Scott Rodgers: Caitlin, thank you for coming on the podcast. Your book Voices in Aerosol: Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement and Graffiti in Urban Mexico encompasses a seventeen-year period, and the chapters bring the reader on a loosely chronological but also conceptual and thematic journey. When one reads the introduction, it’s clear right away that the book has a lot to offer on the conceptual side, and we’ll certainly come to that. But let’s start with the setting of your ethnography. Take us, however briefly and partially, to León, Guanajuato. What’s interesting about that setting or world — to use a recurring term from your book — and why did you choose it?
Caitlin Bruce: Thanks for asking. I think with many of these things, a lot of it has to do with propinquity and luck and social relationships. When I started this project, I was doing research for my dissertation. It was back in 2012 when I first went to León, but I had met one of the key players in the writing scene there, Karina Kif, back in 2011, when I went to Meeting of Styles Mexico and Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl. And Kif, as I write about in the book, is a really interesting artist and also a social organizer of graffiti in León because she had this blog called Lady’s Graff, and as a result, she was super well connected to a lot of writers, not just all over Mexico, but all over León.
When I met her outside of Mexico City, she had invited me to visit her. When I came back in March of that year, I was just really blown away by the extensiveness of the sponsored projects that I saw there, but also the range, diversity and caliber of the different styles that were on display. And it was a really impactful first visit. I came back in 2014 once I got employed to see if it had legs for a book project and I decided that it did.
There are a couple of reasons why. One is that a lot of the extant work on public art and graffiti in Mexico focuses on Mexico City, which I think is important. East of Mexico, Nezahualcóyotl was like one of the birthplaces of graffiti in the area, in addition to border towns. But that sort of cultural context is quite distinct. I think in the way that New York considers itself to be the epicenter of everything cultural, I can say there’s a similar attitude in Mexico City such that the rest of the country is called la provincia – it’s called “the provinces,” the whole rest of the country. So, doing a project that was not focused on Mexico City I thought was interesting and provided a different kind of background. I learned later that León, in particular, is part of the Bible Belt of Mexico, so it’s an extremely socially conservative city. To see the fact that youth were able to develop this countercultural form of communication and then get some level of recognition from the city government in a sustained way was really impressive and really surprising, so that was another motivating factor.
Then also, just in terms of the capacity to have a long-term research project, as I write about in the book, there are different iterations of sponsorship and engagement with the state, but there really has been some sustained relationship between writers and the state at least since 2002–2003. So, it offered kind of a long scope, and I just really wanted to write about a place where I could think about layers of place over time. My first book was a transnational project, and as I write about in this one, all cities have transnational elements to them. But I was jumping around to six different cities in four different countries, and so here I could really settle in and focus on some of the stories and histories in one place.
SR: One important historical context for your book is Mexican muralism. Some listeners of this podcast might be familiar with the way murals are a central ingredient of Mexican visual culture historically and today. And for me, what’s interesting about this historical context is how it potentially sets up some interesting and perhaps unique preconditions for graffiti culture in Mexico. So, when I think of typical histories of graffiti, they tend to frame it first and foremost as one of the fundamental elements of early hip-hop culture, with this sort of strong nod usually to 1970s New York City. Then that subculture is sometimes also related with or maybe distinguished from the so-called new street art associated with renowned artists like Banksy, Invader, or Swoon. Mexican muralism is rarely part of these narratives, in my experience at least. Now, I acknowledge muralism is only one part of your book, but could you tell us a little bit more about how the histories of muralism might establish a distinctive cultural milieu in León, which then sort of collides in the 1990s with the transnational movement of aerosol-based graffiti culture?
CB: I think I would say, first of all, that any kind of art movement is always, as you know, influenced by its predecessors and its larger cultural and social conditions. That is the case anywhere in the world. In the context of Mexico, of course, Mexican muralism is very important. I would also say that some practitioners also locate influences back to pre-Hispanic periods of public art and inscriptions and graphic design in public ways. I think that’s also something that’s worth noting.
So, I think that when I started talking to writers, especially since the project straddles early career to mid-career, I was very interested in seeing whether graffiti was the lineage of or the inheritor of muralism. And I think in a lot of ways, some practitioners frame it that way. There is discussion in Mexico about whether aerosol-based art can be understood as neomuralismo (neomuralism), and there have been debates about that. Likewise, as I mentioned in the context of the pre-Hispanic period, there’s a collective in Querétaro called Nueve Arte Urbano. They talk about the history of knowledge makers and the role that painting played.
Now in León, I think that in terms of the history of graffiti, a lot of my interlocutors emphasize the importance of music and diverse music influences. So, yes, I think the general story about graffiti in the United States is overdetermined by the history of hip-hop and there are strong connections there, but in the context of Mexico, rock and roll and ska and punk were also really important influences and a lot of skating culture too. So, a lot of the folks that were really involved in graffiti weren’t necessarily initially involved in hip-hop; they were goths, they were ska people, you know. And so that sort of diverse musical subculture I think also kind of shows up.
Another really important influence also has to do with legacies of migration between the US and Mexico and the predominance of cholo culture and placas. A lot of the early writers talk about the way that they were influenced strongly by the aesthetic of cholo writing in León, but really also brought in exchange with California. So, those are just a couple of instances.
The other thing that I was kind of interested in vis-à-vis muralism is that it is also an overdetermined form of art in terms of histories of nationalism. I get into this more in Chapter Four on muralism, but the retroactive story that the state, especially the PRI (the Revolutionary Institutional Party), wants to tell about muralism is that it was a form of consolidation and a kind of unproblematic, really monolithic form of populism. But many scholars, like Mary Coffey, Bruce Campbell, Robin Greeley, and Leonard Folgarait, among others, have pointed out that there were constantly debates and fissures and disagreements about what a people means, what muralism is, what public art is, and what the public is. So, I also think that in talking to graffiti writers, you also see how these debates about “who is the public?”, “what is a city?”, or “what is a state?” are never settled, and they’re always kind of exercised in these aesthetic movements.
SR: You’ve sort of anticipated one of the things that I wanted to ask about in connection with that. One of my reasons for asking about muralism is that in your book, it is sometimes presented as a practice connected with nostalgia for Mexico’s post-revolutionary period where muralism is, or was, a state-sponsored practice. In the institutional and perhaps more general imagination you describe how murals are often presented as this more artistic kind of graffiti, and also perhaps one that’s more civically orientated. It strikes me that this is perhaps not so specific to Mexico and one of the reasons that it strikes me this way is that even in my own local patch here in East London, for example, there’s this project called Wood Street Walls, which curates murals, often by local artists, or works that are portraying important local figures past and present around local walls, and crucially, with permission. I’ve heard about and seen similar instances of this in other localities too, which could be described more as murals rather than graffiti. Do these trends have any kind of genealogical connection with Mexican muralism?
CB: The Mexican mural movement has had tremendous influence globally and a lot of muralists from all over the world would go to Mexico to work with artists there to learn about their techniques and would then travel and then have that influence their local milieus. So, absolutely, and I’m happy to talk more about that to the extent that I can give some examples. I think a lot of this starts in the 1930s and 1940s, but really has continued. For instance, Judy Baca, who was active in Los Angeles starting in the 1970s, studied in Siqueiros’s studio in Mexico in the mid-1970s and then went back to LA, and that really influenced a lot of her aesthetic among other things.
But yes, I think this question of the civic is interesting. I think what’s challenging is that permission does imply a kind of agreement from at least a property owner that there should be art in a space. But I think one of the things that I’m interested in this book, and this kind of relates to this question of institutional attunement and the sort of sub-conversation in the book about neoliberalism, is: what is the difference or the differences between simply giving permission and providing support and infrastructure from the state and also from a public or a community?
I think that one of the reasons why the Mexican school of muralism is also very important to think about is that despite all the disagreements and conflicts and so on and so forth, there was a good amount of resource building involved and, crucially, it was directed by the secretary of public education, so it was a national level initiative that was done in tandem with a lot of other post-revolutionary educational practices.
A lot of what I see happening all around the world, because I’ve also done a lot of work on tourism and graffiti and street art, and I’ve been to East London, although this was a few years ago – it’s reliant on infrastructures that are also largely more about public–private partnerships, where there often aren’t as many resources given to artists. So, I think that’s kind of important too, because one of the things that I was tracking in this book was also the way that levels of support varied across administrations and the kinds of support varied in terms of materials, like how many cans of paint you get, or whether it’s a salaried position, or whether you have to do fundraising with other corporations to make a project doable.
In that respect, the genealogical relationship I think is a little bit more aspirational and based on this sort of fantasy of a movement that I think is always reiterated in different guises across the world, but really requires us as scholars and practitioners to think about: what are the actual arrangements that are being instantiated between institutions and artists and different kinds of audiences? And what do those relationships generate for different practitioners in terms of the kinds of art that can make claims about the need for more socially just or inclusive spaces?
I think that varies really widely across examples and requires a lot of contextual analysis. But I think that the Mexican muralism example is very dominant, but it also sometimes becomes almost like a pastiche. I’ve been thinking about this since I interviewed a muralist named Patricia Quijano Ferrer, who’s done some really amazing work, not just in Mexico City, but around the world. She talked about this sort of “refried Zapata” aesthetic that often funders are looking for, and that’s how the mural movement is often understood. And I think that’s often sadly right. Even if you go to Mexico City now, for instance, there’s a lot of muralism between the airport and downtown, and it’s very technically impressive and beautiful, and there’s a lot of variation between the different works, but I would say also on balance it’s performing a certain kind of representation of Mexican identity that’s often very digestible and recognizable for tourists, for folks that don’t have a deep investment or understanding of the history. This connects to this transgression question too about what kinds of voicings are allowed, and when can we hear friction or when can we hear dissonance or when are those things filtered out.
SR: Maybe on that point of transgression, whether we’re talking about muralism or not – from practitioners, but also I guess scholars who write about visual culture, graffiti, culture, street art, et cetera – there’s often this notion that the essence of graffiti, let’s say, is that it’s not permitted, right? And that when it does get permitted, it’s part of this process of normalization by various urban institutions. And it sounds like you’re engaging with that problem, but not necessarily taking the sort of binary that as soon as it is permitted, it’s necessarily, you know, not reaching or addressing the public that graffiti writers might want to. I guess maybe the other way of putting it is that mere permission doesn’t necessarily mean the art loses its essence, if I can put it in such a simple way.
CB: Yeah, I think that’s correct. I’ve been frustrated for a while with popular understandings that graffiti is necessarily resistant because it’s illegal because it was not always illegal. That comes in later when governments and corporations and various civic leaders decide that something is a social problem. And then framing stories get generated — and this is a concept that I take from Joe Austin — that normalize and naturalize an understanding of graffiti as dangerous, as chaotic, as not voice.
But at the same time, it is the case that a lot of permission work — and this kind of goes back to this question about kitsch muralism, perhaps, that’s digestible and pretty, but doesn’t really have a lot of critical content to it, is often easier to get permission for. So, those things can definitely align, but I think I want to be careful about the idea that permission necessarily makes a movement non-impactful. Because one of the things I was also grappling with in the writing of this book was this question of just people surviving, people making a living, people making a way to do something that they care a lot about, but with different kinds of risk and perhaps less risk, especially in a context where the city government called in the state military to crack down on a bunch of kids that were painting on walls. It’s quite terrifying. Given that background, it makes a ton of sense that you would try to find some sort of arrangement where you can practice that form of expression without being punished or surveilled or profiled in the media or followed around by white vans that might arrest you without cause.
So, I want to be really careful about that in this project. At the same time, I do want to be critical about structures like those of neoliberalism and also forms of collusion, I think, between capital and the state that basically say, “some lives don’t matter.” And that’s really quite structural, but it does play out in some of these permission programs.
SR: Let’s turn to the conceptual side of the book. The most important concept in voices in aerosol must be attunement. And you define attunement as, “The process by which voice is identified, attended to, made audible and amplified, contoured to fit within resonant circuits, and redistributed through recognizable frequencies, the making of what might be considered voices and worlds.” Now, there’s a lot to chew on there, obviously, but let’s just begin with a little conceptual context. Your use of attunement comes primarily from rhetorical theory, though you also complement that by discussing related ideas from other disciplines. But with our interdisciplinary audience in mind, one that’s interested in media, cities, and culture, could you give us an example or two from the book which might elucidate this concept of attunement more concretely?
CB: Well, one thing I would say is the way that I’m thinking about public art in general is as a form of media. This goes back to the history of Mexican muralism: public art, murals, graffiti, street art, all of that, are forms of communication with publics in a sort of massified way, and public space is their context. Given that, one of the questions that I was thinking about is: how does this form of expression, which was framed by traditional news media entities as dangerous, dissonant, unruly, chaotic, et cetera –done by other-than-citizens – how does then get reframed into something that could be understood as having civic potential and promise? And that’s what I mean about recognizable frequencies and resonant circuits. So, what are the different forms of ancillary and adjacent media that also do some of that framing work?
Between 2010 and 2013, there is the City of Murals project. This was really the first large-scale form of permission mural support that the youth institute did. And it was also done in tandem with the bicentennial of the Mexican revolution. Again, there are a lot of homages that were made to the three big muralists, Siqueiros, Orozco, and Rivera. So, you had these murals that were being made in public spaces that were basically making references to a prior history of muralism, but using aerosol [paint] as medium, so the mural itself is used to kind of dignify a so-called new medium, or a medium that’s viewed with suspicion. But then also, these projects were documented and then narrated through a YouTube series that was also hosted by the Youth Institute and in it they would do little interviews with the artist to basically say, from bad forms of being in the street to “good forms” of being a street, from rebel to citizen, and so you also have this other kind of reframing that’s happening through the medium of YouTube.
This was also early in the game for Facebook – for institutions to be using it, especially government institutions. At that time, the Youth Institute had a Facebook page and they would share updates about the City of Murals project and invite people to like it or to share their thoughts or to come out to events. And so it was also about trying to build intimacy between different audiences and the Youth Institute and writers, to basically humanize them in a particular kind of way. One of the things that came out when I did some retrospective interviews with some of the folks that were really involved in this process was this concept of how to really be heard. One of the things that I was mulling over for a long time conceptually, and thinking about voicing, is Jacques Rancière’s distinction between speech and noise, and how that’s absolutely to do with what coheres to our given understanding of what is proper.
Anyway, I was interviewing Nikis, who was one of the major proponents of permission graffiti, and he talked about this meeting that he had with the government official, the director of the Youth Institute, Pedro Rangel. He was like, “You know, I was suspicious of this person. I wasn’t sure what to think but he came out to meet me at the wall where I was painting and it was raining, and he just had an umbrella, and we had this conversation and he used this language of… we finally had this opportunity to speak and to be heard and the question, is what will we say?” So, this question that was really richly debated among practitioners: what does it mean to have an opportunity on a platform and how do you use that platform to change a narrative?
That’s one example that I think about in terms of both the attunement of writers to the capacities and the potential of collaborating with the state, but also how the state was tuning into youth as a potential avenue for creating a sense of connection with other kinds of youth. The Youth Institute emerged primarily as a street organization reduction initiative that was founded by psychoanalyst. So, it has a lot of its roots in therapy and adjustment and helping deviant young people become “better citizens.” That’s some of the baggage, right? So, they identify graffiti and street art as this potential medium to connect more youth with the youth Institute, and to bolster their mission and their roles. So, there’s some complementarity there, but also, even from the beginning, there’s friction and disagreement.
SR: The more I read your book, the more that concept of attunement seemed to bring forth an almost sonic or aural perspective on graffiti and more broadly on visual culture. Your use of related notions in the text and the chapter headings — things like frequency, harmony, resonance, signal, noise, speaking, listening, et cetera — only underscore this for me. Now, this isn’t to say that you’re putting forward this specifically sonic reading, because often your use of aural terms seems to be more metaphorical, perhaps. But what this sonic language left with me was this sense that you were pushing against a tendency to analyze graffiti and street art in a visual or ocularcentric way, or at least you seem to be trying to steer away from an account of graffiti that emphasizes representations, whether we’re talking about representations in graffiti art itself or how people talk about graffiti. Instead, graffiti comes through in the book as a kind of anchor to analyze affective and multisensory world building. How or why did you come around to seeing graffiti in this kind of way?
CB: I think that’s a really great insight. I would probably embrace the sonic reading. I would say that I’ve been doing research on graffiti and street art and writing culture since about 2010, and much of my work comes from field-based methods and in-situ research, so being at walls and witnessing and documenting the process of production. That’s really important to me because I think that, as I argued in my first book and also kind of elaborate even more in this one, it’s the process that teaches us a lot about the kinds of relationships and challenges and aspirations that practitioners navigate. So, if we think quite literally about the process when you’re at the wall, this is the production of a visual form, but it’s also profoundly sensorial if you think about the smell of paint or the sound of a can shaking and the “sssss” of the aerosol can. In a way, the can is breath-based.
I’ve also long been interested in embodiment, affect, and the sensorial in general, and this is something that’s not wholly new to the field of rhetoric, but is something that I think in the context of analyzing visual culture is slightly more recent. My colleague Christa Olson, and Debbie Hawhee, and Jenny Rice, and Emerson Cram have been doing work like this as well. But thinking about, “How do we consider the visual as a process that’s embodied and relational?”, is something also that has been shaping a lot of my work.
Sometimes I think some readers are frustrated that I’m not doing a close reading of all of the murals, even though I do that in some chapters, but I think that understanding the dynamics, the more ineffable dynamics behind the production, is what is sometimes more interesting to me, because that’s the thing that often falls out of a lot of the archives, if we think about them as traditionally formed.
Also, this question of encounter and relationality, for me, has been more dynamic for a much longer time. I also wanted to say, you mentioned earlier that attunement comes primarily from rhetoric and actually, practically it came more from the project itself and a lot of reading that I was doing in Black visual culture [studies] and also theories of voicing from Eric King Watts, Fred Evans, and Tina Campt. And then I was kind of situating it in conversations I had heard about more as a grad student later, but also I think of work in urban studies like Nigel Thrift and Ash Amin, who are interested in the way that cities are often creating forms of relationality through not just visual culture, but affective connections and forms of relationality.
For me, attunement ended up being a helpful framing, but it’s not the one I started with. I started with this theory of braiding and unbraiding, but I found that that was a little bit too binary. Once I got into like metaphors about knots, it kind of fell apart. I also just wanted to shout out Christa Olson, who was one of my reviewers, who really pushed for what it would mean to mobilize the theory across different chapters. And that really pushed me to think about, okay, what’s the aural metaphor for each chapter that addresses what’s going on here? So, I wanted to cite her because I don’t think I would have been pushed to do that as much had she not been my reviewer and been like, “This braiding thing doesn’t work. You need to find something else.”
SR: I think I like attunement and also the other metaphors that go along with it. It definitely spoke to me, and I really quite liked it, and thought it unified the book nicely. Now, your book also addresses how graffiti figures in what you call the “urban image,” and in particular, how graffiti arrays a series of different claims or readings about what makes a good city and more generally just about what the city is for. I liked how you approached this urban concern without this excessively abstract or conceptual discussion of the city, and also that your discussion of the urban image wasn’t really romanticized, or unduly skeptical either. What was refreshing for me was how you unapologetically examined questions of the urban image through what I see to be the more ordinary lens and scale of the local municipality. So, was that focus on the local municipality related to your research design and methods or did it have to do with your particular interest in specifically institutional attunement?
CB: Well, I think that framing came later. Institutional attunement came in after I completed most of the research and I was really deep in the writing phase of the project. In terms of how I came to the urban image, my research design was basically a mix of archival research about newspaper articles in the municipal archives, and also what archives I could get from the Urban Planning Institute of the City, IMPLAN, and then personal archives of writers. So, when I was going through the newspaper archives, and I was basically just looking through anything that mentioned graffiti from 2001 to the present, I kept coming across a lot of these lamentations about the damage that graffiti does, that it creates a bad urban image. It was an emic term that came out as a way for authors in these papers to frame what they understood to be the bad version of urbanism that they saw being enacted by graffiti.
But I thought that was very interesting because in my conversations with writers, I also heard them gesturing to different understandings of the city and what the city means. And then later on, when I got into the urban planning archives, there were a couple of documents that talk about the idea of living the city – vivir la ciudad – so what is it “to city”? As in, “to city” as a verb. Which as an urbanist, you know, I’m very interested in that because it always connects to this question of the good life, if we think about the polis and the city as ideally formed as this site of heterogeneity and collectivity and density that can generate really cool things. So, how do we image the urban in ways that are generative and productive?
That’s kind of the way that it came about. I didn’t want to romanticize it or also be too down on the concept because it does a lot of important work for different constituencies. I think that when I later came to the concept of institutional attunement, the urban image was a way for city planners and also city agencies to tune into graffiti both as problem and potential that could be activated in different kinds of ways.
SR: You end the book with a concluding discussion of some of your own collaborative work since 2016 in cross-border arts programming, where you work with Leónese and other graffiti writers. Could you tell us a little bit more about why you have devoted time and attention to this kind of practice-based research in action?
CB: This has been occupying most of my time for a while, but especially in the last three years. So we started HCUAP (Hemispheric Conversations: Urban Art Project) back in 2016, and it came out of a desire to collaborate in creating platforms for the production of graffiti and writing culture. Because I love writing and I love research, but frankly, not that many people read academic books. And if we’re thinking about engaged research where a lot of that work comes from interviewing practitioners and doing in-situ-based stuff, there is a question of responsibility.
So, I feel like as an academic who has a lot of resources to make conversations happen, I wanted to collaborate with writers to see what further conversations we could have, especially in a city like Pittsburgh, in which I learned — and I talk this a tiny bit in the book – graffiti is extremely criminalized, like hyper-criminalized and demonized and the city is like way behind the ball, I think in terms of public framings. Such that León is actually a very generative example of where we could go, with all the caveats that I have in the book.
So, I was really lucky to meet an artist and educator named Oreen Cohen through a public art tour that Shiftworks, which used to be called The Office of Public Art, gave in 2015. I told her about my interest in graffiti and I told her that I wanted to do something but I didn’t quite know where to start in terms of programming because I wasn’t really trained that way. I had done a one-off circus collaboration with a friend and some writers back when I was dissertating but that was like very flash in the pan. So, we met up together and we talked about what Pittsburgh as a space has to offer and also what questions exist here about the history of graffiti and also the history of the city.
So, we got very interested in the legacy of the industrial and the post-industrial across the world in terms of graffiti culture, but Pittsburgh as a particular landing spot for that. And then also maybe the promise and the importance of generating more hemispheric conversations in Pittsburgh, where historically the Latinx/Latine population has been very dispersed, but has increased a lot recently. But there’s not as much celebration, I think, of arts culture by Latinx practitioners here.
So, over the last eight years, we’ve really moved from trying to bring artists from León specifically out here to Chicago, because those were two big research sites that I had where I had large networks, to expanding to any Latinx-identifying place, whether in the United States or outside. So, it’s ballooned quite a bit, and the thing that’s been helpful about that is that it’s taught me a lot about when the rubber meets the road, what’s involved in making this kind of works of art? What’s involved in the more behind-the-scenes dynamic of generating permission from property owners? And what kind of compromises do you have to make about the criticality of content? And also, basically how you have zero control over uptake and framing, which is extremely humbling and extremely frustrating for an academic who is trained in trying to make the most responsive generative theory, and then you kind of see how that doesn’t always play out how you think it will.
It’s been extremely generative and extremely frustrating and very cool. I hope this shows up in the text, but it’s also more, not just humble, but I guess less judgmental about some of the real constraints that are faced by practitioners and institutional agents while still being critical of structures that are that are messed up and set up to make some people fail — like, you know, structures of neoliberalism and state violence and all of that. So, it’s ongoing, it’s still provisional, and it’s the thing that has a lot of my time and focus right now. I’m working on a legal reform project with my collaborator, Max Gonzales, who was marketed as “Pittsburgh’s most wanted” back in 2017, and is now an active muralist and has a whole lot of smart things to say about the inequities in the system of criminalizing and prosecuting graffiti. We also have an archive project that we’re working on, and we’ve had twelve artists out for residencies and a bunch more for talks. So, it also means that the book is not fully done ever, because the conversations keep going.
Caitlin Bruce is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh.
She is the author of two books and several articles. Her books are titled Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter (Temple University Press, 2019), and Voices in Aerosol: Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement, and Graffiti in Urban Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2024).
Scott Rodgers is Audio Editor for Mediapolis, where he hosts the Mediapolis Now podcast. He is Reader in Media and Geography in the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London, and co-director of Birkbeck’s Centre for Creative AI. His research works at the interface of media and geography, in recent years on the urban and local geographies of social media and digital platforms, and increasingly on how AI is becoming the next mediating infrastructure of everyday urban life. This concern with the ordinary character of mediation runs across his work, including Conditions of Mediation: Phenomenological Perspectives on Media (Peter Lang, 2017), co-edited with Tim Markham.
