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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.

Re Re-discovering the center
Author
mediachef
Post
08.15.2010
Tags
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“Sociologist William Whyte’s late twentieth-century clarion call for a “rediscovery of the center” asked us to reconsider centralized, dense public spaces rich with unexpected encounters and “maximum choice”. His appeal still echoes, but against radically different conditions. Notions of density, the public and private realms, and the experience of urban space have been re-inscribed in the purview of networked culture — the decentralized, layered, re-publicized and de-privatized conditions of virtual cooperation, coordination, and performance. The explosion of mobile media has transformed understandings and experiences of mobility and presence for technology users and non-users alike. Our social, cognitive, industrial, geographic, and economic experiences and systems have become severed or skewed from traditional anchors and re-oriented within network culture.”

from Rediscovering the Center…Again by Nepal Asatthawasi and Germaine Halegoua via the network architecture lab

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Small Wonders
Author
mediachef
Post
05.27.2010
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Stephanie Syjuco, Future Shock Nesting Boxes, 2005

Saul Becker, Strip, 2010

Jim Campbell, Ambiguous Icon #1 (running falling), 2000

Peter Chilvers and Sandra O’Neill, Air, 2009

John F. Simon, Jr., Every Icon, 1997

Beatriz da Costa, Pigeonblogger, 2006/2010

Robert J. Lang, Peregrine Falcon, 2010

Daina Taimina, 13-Symmetry, 2005, and Gail Wight, Ghost, 2004

Christopher Locke, Egosiliqua malusymphonicus, 2010, and Hilarofustis atarium, 2010

Erik Klein, Altair Musical Interference, 1975/2009

Natalie Jeremijenko, Feral Robotic Dog, 2006

Eduardo Kac, videotext works, 1985-86

Gail Wight, Ghost, 2004

Ken Goldberg and Karl F. Böhringer, flw, 1996, and Frank Oppenheimer, bamboo cane

Tad Hirsch, Tripwire, 2006

I just returned from San Jose working on the 2010 01SJ Biennial where, among other projects, I worked with Jaime Austin and Shona Kitchen to install “Small Wonders,” a cabinet exhibition based on the idea of the wunderkammer at the new expansion of the San Jose International Airport – which has some amazing public art, and you should definitely fly through there next time you come to the Bay Area.

Small Wonders includes work by Saul Becker, Jim Campbell, Center for PostNatural History, Peter Chilvers and Sandra O’Neill, Beatriz da Costa, Amy Franceschini, Ken Goldberg and Karl F. Böhringer, Tad Hirsch, Misako Inaoka, Natalie Jeremijenko, Eduardo Kac, Erik Klein, Robert J. Lang, Christopher Locke, Frank Oppenheimer, John F. Simon, Jr., SuttonBeresCuller, Stephanie Syjuco, Daina Taimina, and Gail Wight.

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Is precedent important?
Author
mediachef
Post
05.22.2010
Tags
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Virtual Street Corners

From the home page of Virtual Street Corners, a public art project by John Ewing with Boston Cyberarts & the Knight Foundation

This project looks great, and I’m excited to see it, but I do hope that by launch time there is at least some acknowledgment of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s pioneering Hole In Space (1980) project between LA and New York, which informed their LA Olympics original Electronic Cafe (1984), which had some of the same explicit goals of creating virtual discourse and sociability between geographically divided neighborhoods.

Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Hole In Space, 1980. Via Media Art Net.

Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Hole In Space, 1980. Via Media Art Net.

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