A quote from The Media City by Scott McQuire:
In contrast to the paranoia towards strangers that constitutes somuch of official rhetoric post 9/11, [the art installation] Body Movies celebrates the spontaneous alignments that can make genuine public encounters - in Sennett’s terms - so memorable. These kinds of tactical interventions into u rban space provide a striking comparison to more manufactured ‘media events’, where the media simultaneously uses the lure of spontaneity to attract an audience, but generally occludes the spontaneous by imposing standardized frames in order to minimize the risk of ‘nothing happening’. Rather than adhering to the cybernetic goal of informational speed and transparency, media technology in Body Movies becomes the basis for affective experience capable of sustaining reflexive public interactions. Body Movies takes the openness of relational space as the starting point for developing a dynamic and participatory social space. As Timothy Druckrey argues,
It is an evocation of the kind of social space in which active participation is not a by-product, but the driving force in the creation of dynamic agora in which every position is established in an open system that ruptures hierarchies and dismantles the notion that the public is an undifferentiated mass, the media not the harbinger of a utopian global village, interactivity not the opiate of shoppers.
