Scott McQuire talk
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Time:
7:00pm – 9:00pm
Location:
cinema, Goldsmiths
City/Town:
New Cross, United Kingdom
“Googling the city”
In May 2007 global media giant Google launched ‘Street Views’, an application enabling users to access a digital archive of street level photographs taken across five cities in the United States. By mid-2008, the service covered over 50 US cities, and was also launched in Australia and Japan, with more countries in the pipeline. In this paper, I want to locate ‘Street View’ within a history of urban representation and metropolitan discourse. Beginning from the invention of photography which initiated new systems of ‘mapping’ urban space in the 19th century, I will trace the ways that the convergence of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with distributed networks and mobile media initiates new struggles over public space.
Scott McQuire is Associate Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space was published in the Theory, Culture and Society series by Sage in 2008.
