsonaro’s downplaying of the pandemic that killed nearly 700,000, were not able to congregate in public, these projections manifested a powerful collective visual repertoire of resistance.
To learn more about the event, visit mab23.org
