Date: Thursday 30th October 2019

Venue: G04a

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

From the beginning of Modernity to the present, crowds have marked urban life and have been central to social and political theorising. Although traditional conceptualisations of the crowd focus on physicality, proximity, and touch, Siegfried Kracauer argues that the crowd is a highly cinematic object, whose essence can only be captured through film.1 By understanding the crowd as a mediatic object and already as an act of representation, this presentation will examine the digital representation of crowds and their role in determining the structure and character of a contested public square in Athens, Greece, and to decode how conflict plays out on it. Agios Panteleimon, is a residential district in the city centre of Athens, where the increasing immigrant population and their presence in the city’s public spaces in combination with the declining social conditions of the older residents in the context of the recent financial crisis have led to the development of aggressive, xenophobic, and nationalist behaviours. Its central square has therefore become a site of violence of far-right groups against immigrants and has given space to clashes between far-right and anti-fascist groups. The aim of this presentation is to study how the digital staging and re-staging of three different processions through the square (as seen via YouTube) can unravel the space of conflict and the realities that emerge from it. The roles of repetition and reproduction within digital culture will frame the discussion: can the ‘virtual crowd,’ in a similar manner to the ‘physical crowd,’ constitute a tool for the spatialisation of particular urban phenomena or is it reduced to an effect and an urban spectacle with the ‘city in crisis’ as its backdrop?