In July 1983 the North Mission Artists’ Coalition (NoMAC) projected huge slides of a notorious slumlord upon a four-story building. The building towered over a massive pit left years earlier when San Francisco’s Gartland Hotel was immolated in a fire—probably arson—that killed at least 25. Also that summer, shortly before the Urban Rats collective “corrected” property management billboards atop their 60-foot graffiti installation there, underground filmmaker/Other Cinema impresario Craig Baldwin projected a 16mm movie about Philadelphia housing activists ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) upon the basement walls of the pit. The neighborhood’s young antigentrification activists knew that walls could be used for visual, albeit short-term, messages beyond community murals and graffiti.
Subsequently, we have seen Jenny Holzer’s commanding messages projected at imposing public scale in her critique of political truisms in an electronic crawl—and tunnellike “crawl space”—in Manhattan’s Times Square. We have seen huge and sparkling corporate...