About the Symposium

Date: 15–17 May 2013
Venue: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Fabianinkatu 24

In contemporary cities, the effects of advanced telecommunications and commodified media exist everywhere around us. In both eye-catching and oblique ways, mass and personalised media forms reshape our spatial practices and perceptions of specific milieus and the city as a whole. Throughout the interdisciplinary symposium, the spectacular, ordinary and contested aspects of the media city will be brainstormed through questions such as:

• What is the relationship of materiality of media and symbolic media representations in the construction of densely digitalised urban milieus?
• To what extent and how is media-saturation steering people's urban activities towards automated and un-reflected modes?
• Do the "urban media affordances" open room for creative place-making practices, new amalgamations of technology and corporeality, and even chances for decoding and political resistance?
• In which ways do different forms of art and popular culture (cinema, literature, theatre, digital games etc.) articulate and intervene in the media city?
• What ethical and political issues lurk behind the pecuniary motifs of the ongoing mediatisation of space?
  
  

Keynote speakers include:

• Anne Cronin, Lancaster University, UK

• Scott McQuire, Melbourne University, Australia

• Shannon Mattern, The New School, USA

The symposium is free but registration is required due to the limited space available. Participants wishing to come and listen to the symposium should register by 30 April 2013.

The organising committee

Jani Vuolteenaho & Outi Hakola, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

Seija Ridell & Sami Kolamo, University of Tampere.

Contacts / conference secretary:

Kirsi L. Reyes-Anastacio / Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Email: mediacity-2013(AT)helsinki.fi