Image, screen, projection: conceptualising the urban (imaginary) in digital visual culture

This paper examines the implications for theorising the concept of the 'urban imaginary' in the context of digital visual culture. In digital visual culture, the vast majority of images are designed, circulated and displayed using software, data networks and screens of various kinds. The literature on urban imaginaries has long acknowledged that cities are mediated by images as much as by various kinds of other media, and significant attention has been given to specific visual media including films, documentary photography and maps. This remains the case when visual culture is digital. However, digital images have a particular technocultural materiality which also has implications for their co-constitution of the urban. In digital visual culture, visual imagery is dominated by animations, shaped in part by the affordances of computer graphics software. These images require screens and data networks to become visible, which also mediate the infrastructure of cities both materially and imaginatively. Moreover, onscreen digital visual content materialises as an ambient atmosphere projected across and between screens and gazes (human and not). This networked, screenic projection is now sufficiently pervasive to constitute a significant form of urban spatiality. Hence the paper proposes that in digital visual culture, visual urban imaginaries can no longer be theorised only as representations of an urban reality. Instead, onscreen images must be theorised as enacting a form of the urban itself, in three ways: in their visual content, in the material emplacement of their networked screens, and in their projection into and as urban space.