Reviews and Features

"A remarkably insightful culmination of over a decade of the author’s engagement with urban screens, Urban Screens: Situations, Practices, Concepts offers a nuanced and multi-faceted set of frameworks and methods for effectively analyzing the screens that co-constitute our urban environments."
– Stephanie DeBoer, The Media School, Indiana University

"Verhoeff offers thoughful insights not only for scholars but for designers and curators of urban screens. This book is a welcome resource for practitioners of urban media art to develop a nuanced understanding of the relational dynamics that shape media in urban space.”
– Kristy H.A. Kang, Arizona State University

"This book offers a welcome stock-take of contemporary developments in urban screens understood as both material and conceptual practices. Verhoeff uses close reading to explores the layered arrangements that bring screens, bodies and places into specific, situated conjunctions. Her book advances the idea that curating urban screens has the potential to contribute to distinctive modes of urban criticality and care."
– Scott McQuire, University of Melbourne

"A unique and compelling book that will be of interest to a range of thinkers and makers across media studies, cinema studies, performance studies, and the humanities. Verhoeff outlines the unique potential of screens as objects to think through, on, and with — and deftly connects this to wider questions (and stakes) of identity and perception."
– Dave Colangelo, Toronto Metropolitan University

Situations, Practices, Concepts

This book offers a discussion of the screens, installations, and media architecture that populate contemporary urban public spaces. It proposes a methodological approach and conceptual toolset for the critical examination, not only of what these screens do, but also of what we can do with them. The book contains a collection of theoretical concepts, developed through an in-depth examination of the material, relational, and performative aspects of a range of urban screens and screen practices. Its situational and practice-oriented approach focuses on the space between their material surfaces, the spectatorial situations they create, and how such screens situate us in relation to the surrounding social and cultural environment of the city.

Offering concepts for a critical understanding of the wide variety of contemporary urban screen practices, the book’s methodological proposal integrates close situational analyses and a historical-comparative approach for individual screens and screening situations in their role as part of a wider global contemporary screen culture.

Author

Nanna Verhoeff

Nanna Verhoeff is Professor of Screen Cultures and Society in the Department of Media and Culture Studies of the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University. She dedicates her research both to the comparative study of screen media, and to the development of methods and concepts for the creative humanities. Previous publications include The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning and Mobile Screens: The Visual Regime of Navigation – both published with Amsterdam University Press. This current book on urban screens completes this trilogy, which proposes methods and concepts for comparing and analyzing screen media across times and places.