In this book, I chart the moving image’s entrance into and continued
presence within the feld of public art through its encounters with passersby. I argue that moving image artworks in public spaces do more than merely distract or decorate; they produce moments of enchantment that can renew, intensify, or even challenge our experience of public space.
These artworks also offer frameworks for understanding how moving
images operate in public space—how they move viewers and reconfgure
the site of the screen—outside of the critique of spectacle. While attentive
to precedents and genealogies, the structure of this book is not chronological, but rather based on the types of spectatorial encounters public moving image artworks engender and how these intersect with the material fabric of urban space. Each chapter articulates a mode of address: visually enticing works that produce a liminal sense of enchantment; intra-spectacular initiatives in advertising landscapes; screens that spawn pop-up zones of interaction; projection festivals that re-enchant urban
space in the service of Creative City placemaking; precarious installations
and projects that were planned with permanence in mind; and superimpositions that connect, complicate, or critique dominant narratives of place. Each mode uncovers related practices that may use different technological supports, but all exploit the moving image’s own experiential power.