Cities Have Eyes: Architectural Surfaces as Urban Screens

This paper concentrates the analysis on the spaces of hybridisation between urban and media language in the contemporary city, focusing particularly on the Italian case. The characteristic figurative motif will be the archi-tectural surface transformed into a screen, echoing the forms of cinematographic repre-sentation that prefigure the emblematic cases of urban installation and video surveillance, as well as the visual contaminations of media building and videomapping, to the point of envisaging the city as a viewing device, as has occurred in recent technological practices linked to augmented and virtual reality. The field of investigation is the research conducted in the field of audiovisual experimentation in the first two decades of the twenty-first century: from avant-garde and experimental video to artistic animation, from video art to the visual arts. In these experimentations it is the city that emerges from the passive role of contempla-tive object of observation to become an active subject of vision.