The article proposes the urban digital gallery as an opportunity to explore the relationship between ‘human’ and ‘technology,’ through the programming of media architecture. It takes a curatorial perspective when proposing an ontological shift from considering media facades as visual spectacles to consider how they may act as emotional and affective constitutes and interventions in the urban environment.

The article takes the SESI Digital Gallery in São Paulo as an example when analyzing how the curatorial approach can pursue this. This is a gallery not acting like a mimicry machine “representing” nature and its given phenomena but acting like a catalyst that reformulates the local program of experience by means of experimentation with various modes of interactivity and audience engagement.

The article argues that the urban digital gallery holds the opportunity to enhance social relations, citizen agency and a sense of being by way of dematerializing architecture. This is achieved by way of programming the symbolic to provide new emotional realizations and situations of enlightenment in the public audience. This reflects a greater potential to humanize the digital in media architecture.