The Evental City: Moment, Situation, Presence
Published online on September 08, 2015
Abstract
Events are part of everyday life and cities, and cities’ experience economy. Affect and emotions—real or imagined, collective or subjective, lived or dreamed—are crucial issues to events, including being insecure on what one experiences is part of the attraction of events. Events are most often seen as situated encounters in planned spaces, where the mode of social exchange is significant to people’s experience (both as Erlebnis and Erfahrung) and identification with place. Emphasizing the eventness or eventful experiences of city life highlight the importance of forces of moments and situations as presence forces. Experiencing events happens in between sense–body–mind effects. Presence is a wirkungs-kraft. This article discusses presence effects exploring some "types" of urban experiences—presence-culture, presence-meaning, present-presence—using street art, everyday experiences, and community art events as examples. It is an exploration inspired by Hans Ulrich Gumbrect’s writings on presence and Michel Foucault on event and eventalization.