Engagement with Public Art Through Locative Media and Geodata

IFTF’s Anthony Townsend wrote an article that takes the New York City Waterfalls as context and the study I led on the evolution of the attractiveness of the waterfront as example of locative media, combined with the social media outlets of the web as enablers of public participation in public art (also see “Editer l’espace public” in Chronos).

Augmenting Public Space and Authoring Public Art: The Role of Locative Media (web – pdf)

Abstract: Locative media remain a useful frame for understanding how collaborative sensing will broadly empower groups to author alternative narratives of urban public space. The case of Olafur Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls is used to describe this process in the context of a recent large public art work.

Anthony has some provoking thoughts that go right up to my alley in considering locative media provide a solid basis for investigating the larger implications of collaborative sensing and sensemaking. The example of the Waterfalls indicate that, in the future, artists will need to rethink how they engage the public as co-producers of public art and public. It implies the development of techniques and observations from both on passive activity sensing and pools of user-generated data (or as Anthony would say “the interplay between top-down systems of command and control versus bottom-up systems for collective action“). I would argue that this example with public art could extended to any kind of practice that touches the public spaces.

Relation to my thesis: “locative media will also extend our awareness of the urban condition” and “the next step of urban computing will be the development of platforms for making sense of these pools of user-generated data, and visualizing them in place.”