Spaces of Sociability: Interdisciplinary Practices of Urban Media, European Network of Cinema Studies, June 9, 2021

The workshop was held over zoom during the NECS 2021 conference in June, 2021. Organized by Will Straw, Alanna Thain and Ipek Tureli, it also featured Dr. Toni Pape (assistant professor of media studies at the University of Amsterdam) and Dr. Eleonora Diamanti (filmmaker and lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at John Cabot University, Rome). It was organized around the prompt: “How does urban media create sociability?” Diamanti, Tureli, Thain and Pape led the audience through a series of practical exercises and discussions, and four students from McGill architecture program diagrammed the conversation and created a visual record of the event.

Proposition: This workshop explores interdisciplinary practices  of somatic and mediated sociability in urban environments. “Spaces of Sociability” assembles experts in architecture, night studies, visual ethnography and video games studies. Bodies in transit through the city likewise transition through embodied archives of mediated memories and corporeal habits, remixing the space-time of the urban itself. Four short presentations will be followed by a moderated conversation, asking: how do the affective contagions of media forms move between onscreen and off-screen urban spaces? What affordances can identify and activate such contagions in pedagogy, research and dissemination? How do mediated movements, memories and experiences become playable and actionable in new contexts? Filmmaker Eleonora Diamanti will present a short film on Cuba’s urban night and discuss visual ethnography’s methods relative to to everyday digital visual practices of urban life. Will Straw will assess novel spaces of contemporary cinema exhibition, which set the dark space of film-viewing within fluid sites of sociability (bars, boutiques, and exhibitions). As they stimulate low-level transfers of sociability across the activities of perusal, conversation and spectatorship, to what extent must cultural forms perceived as “residual” embed themselves within atmospheres of multi-sensorial consumption in order to survive the contemporary media marketplace? Turning from actual sites to studio design practice in architecture, Ipek Tureli will address time-based design in studio teaching between architecture and cinema, through her innovative course and design prompt for creating “Projections for the Urban Night”. Building on media augmentation of bodily movement across urban spaces, Toni Pape’s contribution focuses on how movement practices and conventions from video games are (re)introduced into urban spaces. He will address methodological questions underpinning perceptual and kinetic transference (or kinetic desires) between media and urban space. The discussion will be moderated by Alanna Thain, director of the outdoor bike powered cinema, Cinema Out of the Box.