| Description |
In our digital media saturated lives, where we spend increasing amounts of time in "virtual worlds" such as Second Life or online on blogs and video sites, it can be easy to forget about public spaces. Unlike much content in virtual worlds, cultural programs in public spaces are events that are lived and experienced bodily and sensuously. Museum exhibits, public music performances, sports, arts festivals-these events and spaces are truly immediate, which is to say that they are lived bodily by those that participate in and produce them. While media might be involved, these phenomena are wholly different from broadcast mass media objects. This book, The Politics of Cultural Programming in Public Spaces, interrogates these events and spaces in order to discover-and recover-the ways in which they affect subjectivity. We offer this not in lieu of interrogations of our heavily mediated world, but as a reminder that public spaces and public events still matter to millions of people worldwide. |
