The first time I encountered Dave Colangelo’s work was in the summer of 2014. The developer Castlepoint Numa was hosting a party in a stripped-bare Automotive Tower that will be the future home of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MoCCA) here in Toronto, and two artists were projecting scenes of labour and resistance onto its façade: Colangelo and Patricio Davila. A researcher and artist focused on the role media plays in the city, Colangelo is all about large scale projections, public art, LED screens; he bundles up all these techniques and technologies and addresses them as something he calls ‘massive media,’ and his reading of these experiences and their effects are quite nuanced. Beyond his participation in the amorphous Public Visualization Studio, Colangelo is a freshly-minted Assistant Professor of Digital Culture at Portland State University in the School of Theatre + Film. Also a co-chair of the Media Architecture Summit 2016, that takes place in Toronto this week (and is looking quite promising), Colangelo engaged in a chat about media and the city with CAN that touched on everything from the Empire State Building to Pokémon Go.

In your 2015 article “Curating massive media” you describe a new visual regime in urban space that was enabled through the propagation of LED displays and powerful projectors – you call public art executed with these technologies ‘massive media’. Can you unpack this term a bit for our readers?