+

Public Address is a platform for wide-ranging discussion of innovative projects, and practices. Read here for news, announcements, and postings and sign up for our e-newsletter here.

Contemporary art is increasingly “untethered” and moves from the white cube of the gallery to any site – including the virtual – to engage the public in its own realm. Public art is an ever-expanding field of inquiry, with artists of all stripes exploring the public realm. Beyond murals, monuments, memorials (and the occasional mime) public art has become a vibrant and engaging practice. From the spectacular to the quotidian, permanent to ephemeral, sited to virtual, material to performative, conceptual to cinematic, we believe there are unprecedented opportunities for new art practices in our shared environment. This is the critical focus of Public Address.

Hertzian barometers
Author
mediachef
Post
12.12.2010
Tags
, , ,

Mark Shepard, Hertzian Rain. From "Ambient Awareness, Hertzian Weather Systems, and Urban Architecture," Public Art Review, 2009

“It is just over one hundred years since electricity generation started, seventy since radio transmissions began, and fifty since radar and telecommunications entered our environment. The twentieth century has seen space evolve into a complex soup of electromagnetic radiation.” (Anthony Dunne)

Several projects, like hertzian barometers, intend to measure and map this complex soup.

Read More

Requiem for fossil fuels
Author
Steve Dietz
Post
12.2.2010
Tags
, , , ,
01SJ Biennial, St. Joseph's Cathedral, San Jose. Photo Everett Taasevigen

01SJ Biennial, St. Joseph's Cathedral, San Jose. Photo Everett Taasevigen

01SJ Biennial, St. Joseph's Cathedral, San Jose. Photo Everett Taasevigen

01SJ Biennial, St. Joseph's Cathedral, San Jose. Photo Everett Taasevigen

01SJ Biennial, St. Joseph's Cathedral, San Jose. Photo Everett Taasevigen

If you are looking for a change in your holiday sound track, O+A’s Requiem for fossil fuels was a transcendent performance in St. Joseph’s Cathedral at the 01SJ Biennial in San Jose.

In November, O+A performed Requiem again at the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden in New York, and the concert will be broadcast Thursday evening, December 2, as part of WNYC’s New Sounds series. Don’t miss it. Below the jump is a mini-preview.

Read More

Janaki Ranpura, Egg and Sperm Ride
Author
mediachef
Post
11.15.2010
Tags
, , ,
Both versions of the Egg bike, cross-country (right) and San Jose Green Prix (left)

Sperm racers prepare to depart for the 01SJ Biennial Green Prix

Sperm riders circle Egg during Green Prix parade

Sperm escorting Egg

More Sperm circling

Author as Sperm

An earlier version of the Sperm helmt at Art-a-Whirl

Janaki Ranpura transcribing stories for an earlier version of Egg and Sperm ride at Art-a-Whirl

Janaki Ranpura, artist talk, Out of the Garage Into the World, 01SJ Biennial

by Stephen R. Miller

The Egg and the Sperm are a matter of prosaic beginnings. They meet in passion, lust, happiness, joy; in individuals coupled to each other. They can meet through violence; they can be frozen and shipped like cargo. Are they commodities sans soul? The conversation rapidly evokes larger questions. “Manhood’s repose of If,” as Herman Melville says in Moby Dick, is shaken by the subject. Adding to this existential ambivalence, the egg and sperm reference not only life but after life; Marilynne Robinson writes in Gilead: “We participate in Being without Remainder.” T.S. Eliot reminds us that the egg and sperm’s passage, the passage of a journey, is also the passage of time: “To arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” (Little Gidding)

Read More

Painting the nuit blanche in Toronto
Author
mediachef
Post
11.14.2010
Tags
,

With the Twin Cities’ first ever nuit blanche coming up June 4, 2011, – Northern Spark – I will be posting a lot of related content from nuits blanches around the world. via Lonely Planet from the 2009 Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Toronto.

Read More

Sorry I couldn’t be in Miami, I was there in 2007
Author
Steve Dietz
Post
11.13.2010
Tags
, ,

Sorry I couldn't Be there, Project VII, via @Platea

“‘Sorry I Couldn’t Be There‘ is a crowd-created video series. Developed by members of @Platea, the social media art collective directed by An Xiao, the series features artists from around the world explaining briefly why they couldn’t attend #rank and swing by Miami. Ultimately, the video would highlight concerns around geographic access and about who’s left out during large art fairs. For too long, the influential art centers have been located in major metropolitan regions such as New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Paris, London, Beijing and Seoul. We want to highlight the parts of the world where artists are working.”–William Powhida via Hashtag Class.

Read More

Thousand Print Summer becomes the Big Print
Author
mediachef
Post
11.13.2010
Tags
, , ,

“The Big Print” is comprised of art from 1180 kids and adults and an overall design inspired by historic Norwegian knitting patterns.

The Big Print is based on public art events around steamroller printing during the 2008 “Thousand Print Summer,” including Northern Lights’ The UnConvention during the Republican National Convention. The resulting prints by 1180 kids and adults are now installed at St. Olaf in NorthField, MN. Congratulations ArtOrg! Join the celebrations at the Big Print Block Party 2 to 4 pm, Sunday, November 21, 2010, in Buntrock Commons, St. Olaf College.

Read More

Watch Art(ists) On the Verge @ the Spark Festival
Author
mediachef
Post
10.26.2010
Tags
, , , , , ,

“Where Stefanich’s and Philips’ pieces are inward-turning, looking at the relations of human beings to each other, to memory, to the past, the works of Arlene Birt and tectonic industries (Lars Jerlach and Helen Stringfellow) turn outward, to the social and commercial spaces that constitute the public matrix in which we all swim.”

“Electronica and virtuality bring us, again, to the root questions of humanness: Can we create our selves? Can we create our own world? Are we at the mercy of our creations? Are they, rather, under our control? What do we want from what we make?”–Ann Klefstad

Read More

Smiles per hour
Author
Steve Dietz
Post
10.17.2010
Tags
, , ,

Smiles per hour zone, Port Phillip, Australia

“Are we a friendly folk here in Port Phillip? Do we smile or say ‘Hi’ to our neighbours and strangers as we walk down the street? Do we even make eye contact, or do we hurry down our street hoping no one will talk to us? In 2005, a survey of residents across our 7 neighbourhoods found that many people yearned for a friendlier neighbourhood, but didn’t know where to start. Some admitted that they also avoided eye contact and a smile with others in their streets.”–via

Read More