Mediapolis Now

About Mediapolis Now

Mediapolis Now is the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. Like its parent journal, our podcast puts media and the city into conversation. We are interested in how scholars, artists and other practitioners see the practices, rhythms and motilities of the city through patterns of media use, exposure and desire; and who approach media forms, representations, infrastructures and industries as intrinsic aspects of urban living. Our channel hosts three series, all exploring the junction of cities, culture and media: Voices, in which we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work; Essays, featuring audio readings of selected Mediapolis articles; and Events, audio recordings of recent talks and symposia. Audio Editor: Scott Rodgers Visit the Mediapolis journal website: https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/

Publisher

Scott Rodgers / Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture

Category

education · society & culture · tv & film

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

2 Apr 2021

Latest episode

14 Jun 2026

Latest episodes

18 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   14 Jun 2026

   Voices 10: Small-Gauge Scholarship at Ten, with Erica Stein, Elizabeth Patton and Adam Ochonicky

   This episode is a special one, marking the 10th Anniversary of Mediapolis, where we speak with Erica Stein, Elizabeth Patton and Adam Ochonicky. Erica Stein is Associate Professor of Film at Vassar College, and a co-founder of Mediapolis, where she now serves as treasurer. Her research addresses how mediation and urbanization meet: how capital claims physical and social space through visual strategies, and how certain moving images push back against them. She is the author of Seeing Symphonically: Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York (SUNY Press, 2021), and co-editor of The Companion to Media and the City (Routledge, 2022). Elizabeth Patton is Chair and Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and outgoing co-managing editor of Mediapolis. Her research centres on media history, identity and space, and on how media practices have shaped popular understandings of work and leisure. In her book Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office (Rutgers University Press, 2020), she explores how the idea of working from home was constructed across the 20th century. She was a 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. Adam Ochonicky is one of three current co-managing editors of Mediapolis, and Associate Professor of English in the School of Media, Arts, and Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. His work centres nostalgia and regionalism across a range of mediums and eras, and is drawn to the relationship between form and content: the idea that engaging critically with space calls for more than text on a page. He is the author of The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism (Indiana University Press, 2020), and came to Mediapolis as a contributor before joining its editorial team. Our conversation took the journal's tenth anniversary as an occasion to ask what Mediapolis set out to be and what it has actually become. We began with what we might call its founding wager: the case made in a 2016 roundtable for "small gauge" scholarship, meaning: short-form, conversational, situated work that the legacy journal system wasn't built to carry. From there we asked which of those founding ambitions became durable features of the journal as a working concern, and which turned out harder to hold on to — a question that led into franker territory about the economics of academic labour and how a journal sustains itself when no one is being paid. We then turned to the shifting ground beneath all of this: the platform conditions that once made nimble, responsive publishing possible, and what happens when that substrate — things like academic Twitter, the open web — thin out, financialize and decay. We ended on AI, and whether the value of small-gauge work changes when machines can produce short pieces at speed, turning finally toward voice, editorial curation, and the journal's emerging life as a pedagogical space. Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

2. 

   14 Jun 2026

   Voices 09: Chris Lukinbeal on Cinema, Cartography and the Spaces Between

   In this episode, we speak with Chris Lukinbeal. Chris Lukinbeal is Professor of Geography and Director of GIST Programs at the University of Arizona. He has made foundational contributions to the field of film and media geography, but what makes his work distinctive is a parallel grounding in cartography and geographic information science — so that alongside the study of cinematic landscape sits a practising cartographer's interest in maps, scale and spatial analysis. His research has long sat at the meeting point of these traditions, across projects in the United States and, through a long collaboration at the University of Mainz, in Germany and across Europe. Our discussion centred on Chris's recent book, Cinematic Cartography: Scale, Analysis, Topography. It is a book that takes two ways of picturing the world — cinema, rooted in perspective, and cartography, rooted in projection — and asks what happens when you hold them together: how film and the map each construct space, and how, increasingly, the view from above and the view from the street meet and mingle in the technologies we use every day. We discuss the book's origins, in Chris's own movement between landscape studies, the economics of film production, and cartography, as well as the conceptual heart of the book — his argument about scale, and a return to Ptolemy's old distinction between geography, chorology and topography. We then turn to two case studies grounded in particular places: a spatial analysis of San Diego as a cinematic region, where film and television productions quite literally use the landscape differently, and finally Old Tucson Studios, a Western film set built from a map drawn onto the Sonoran Desert — and the "cartographic archaeology" Chris used to recover it. A readable version of the interview has also been published simultaneously as part of the The Mediapolis Q&A series. Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

3. 

   28 Apr 2025

   Voices 08: Burcu Baykurt on Google Urbanism

   In this episode, we speak with Burcu Baykurt. Burcu is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work centres the technological dimensions of statecraft, from its expressions in nationalism and borders, to the various kinds of automation being incorporated in local government infrastructures. Our discussion centred more so on the latter, and specifically Burcu’s longstanding interests in Google as an increasingly influential agent in urban affairs. While the influence that Google and its parent company Alphabet exert on our worlds has hardly been ignored, in a strange way, less attention than we might expect has been directed to the unique place ‘Big Tech’ companies like Google have in an emerging ‘platform urbanism’, or in debates about so-called ‘smart cities’. We spent some time discussing a special issue Burcu has co-edited with Antoine Courmont on what they call Google urbanism, before turning to her own extended research into Google in specific locales, in her case Kansas City. We end our discussion talking a bit about where Burcu’s research and writing is heading, specifically concerning the notion of a rising ‘test-bed urbanism’, and how the urban interventions of the tech sector interweave with local knowledge, practices, cultures, inequities and histories. This interview, which was recorded on 26 February 2025, is Episode 8 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media. Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

4. 

   14 Dec 2024

   Voices 07: Caitlin Bruce on Graffiti Culture and Urban Institutional Attunement

   Caitlin Bruce, Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, discusses how graffiti culture in urban Mexico navigates shifting institutional attitudes and values in her book project, Voices in Aerosol.

5. 

   25 Jun 2024

   Voices 06: Myria Georgiou on Competing Claims to Digital Urban Humanity

   In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Myria Georgiou. Myria is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has been working for more than two decades on the mediation of identity and citizenship. Myria’s work has spanned interests in: the relationships of media and cities; how media are implicated in identity construction for diasporic populations and migrants; and how diversity and difference are represented in the media. Our discussion centred on Myria’s recent book Being Human in Digital Cities. It is a book which explores the curious resurrection of a kind of ‘people centrism’ in discourses about digital cities, analysing the rise of competing claims to urban humanity by a range of different actors, from technology companies to local governments to ordinary urban citizens. Our discussion provides a good overview of the book’s thematic attention to three varieties of digital humanism in cities: popular, demotic, and critical. We also touch on the where Myria sees her arguments in relation to broader contemporary debates about the ‘human’ or ‘posthuman’. This interview, which was recorded on 7 May 2024, is Episode 6 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media. A readable version of the interview has also been published simultaneously as part of the The Mediapolis Q&A series (https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2024/06/myria-georgiou/). Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/))

6. 

   24 Apr 2024

   Voices 05: Rebecca Ross on Postcodes, Communication Design and Urban Media

   In this episode, we speak with Rebecca Ross, director of the graphic communication design programme at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Her writing and practice are both interdisciplinary, extending from graphic and communication design to media studies, urban studies, the history of technology and creative computing. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Urban Pamphleteer, a publication which explores contemporary urbanism in the tradition of radical pamphleteering. Her work has also been seen in London’s public spaces, notably her 2015 digital billboard installation, London is Changing (https://www.londonischanging.org/). That installation is discussed in the podcast, but before we get there, we begin with a fascinating discussion of postcodes, as a form of spatial media. We dive into this with some detailed definitional and historical discussion initially, but then open out into a conversion about on the everyday life of postcodes, as a kind of social and cultural innovation, not to mention a shared spatial language between humans and machines. Midway through our chat, we switched gears to talk about graphic design and communication as a practice and way of thinking, and the paradoxical distance that discipline oftentimes seems to have from academic media and cultural studies. This is unfortunate, since, as we discussed, the former provides ways of thinking about urban media in everyday life (for instance in the fine-grained ways typography shows up in urban environments), as well as how we come to know ‘the city’ as a larger entity (here Rebecca talks about the periodic London Plan, and in particular its public consultation processes). We end by discussing Rebecca’s recent writing on how academic publishing could become more public (https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/18105/), by working with media as much as writing about it. This interview, which was recorded on 5 March 2024, is Episode 5 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media. Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/))

7. 

   22 Nov 2023

   Voices 04: Monica Degen and Gillian Rose on the New Urban Aesthetic

   In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Monica Degen and Gillian Rose. Monica Degen is Professor of Urban Cultural Sociology at Brunel University London, in the UK. Her research focuses on the practices and politics of experiential urbanism. Largely through ethnographic approaches, Monica’s work explores how multi-sensory, temporal and emotional dimensions not only shape how we live in cities, but also, increasingly how planners, architects, place-branding professionals and others design them. Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford. Gillian is well-known across humanities and the social sciences for her book Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, which published its fifth edition in 2022. She identifies first and foremost as a cultural geographer, and her multi-faceted work has centred on the techniques and politics of knowledge production about places. Most recently, she has devoted much of her attention to how digital visualising technologies are shifting urban life and its spatial and temporal organisation. Our discussion centred on Monica and Gillian’s recent book The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change. It is a book which explores the coming together of new digital technologies and urban branding, and specifically how these are increasingly being geared toward new kinds of sensory, bodily experiences, in and across different urban sites and scales. Not only do we discuss the central arguments of the book, or its fascinating cases studies. We also touch on the trajectories of work that brought them to write it in the first place, and where their work is heading next. This interview, which was recorded on 1 November 2023, is Episode 4 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media. A readable version of the interview has also been published simultaneously as part of the The Mediapolis Q&A series (https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2023/11/degen-and-rose/). Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/))

8. 

   5 Oct 2023

   Events 03: Julia Stolyar, Darshana Mini and Jaana Serres at Locating Media Industries 2023 in London

   This episode, part of the Mediapolis Now Events series, brings together three scholars presenting at the conference Locating Media Industries, held 19th-21st June 2023 at King’s College London (KCL). At this conference, attendees from around the world gathered to think through the spatial organisation of different media industries, with a special interest in how that organization might be shifting in the long wake of digitalization, and the shorter wake of Covid-19, with its attendant rise of remote working, including in many media sectors. Our first guest was Julia Stolyar, who recently completed her PhD at SOAS, which investigated transnational TV drama remakes between South Korea and Japan. In the interview, you’ll hear her touch on her contribution to the conference, which focused on the development of Seoul as a center for media production, and particularly its Digital Media City, developed as a cluster for business, tourism, branding, and urban development. She was joined by Darshana Mini, an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. You will hear Darshana discuss her research on the role of financial intermediaries in procuring funding for production houses in the South Indian film industry, and the continuities and ruptures going hand-in-hand with the rise of what are called OTT platforms, that is, Over-The-Top streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Sony LIV. And, our third guest on the panel was Jaana Serres, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen, whose work centres on the relationships of grassroots artistic genres and placemaking. She spoke especially about themes emerging from her doctoral research at the University of Oxford, where she studied how the Nigerian music industry delineates an aspirational horizon for an Africa-based project of modernity and globalization. We recorded our group interview following lunch on the second day of the conference, 20th June, in a reasonably cozy, nearby teaching room in Bush House, a building KCL recently took over from the BBC, whose World Service broadcasted from the same site, for 70 years. The host Scott Rodgers arrived later than planned, due to frustrating traffic on Kingsway, the wide road leading to Bush House, and a bus driver who unfortunately, but probably responsibly, wouldn’t let him off. Because of this, you will hear that one of our participants, Julia Stolyar, needed to leave two-thirds of the way through, so she could present her paper. But the discussion was interesting. It starts a little descriptive, with the guests outlining the research topics they were presenting at the conference. Once things get going, though, you’ll hear us move onto a range of interesting themes, around placemaking and place branding, cultural and linguistic complexity, postcolonialism and geopolitical relations, temporality and speed, and the production of mediated locality. This interview, which was recorded on 20 June 2023, is Episode 3 within the Events podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we feature recordings of recent talks and symposia at the junction of cities, culture and media. Host: Scott Rodgers. Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

9. 

   16 Jun 2023

   Voices 03: Amy Y. Zhang, Asa Roast and Carwyn Morris on Wanghong Urbanism

   In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Amy Zhang, Asa Roast and Carwyn Morris. Amy Zhang is based at a The University of Manchester, in the UK, where she is Lecturer in Urban Planning. Her research focuses on urban politics and governance, urban knowledge and policy mobilities, postcolonial urban theory, and state-society relations in China. Asa Roast is based at the University of Leeds, UK, where he is Lecturer in Urban Geography. His work focuses on urban transformations in China, with an emphasis on housing, informality, verticality and urban agriculture in the city of Chongqing. Carwyn Morris is based at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he is University Lecturer of Digital China. His research examines the spatialization of digital relations, including digital displacement, digital territorialization projects, digital mobilities, and internet celebrity urbanisms. The host (Scott Rodgers) first came across this episode’s guests a couple of years back, reading a substack discussion among them, playfully titled ‘We Built This City on a Camera Roll’. He soon found himself introduced to a new notion of ‘wanghong’, and wanghong urbanism. Focused on developments in the Chinese urban context, the discussion was asking: what happens when places achieve celebrity status online? Late last year, in issue 4 of Mediapolis Volume 7, Amy, Asa and Carwyn co-authored a Deep Dive essay fleshing out some of these ideas, which was then followed earlier this year, in issue 1 of Mediapolis Volume 8, in a Dossier (or collection of essays) exploring the broader notion of an urban-digital spectacle. Our discussion in the episode ranges from how they first encountered the phenomena of wanghong in Chinese urban contexts, how the notion might be defined, and what it might tell us about the emerging relations of social media and cities around the world. This interview, which was recorded on 27 April 2023, is Episode 3 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media. Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/))

10. 

    29 Mar 2023

    Events 02: Media, Cities and Space at ECREA 2022 in Aarhus

    This episode includes excerpts from four interviews from the 9th European Communication Conference, held in Aarhus, Denmark, 19th-22nd October 2022. The ECC is the biennial conference of the European Communication Research and Education Association, and in 2022, the conference theme was ‘Rethink Impact’, exploring how communication studies (broadly defined) interacts with, impacts on, and reflects society. The four interviews here are with scholars who presented at the conference, in one of the sessions organised through ECREA’s Section on Media, Cities and Space. Each of the interviews were recorded in a compact, mobile podcast van - a collaboration between the Aarhus public library Dokk1 and the newspaper Jyllandsposten. During the conference, the van was parked outside one of the main conference buildings on the Aarhus University campus. All four interviews were facilitated by Christoph Raetzsch, executive produced by Jay-vee Marasigan Pangan, with Chance Dorland as audio engineer and trainer. The interviews themselves were hosted by the Erasmus Mundus Journalism students from Aarhus University. The hosts are credited below, alongside the guests, producer and support staff. Lisa Schulze The first interview is with Lisa Shulze, who spoke with Martina Hrgović. The producer was Saskia Reimann, with Nariman Moustafa on staff. Lisa is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Salzburg, in Austria. We jump in here with Martina briefly asking Lisa about her background, before turning to the research she presented at the conference, exploring how wheelchair users in five German cities navigate their movements with the help of digital and other media. Karin Larsson In the second interview, Karin Larsson speaks with Marcela Sánchez. The producer was Abhishek Kumar, with Ramisha Ali on staff. Karin is a doctoral candidate in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, in Stockholm, Sweden. We join Marcela asking Karin about her background, before turning to the research she presented at the conference, around VDNKh, a Stalinist exhibition area in Moscow. They discuss how Karin came to study this site, and what it reveals about urban mediations of authoritarian and national-conservative tendencies in Russia today. Mortiz Schweiger In our third interview, you will hear Moritz Schweiger speaking with Malene Solheim. The producer was Andy Peñafuerte III, with Abhishek Kumar on staff. Moritz is a doctoral candidate in the Department for Media, Knowledge and Communication at Augsburg University in Germany. We come in with Malene asking Moritz about his main object of research, augmented reality. They go on to discuss the many possibilities and problems of these technologies for urban life, and even societies in general. Derya Özkan Finally, we join Derya Özkan being interviewed by Radha Puranik, with Saskia Reimann producing and Nariman Moustafa on staff. Derya is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Communication at Izmir University of Economics in Turkey. We pick up here with Radha turning to the feedback Derya received at the conference, before they move on to exploring her research project, which created an ambitious, publicly accessible digital map of former movie theaters, presenting them as cultural heritage sites in İzmir, Turkey. This is an episode within the Events podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we feature recordings of recent talks and symposia at the junction of cities, culture and media. Host: Scott Rodgers. Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/))

11. 

    25 Jun 2022

    Voices 02: Christian Olesen on Film Sound, Soundscapes and the ‘Listener’s Rights’

    In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Christian Olesen. Christian is based at the University of Amsterdam, in The Netherlands, where he is Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Cultural Heritage. His work has focused on archiving theory and history, film and media historiography, digital methods, found footage, remixing and practice-based research. We discuss with Christian various was of thinking about the film sound and soundscapes, extending from the experimental ends of film theory and cinephilia (e.g. Michel Chion, Rachel McBrinn, Robin Rimbaud, Noël Akchoté) to the creative appropriations of sonic film material in hip hop music (e.g. MF DOOM, Wu-Tang Clan and The Prodigy). Throughout, we pay a lot of attention to kinds of environments and atmospheres sound creates and makes possible in and through film, and the practice, politics, and ethics of sonic appropriation. Throughout the interview, we discuss and play short sections of recorded material, for which we do not own the copyright. The use of this material is strictly for the purposes of criticism, commentary, teaching, scholarship and research, and hence covered under the legal provisions for ‘fair use’ or ‘fair dealing’. All credits go directly to the rightful owners, and no copyright infringement is intended. This interview, which was recorded on 17 June 2022, is Episode 2 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media. Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/))

12. 

    13 Aug 2021

    Events 01: Predictive Cities with Manu Luksch, Melissa Butcher, Sarah Keenan and Joel McKim

    This episode is an edited version of the Predictive Cities colloquium, held online on July 1st 2021. The colloquium involved a roundtable discussion of the Predictive Cities exhibition, sponsored by the Urban Intersections Working Group of Birkbeck’s Institute for Social Research. Especially for Mediapolis listeners and readers, the exhibition's run has been extended until the end of 2021, so that you can take it in before, after or even while you listen to the roundtable. Access the exhibition: http://www.manuluksch.com/project/augmented-reality-virtual-reality-cryptart/predictivecities/ (http://www.manuluksch.com/project/augmented-reality-virtual-reality-cryptart/predictivecities/) The Predictive Cities exhibition is situated in the virtual space of a Mozilla Hubs VR chatroom. It contains two kinds of objects. First, memes that spawn a selection of artworks by Manu Luksch, which interrogate networked urbanism and citizen agency. Second, the exhibition includes a series of spherical photographs of Songdo, South Korea, internationally famous as a case study of greenfield smart cities. The series Songdo is custom-made for VR (if you have access to a VR headset do use it!). At the roundtable even, we were very fortunate to be joined by the creator of the exhibition, Manu Luksch. Manu is an artist and filmmaker who researches the effects of emerging technologies on daily life, social relations, urban space, and political structures. Her current work focuses on corporate-governmental relationships and the social effects of predictive analytics in the algorithmic city.  Her work is included in the Collection de Centre Pompidou, the BFI National Archive, and the Core Collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. In the roundtable, Manu is in conversation with a panel, all people based at Birkbeck, University of London. including: Professor Melissa Butcher, who is a social and cultural geographer that uses ethnographic, visual and participatory methodologies to examine questions of identity and belonging within contexts of cultural change and contested urban space. Dr Sarah Keenan, who works at the intersection of legal and political thought, geography, feminist theory and postcolonial studies - and has a particular interest in the expansive and politically potent concept of property, and the ways in which it might be rethought. Dr Joel McKim, whose inter-disciplinary research draws together architectural and urban studies, digital media theory, memory studies, philosophy of aesthetics and communication theory – and who is currently studying digital images, animation, and machine vision. The original recording has been edited, for length and clarity, but also to remove some of the host's (Scott Rodgers') interjections and housekeeping notes for the audience of the live event. Also added in are some sound clips from artworks mentioned in the discussion. This is an episode within the Events podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we feature recordings of recent talks and symposia at the junction of cities, culture and media. Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/))

13. 

    29 Apr 2021

    Shannon Mattern on '5000 Years of Urban Media'

    This is a repost of Mack Hagood’s conversation with Shannon Mattern in 2017 on her book Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. When it was first published, it was the first audio interview to appear on Mediapolis. It was also a preview of the podcast Phantom Power: Sounds about Sound (http://www.phantompod.org/), co-hosted by Hagood with poet and media artist cris cheek in 2018. This episode was written, edited and musically scored by Hagood. Special thanks to Orfeas Skutelis at the New School for his production assistance. [Disclosure: Mattern served at the time on the Mediapolis advisory board] Interview summary: Media archeology is a field that attempts to understand new and emerging media by examining old and often dead media technologies. Shannon Mattern takes inspiration from the field but notes that most of its “digging in the past” is metaphorical. “What if we took media archeology literally,” she writes, “and borrowed a few tricks from archeologists of the stones-and-bones variety?” Her book Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, released in November 2017 by University of Minnesota Press, pushes us in that direction. Each chapter moves us farther back in time in an examination of old urban media infrastructures, starting with the sonic technologies of the telegraph and radio, then moving to the urban emplacement of the printing press, followed by an examination of the earliest surfaces for writing—clay and stone—and finally, perhaps the oldest medium of them all, the human voice. Each of these media reorganized the city around itself and each of them is still with us today, as past and future media co-mingle in the present. – Mack Hagood, www.phantompod.org (http://www.phantompod.org/)

14. 

    14 Apr 2021

    Voices 01: Zlatan Krajina and Deborah Stevenson on the Histories and Futures of Urban Media and Communication

    In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Zlatan Krajina (https://fpzg.academia.edu/ZlatanKrajina) and Deborah Stevenson (https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/people/researchers/deborah_stevenson). Zlatan is based at the University of Zagreb, in Croatia, where he is Assistant Professor of Media Studies. His work has focused on urban screens, media and everyday life and qualitative methodologies. Deborah is based at Western Sydney University, in Australia, where she is Professor of Sociology and Urban Cultural Research. Her work has centred on cities and urban life, arts and cultural policy, and gender in relation to cultural production and consumption. Together, Zlatan and Deborah are co-editors of the Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication (https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Urban-Media-and-Communication/Krajina-Stevenson/p/book/9780415792554). Published in 2019, it is a book that was the result of a multi-year process. Its resulting 44 chapters are notably wide ranging, taking in the urban-mediated dimensions of everything from architecture, infrastructure, digitalisation and regeneration to globalisation, identity, consumption and branding. Our discussion not only centred on the Companion itself, but the lens it provides onto the processes and tensions of academic knowledge production in a fast-changing and interdisciplinary research area. Throughout, Zlatan and Deborah stress the importance of properly historicised perspectives on urban media and communication, and the value of the field as a genuinely transdisciplinary set of dialogues. This is an episode within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now (https://mediapolisnow.podbean.com/), the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture (https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/). In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media. Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/))

15. 

    2 Apr 2021

    Mediapolis Live: London - Gateway to Cinema and Media Studies Symposium

    This episode is a recording of a discussion held at the July 2019 London: Gateway to Cinema and Media Studies (https://ftt.nd.edu/assets/320930/london_gateway_symposium_program.pdf) symposium. Hosted by Pamela Wojcik, the event features panelists Kulraj Phullar, Malini Guha (https://carleton.ca/filmstudies/people/malini-guha/), and Charlotte Brunsdon (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/staff/brunsdon/). It was produced by Brendan Kredell (https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/author/bkredell/). This episode is from the archives of Mediapolis Live, precursor podcast to Mediapolis Now.

16. 

    2 Apr 2021

    Mediapolis Live: Dora Apel on “Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline”

    This episode is an interview with Dora Apel, author of "Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline." Speaking with founding Mediapolis co-editor Brendan Kredell, Apel discusses her notion of the "deindustrial sublime" and the nomenclature of ruin photography. This episode is from the archives of Mediapolis Live, precursor podcast to Mediapolis Now.

17. 

    2 Apr 2021

    Mediapolis Live: Joseph Clement at Film, Media, and Toronto’s Built Environment

    This is a part recording of the March 2018 event "Film, Media, and Toronto’s Built Environment" presented at the University of Toronto during that year’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference and organized by Mediapolis‘ own Stanley Corkin. In this episode, you hear the most utopian presentation of the night, from the second panellist, filmmaker and landscape architect Joseph Clement. Clement directed the 2016 documentary Integral Man (http://www.integralmanfilm.com/), about Integral House and its original owner, James Stewart. Clement’s approach to the evening was to share a collection of his own personal photographs, a quietly stunning series of views taken amid his daily life in the city that showed it under the influence of plays of light, shadows and reflections. Several offered visions of the city’s pervasive concrete – a legacy particularly of development from the 1950s through 1970s – touched by fleeting ephemeral transformations. 1 A sidewalk encased in construction scaffolding is marvellously changed by shadows created by its zigzag fencing. A watery reflection from opposite windows creates a patch of seeming transparency on the imposing and impenetrable limestone fin walls of the city’s courthouse. And in perhaps the most utopian of the collection, a photo taken of Toronto from beyond one of its harbour islands gives the impression that the city’s waterfront boasts a thick greenbelt and a natural sand beach. Clement’s poetic documentation of these imaginary realities amid the city’s built form inspired both a dreaminess about other possibilities and new appreciation for the latent merits of what already exists. (summary by Kate Lawrie Van de Ven) This episode is from the archives of Mediapolis Live, precursor podcast to Mediapolis Now.

18. 

    2 Apr 2021

    Mediapolis Live: Jane Corkin at Film, Media, and Toronto’s Built Environment

    This is a part recording of the March 2018 event "Film, Media, and Toronto’s Built Environment" presented at the University of Toronto during that year’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference and organized by Mediapolis‘ own Stanley Corkin. In this episode, you hear the first participant, Jane Corkin, founder of Toronto’s Corkin Gallery, which pioneered valuing photography in gallery settings. Corkin introduced a series of photos, most of which were the large-format work of photographer Thaddeus Holownia, depicting primarily the city’s Queen West neighbourhood in the 1970s through 1990s. Corkin describes Holownia as “a documentarian… interested in how a place changes and how time changes a place.” Corkin’s manifest nostalgia for a pre-globalization Toronto – and pre-gentrification Queen West – evident in her comments about the photos would possibly have been lost on non-locals or even younger Torontonians who may struggle to see the loss of a chicken market (in a neighbourhood now known for its 21st century cool) as any kind of loss at all, but it was certainly an attitude shared by several on the panel. This nostalgia for something authentic and dissatisfaction with generic non-places installed by global neoliberalism and franchise commerce is not unique to Toronto. What perhaps is unique about it in a Toronto setting is the city’s much longer-standing obsession with its own insecurity and fabled neurosis about ascending to the ranks of “world-class city.” (summary by Kate Lawrie Van de Ven) This episode is from the archives of Mediapolis Live, precursor podcast to Mediapolis Now.

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