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concept of integrating shopping and the production of experience that has proved
highly successful. But this was difficult due to competition from a new but separate
multiplex complex adjacent to the centre, in the area of the old studios where Greta
Garbo and others once had produced the classics of the golden age of the Swedish
film industry. The unsuccessful efforts in this direction by the management were part
of a more general wish to make the centre a ‘centre of events’, as it was formulated in
one advertising slogan. In line with current management trends towards a cultural-
ized economy, visitors should be offered exciting experiences, and a cinema would of
course be an eminent site of experience production. One needs only to recall the
number of references to current films in the intermedial products on sale throughout
the centre to understand the vacuum Solna Centre’s lack of a cinema represents.
But there were apparent limitations to that trend towards experience management.
The centre had once organized a sales event including the Bananas in Pyjamas show
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for kids. The centre managers repeatedly referred to this particular event – as a
warning. The reason was that Bananas in Pyjamas attracted large and noisy crowds
that obstructed other customers’ shopping activities. If strong and focused aesthetic
experiences for their own sake are defined as a key aspect of cultural events, one could
say that Bananas in Pyjamas was not too little but rather too much (experience)
culture for this shopping centre.
A related problem was the lack of appropriate space for a cinema, its location a
potential disruption to the smooth sales machinery of surrounding shops. Cinemas
are often placed in shopping centres and were actually also included in some old-time
department stores. One of the very first public places showing films in Paris was the
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Dufayel department store in 1896, where it was supposed to attract customers. But
with longer narrative films the competition between commerce and film reception
made such cohabitation difficult to sustain. Today multiplex cinemas are returning to
shopping centres, but they usually occupy a separate floor or wing. They clearly
require careful strategies of containment and planning, in order for the powerful
media machine of the cine-projector not to interfere with the surrounding commer-
cial sales apparatus.

(3) The final main type and phase of consumption was the use outside the centre of
machines bought in that centre. Visitors interviewed by Martina Ladendorf easily
remembered which TV sets, cameras, record players or phones they had bought in
the centre, and this historic root often gave that machine a specific meaning for them.
In such use, the links back to the place of acquisition were often maintained, for
example by guarantee conditions and service access, by the continuing delivery of
software to the hardware, but also in the aura around the machine that was some-
times kept alive in memory. It felt different to have bought a machine in a more
exclusive shop than in a mass chain store, or having paid a reduced sales price, for
instance. This could give the machine an aura of either nobility or simplicity, of high
or low cultural value, as a waste of money or a bargain. Media machines helped to
structure time and space, shaping memories and spaces of interaction by creating and