http://www.brianmassumi.com/textes/Urban_Appointment.pdf
I found this essay by the contemporary French philosopher, Brian Massumi (I had known of him first as having done the English translation for Deleuze and Guattari's 'a thousand plateaus' and Jacques Atalli).
This paper discusses the work of a group of artists, assembled to participate in the HUMO (HUge and MObile) workshop dedicated to projecting extremely large images upon urban structures. Interestingly, Massumi uses the metaphor of the Situationist 'Possible Rendez-Vous' in which one participant is invited to wait alone in a public place for the possibility of an encounter with another participating subject. Since the encounter is merely a possibility of an infinite number of scenarios the participant is "freed from the bothersome obligations of the ordinary rendezvous since there is no one to wait for." (Debord 3). Interestingly, Massumi anthropomorphizes the massive image projections as a potential subject of the Situationist practice. I wonder if this is perhaps stretching too far the relevance of this practice which is already taken considerably out of context.
There's also some sophisticated talk in this essay discussing aspects of this project--particularly the *physical* components of image and environment--that exceed the basic notions of signifier relationships in art practices. He accomplishes this by introducing the notions of 'affordances' and 'landing sites' and using the park bench as a metaphor for a physical encounter with a usable, bodily-related object (Massumi 5). Also some relevant discussion of issues of globalization and the transnational corporate spectacle and their application to the spectacle of advertising in urban environments.
