Was this “interconnectedness,” I wondered, or just an extension of urban displacement-the teleconferenced anonymous crowd? A curator with Seoul’s new-media gallery Art Center Nabi had taken me to see the building, and told me that the images in the lobby-which present motion-triggered digitized representations of people coming through the doors-would soon be interspersed with real-time images generated from a similar lobby setup in another SK building just south of Seoul.
#Tabula facade signage serial number series
Along with a set of screens in the building’s lobby, the LED zipper was displaying a series of works by Korean artists.
At the Aaron Tan–designed SK T-Tower in the city’s financial district, the base of the telecom headquarters was wrapped in a thin band of LED. There were also screens in the subways, convenience stores, elevators-I even spotted one in the floor of a casino, perhaps intended to attract the downward glance of an unlucky gambler. It seemed that I was hardly ever out of view of some billboard-sized display winking in the distance. As a city that endured numerous invasions only to undergo one of the most explosive periods of urban growth seen in the twentieth century, the civic landscape seems a tabula rasa of generic urbanism, an endless loop of smog-enshrouded modernity.īut after a few days spent navigating the city’s car-thronged streets, one distinguishing urban characteristic began to stand out: the ubiquity of the screen. SEOUL DOES NOT possess much of what urban planners refer to as “legibility.” Instead of a compact center with recognizable landmarks and cohesive neighborhood fabrics, it is an aggressively dispersed place filled with tinted commercial towers and legions of cheaply constructed housing blocks erected in the rush to urbanization. Robert Venturi, Architecture as Signs and Systems for a Mannerist Time (2004) Viva iconography-not carved in stone for eternity but digitally changing for now, so that the inherently dangerous fascist propaganda, for instance, can be temporarily, not eternally, proclaimed! Viva the façade as computer screen! Viva façades not reflecting light but emanating light-the building as a digital sparkling source of information, not as an abstract glowing source of light!.
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