About the Exhibition
The exhibition was part of the MediaCity 4 International Conference, Workshops, and Exhibition hosted by the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies. It accompanied the scholarly program and gave form to the conference's research on urbanity and digital media.
MediaCity 4 took place from May 3–5, 2013 at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. The exhibition shared the same venue footprint as the conference sessions and workshops.
The exhibition extended the reflective inquiry of MediaCity 4 by giving spatial form to questions about architecture, cities, and situated technologies. Rather than treating digital media as separate from urban life, the presentation considered how media, materials, communications, and design become entangled in everyday environments. The exhibition accompanied an international program of scholarly exchange, workshops, and discussion, creating a shared setting in which research could be encountered through built form, visual culture, and responsive spatial practices.
Its central themes emphasized the pluralities and globalities of contemporary urban experience. Attention turned toward populations, cultural and social formations, and urban conditions that have too often remained overlooked. Through this lens, the exhibition invited visitors to reconsider familiar assumptions about media cities, public life, and civic space. Digital systems were explored not simply as technical infrastructures, but as active forces that shape relations across neighborhoods, communities, institutions, and wider networks.
By linking artistic practice with architectural research, the exhibition highlighted methods capable of expanding the understanding of urban media. Installations, media environments, and situated technologies encouraged close observation of how bodies, spaces, machines, and communications influence one another. The overall framing was reflexive and emergent, asking how design can reveal changing relations within cities while remaining attentive to difference, participation, and overlooked forms of knowledge. In this way, the exhibition served as both a gathering place and a conceptual field for continued inquiry.
Themes and Focus
The exhibition explored pluralities and globalities of MediaCities, with attention to non-Western, post-Capitalist, and turbulent urban contexts. Works on view engaged the emergent relations between urbanity and digital media.
It extended the conference's lines of inquiry into spatial form, inviting visitors to encounter situated technologies and architectural responses in a gallery setting.
Related Resources
Conference schedules, the program, and published proceedings are available through the navigation above. Research materials from the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies are hosted at cast.b-ap.net.