  The paper presents the case study of BERLIN_LOKAL_ZEIT, a collaborative
archive and exhibition project aiming to document and reflect individual
experiences of the COVID-19 lockdowns in Berlin, Germany. What began as an
observational effort in spring 2020became a year-long archive, exhibition, and
broadcasting platform that generated various hyper-local interfaces. The paper
articulates an improvisational approach to media architecture in the form of
self-reflection by the project initiators. Necessitated by the limitations
imposed by the lockdowns on cultural production and public discourse, the paper
presents an alternative conceptual approach to media architecture that is not
based on a fully-specified technological infrastructure for discourse and
interaction but instead on improvisational practices that manifest themselves
in different technical interfaces. This improvisational approach is not merely
a mode of production, but raises questions of about the discourse of media
architecture and its underlying assumptions of methodological rigor. In
traditional HCI, systems and artifacts are often presented as stable and fully
specified, while their users are considered interchangeable. In contrast, we
consider urban media interfaces as improvisation-driven infrastructures (or
improstructures) in which the actors and their relationships are stable, while
the technologies they create are provisional and in flux. As a consequence, the
defining property of media architecture is no longer the structural integration
of media into architecture but the embodiment of mediated communication in
objects and performances at concrete places. In an environment where many
physical spaces are longer accessible and human contact among strangers
diminished, the project explores the restorative function and capacities of
media architecture for shared reflection and discourse in physical public
space.
