In-Transit Televisions: Productive Patterns and Urban Imageries of Mobility

Since the early 2000s in Italy, the installation of video-systems within transportation hubs has increasingly affected urban mediascapes and the design of public architectures, posing new opportunities for infotainment and advertising industries. Through a mapping of the major national installations of “Go-TV,” this paper analyzes productive and professional mechanisms implied in the proliferation of such audiovisual interfaces, which often imply contextual communication and geolocalised marketing practices. Acting as a “last-mile medium”, in-transit TV works as a window on the travelling habits of thousands of travellers as well as en passant spectators, generating and reflecting particular experiences of mobility and immobility. Based on their location and viewing settings, the messages conveyed reconfigure notions of space, place, networks, and border regimes, negotiating distances and physical perceptions of speed. Yet due to their situatedness, those video outlets embody an idea of “squared mobility". This impacts on the scheduling of such out-of-home channels: the standard flow of news, commercial clips and editorial contents is interrupted by real-time updates, traffic bulletins and institutional messages, on a responsive and environment-sensitive basis. As the paper will outline, the case of televisual stations arranged for non-domestic settings demonstrates the degree of pervasiveness of the small screen in everyday life, not only in relation to mobile media practices, but entailed by its reconfiguration as an ambient interface.