Associate Professor Scott McQuire
Media and Communications
Biography
Scott McQuire completed his PhD in the Politics Department at the University of Melbourne in 1995. He has a strong interest in interdisciplinary research and has lectured in disciplines including politics, sociology, cinema studies, art and architecture, and media and communication. Scott has held a number of research fellowships including a visiting fellowship at the Department of Film, Theatre and Television, UCLA (1998), an ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship (1999-2000), and a visiting fellowship at the Celeste Bartos International Film Study Center, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2000). He returned to the University of Melbourne to help establish the Media and Communication Programme in 2001. He is an active researcher who has been a Chief Investigator on six Australian Research Council funded projects. He has also received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts, and has undertaken research consultancies for the Communications Law Centre, the Australian Film Commission and the Australian Key Centre for Media and Cultural Policy.
Current research
My research explores the social effects of media technologies, with particular attention to their impact on the social relations of space and time, and the formation of identity. My most recent book, The Media City (2008) traces the way in which cities have become increasingly media-dense environments, transforming previous conceptions of public and private space. I am also a Chief Investigator on two current ARC funded projects examining the impact of large public screens.
Research interests
- Social theory of media
- New media and digital technology
- Interactions between media and public space
- Mobile media
- New media arts
- Digital cinema
- Networked media
Teaching
- 100-303 Media Futures & New Technologies
- 100-571 Media Convergence and Digital Culture
- 100-508 Mobility, Culture and Communication
Full subject descriptions are available on the University of Melbourne Handbook.
Publications (since 1997)
Books
- The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space, London, Sage/Theory Culture and Society series, 2008 (228p)
- Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera, Sage, London, 1998. (288p)
- The Look of Love (with photographs by Peter Lyssiotis), limited edition artists’ book, Masterthief, Melbourne, 1998.
Edited Books
- McQuire, S. and Papastergiadis, N. (eds.) Empires, Ruins + Networks: The Transcultural Agenda in Art, Melbourne, Melbourne, University Press and London, Rivers Orams Press, 2005 (319 pages).
Research reports
- Maximum Vision; Large Format and Special Venue Cinema, Australian Film Commission, Sydney and Australian Key Centre for Media and Cultural Policy, Brisbane, 1999 (56 000 words, 156p)
- Crossing the Digital Threshold, Australian Film Commission, Sydney and Australian Key Centre for Media and Cultural Policy, Brisbane, 1997 (32 000 words, 64p A4).
Book chapters
-
‘Public Screens, Civic Architecture and the Transnational Public Sphere’, in Doering, Joerg & Thielmann, Tristan (eds.): Mediengeography - Media Geography. Bielefeld: Transcript 2009 (in press).
-
‘Media technologies, mobility and the nation state’ in Handbook of Cultural Sociology, John Hall, Laura Grindstaff and Ming-Cheng Lo (eds.), London and New York, Routledge forthcoming 2009).
-
‘Film in the Age of Digital Media’, in Donald, J. and Renov. M. (ed.) The Sage Handbook of Film Studies, London, Sage, 2008, 493-510.
-
‘Space for rent in the last suburb', in Bell, D. and Kennedy, B. (eds.) (2007) The Cybercultures Reader (2nd edition), London, Routledge, 66-79.
-
‘Dream Cities: The Uncanny Powers of Electric Light’, in Potts, J and Scheer, E. (eds.) Technologies of Magic; A cultural study of ghosts, machines and the uncanny. Sydney, Power Publications, 2006, pp. 2-13.
- ‘History On Trial’, in Dennis Del Favero, Ursula Frohne, Anna Munster, Jeffrey Shaw (eds.) Conversation (Digital Arts Edition DVD and book, published by iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research, UNSW, Sydney; ACMI, Melbourne; ZKM, Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; the International University Bremen, Bremen (IUB), 2006) (with Nikos Papastergiadis; McQuire 50% contribution)
- ‘Screening Urban Space’ in Lehmann, S. (ed.) Absolutely Public. Crossover: Art and Architecture, Melbourne, Images Publishing Group, 2005, pp. 60-65.
- ‘The Burden of Culture in the Global City’ in McQuire and Papastergiadis (eds.) Empires, Ruins + Networks: The Transcultural Agenda in Art, Melbourne, Melbourne, University Press and London, Rivers Orams Press, 2005, pp. 204-209.
- ‘After Empire’ in McQuire and Papastergiadis (eds.) Empires, Ruins + Networks: The Transcultural Agenda in Art, Melbourne, Melbourne, University Press and London, Rivers Orams Press, 2005, pp. 2-10 (with Nikos Papastergiadis; McQuire 50% contribution)
- “From Parafunctional Spaces to Shiny Ruins” in N Tsoutas (ed.), Knowledge + Dialogue + Excahnge: Remapping Cultural Globalisms From the South, Artspace, Sydney, 2005, pp. 83-100(with Nikos Papastergiadis; McQuire 50% contribution)
- ‘City Surfaces’ in Creative Cities: Cinema and the Built Environment, CIRAC, Brisbane, 2004: 29-34.
- ‘Art of the Future: The Land that has never been yet. And yet must be’ in Gerz, J. (ed.) Die Anthologie der Kunst, Cologne, Dumont Verlag, 2004, pp. 47-49.
- ‘Paul Virilio’, in Elliott, A. and Ray, L. (eds.), Key Contemporary Social Theorists, Blackwell, London, 2003, pp. 259-266.
- ‘The cathedral of fictions’ in Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (eds.) Future Cinema. The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, (eds.), ZKM, Karlsruhe and The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003: 134-35
- ‘Space for rent in the last suburb’, in Cavallaro, A, Johnson, A. and Tofts, D. (eds.) Prefiguring Cyberculture, Power Publications & MIT Press, 2002, pp. 166-178.
- ‘Walls of light— immaterial architectures’’ in Stuart Koop (ed.), Value-Added Goods, Melbourne, Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2002, pp. 159-167.
- ‘When is art IT?’ in Hugh Brown et al (eds.), Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory, Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, 2001, pp. 205-213.
- ‘The public and the private: John Berger’s writing on photography and memory’ in Papastergiadis, N. (ed.) What John Berger Saw, ANU Canberra School of Art Gallery, Canberra, 2000, pp. 127-140.
- ‘Blinded by the (speed of) light’ in Armitage, J. (ed.) Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond, Sage, London, 2000, pp. 143-160.
- ‘Signs of ambivalence: documentary images’ in French, B. (ed.) Photo Files: An Australian Photography Reader, Power Publications and Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, 1999, pp. 17-27.
- ‘The uncanny home: or living online with others’ in Droege, P. (ed.), Intelligent Environments: Spatial Aspects of the Information Revolution, Rotterdam, Elsevier Science, 1997, pp. 682-709.
Articles in refereed journals
- ‘Rethinking “Media Events”: large screens, public space broadcasting and beyond’, New Media and Society (forthcoming 2009)
- ‘The dilemma of public space in cities on the move: control space and ludic space’, Aether: the journal of media geography (forthocming 2009)
- ‘Transient Media, Public Screens’, ‘Public?’ Special 20th anniversary issue of Public: Art/Culture/Ideas 37: (2009) 76-85. (with Nikos Papastergiadis and Sean Cubitt)
- ‘Public Screens and the Transformation of Public Space’, Refractory: a journal of entertainment media vol 12, 2008. (with Nikos Papastergiadis and Sean Cubitt)
- ‘Immersion, reflexivity and distraction: spatial strategies for digital cities’, Journal of Visual Communication 6 (2), 2007: 146-155.
- ‘Technology’ Theory, Culture and Society, 23 (2/3), 2006: 253-265.
- ‘The Politics of Public Space’, First Monday Special Issue #4: 'Urban Screens – Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society' (February 2006)
- ‘Immaterial architectures: Urban Space and Electric Light, Space and Culture, 8 (2) (May 2005) 126-140.
- ‘From code to the everyday’, Continuum 19:3, 2005: 427-434.
- ‘Slow train coming? The transition to digital distribution and exhibition in cinema ‘ Media International Australia, no. 110 (February 2004): 105-119.
- ‘Dream Cities: The Uncanny Powers of Electric Light’, Scan: Journal of media arts culture, 1 (2) June 2004
- ‘From glass architecture to Big Brother’, Cultural Studies Review 9 (1), May 2003: 103-123.
- ‘Impact aesthetics: back to the future in digital cinema?’, Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 6 (2), 2000): 41-61.
- ‘Blinded by the (speed of) light’ in Theory Culture and Society, 16 (5) October 1999, pp. 143-159.
- ‘Digital dialectics: the paradox of cinema in a studio without walls’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 19(3) 1999, pp. 379-397.
- ‘The uncanny home: television, transparency and overexposure’, Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 3 (3-4) 1997, pp. 527-538.
Catalogue essays
- ‘Tongues untied: speaking sex in the space between feeling and knowing’ in Engberg, J. (ed.) (2008) Darwin with Tears, Melbourne, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, pp. 21-24.
- ‘Architecture under erasure: Scratching the surface of the wounded city’, The City: A Memory Album, exhibition in the Cowan Gallery at the State Library Victoria, October 2008-April 2009 (no pages numbers).
- ‘Interstitial moments’ in Hjorth, L. (ed.) Waiting for Immediacy, 2007, pp. 20-23 (English and Korean)
- ‘Electrical storms’ in Callas, P. (2006) The Invisible Histories of the Present, Budapdest, Pixel Gallery & Jovo Hava. (Translated into Hungarian], pp. 9-31.
- ‘Space creation: lessons from the city’ in Lynn, V. (ed.), Space Odysseys: Sensation and Immersion, Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2001, pp. 64-70.
- ‘The rites of the photographic passage’ in Trois Photographes Australiens à Genève, Galerie Rivolta, Geneva, 2000 (French and English, no page numbers)
- ‘Electrical storms: high speed historiography in the video art of Peter Callas’, in Cavallaro, A. (ed.), Initialising History, Sydney, Dlux Media Arts, 1999, pp. 30-47.
- ‘Burn everything, save nothing: The laws of memory, the riddles of forgetting’ in Defteros, G. (ed.) Mnemosyne, or do humans dream in negative strips?, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 14-16.
- ‘Pure speed: from transport to teleport’ in Millar, J. and Schwarz, M. (eds.), Speed: Visions of an Accelerated Age, London, Photographers Gallery, 1998, pp. 26-33.
- ‘Unofficial histories’ in Smith, T. (ed.), Archives and the Everyday, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, 1997, pp. 79-87.
Articles in non-refereed journals
- ‘Moving Messages & Uncertain Content’, Realtime, 84 April-May, 2008, p. 30 (co-written with Meredith Martin, Sean Cubitt and Nikos Papastergiadis; McQuire 25% contribution).
- ‘Fritz Lang’s M’, Metro 127-128 (Autumn-Winter 2001): 210-213
- ‘Cityscapes and dreamscraps’, Camera Austria 76, 2001: 71-72 (co-written with Nikos Papastergiadis, photographs by Peter Lyssiotis)
- ‘“I’m not a racist, I’m a realist”: snapshots from Fortress Australia’ (with photographs by Peter Lyssiotis), Camera Austria 71, 2000.
- ‘Liquid Architecture’ (with photographs by Peter Lyssiotis), in Fear, B (ed.) Architecture and Film II, (Architecture and Design, vol. 70, no. 1, January 2000), pp. 6-8.
- ‘Pages from the City of Strangers’ (with photographs by Peter Lyssiotis), Photofile 57, October 1999: 12-17.
- ‘Video theory’ Globe (1999).
- ‘Auditing audience development’, Dialogue 8 (April 1998): 64-73.
- ‘A conversation on film, acting and multimedia: an interview with Ross Gibson’, Practice: A Journal of Visual, Media and Performing Arts 3 (1998): 15-24.
- ‘Digital futures’, Cinema Papers 121 (November 1997): 25-40.