Toronto’s digital billboard-laden Yonge and Dundas Square is owned by the city but managed through a public-private partnership. While primarily hosting commercial content and activities, the spaces and screens of the square are often used for cultural events and artistic content. As cities, arts organizations, governments, and corporations increasingly seek to engage people in public spaces through combinations of media and architecture, what are some of the possibilities and pitfalls associated with their approaches individually and in concert with one another? How does media architecture modulate civic, creative, and commercial interests and impacts?

From my perspective as founder of Midnight Moment; Chair of Urban Arts Forum of Urban Land Institute UK; and an international cultural advisor, global commercial property market and local authorities have embraced the value of innovative digital media on architecture. But that hasn’t always been the case; it is a result of almost 50 years of artistic intervention.

The first digital interventions of artist work contrasted the commercial advertising. The exception to the rule was a subversive act that countered the commercialisation of architecture and attracted curiosity and attention from text and/or visuals that countered the vernacular of commercial consumption. As the technology became more digitally sophisticated, there was a second wave of intervention that leveraged a moving image platform to generate content that was equivalent to the duration of music videos or other entertainment formats. From Creative Time’s platform ‘The 59th minute’ & MTV 44 ½ (single channel screens in Times Square) to the light & fountain show of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the programmed anomaly uses its occasional, special presentations as a means to gather people in places-with the permissions and interest of the property holders.

Now, architects regularly create spaces for digital content and audiences are trained to look for unusual content. Sometimes the media architecture is built for art display that is then subsidised by the advertising; flipping the original ratio of commerce/culture. Outdoor advertising takeovers such as Midnight Moment (NYC) and CIRCA (London, Seoul, Tokyo) are becoming ‘institutions.’ Digital art is part of every international artfair or festival. Drones have become a curation of the sky – forming temporary architectures as part of concerts and civic events.

As new squares and buildings use art to compete to have its own brand identity, it is necessary to interrogate what is the correct balance of programming, the duration of digital media in permanent architecture, and the realities of ongoing expense and consumer/audience fatigue.

I propose that public art has three-tiers of success, which can flex between criteria for curation or measurements for success.