Waste Management: Paul Kneale's Recycled Light (original) (raw)

The Rhythms of the Street. The Photobook as Walkscape

Paper Cities. Urban Portraits in Photographic Books

The experience of reading a photobook is always a rich sensorial one: the weight of the book, its format, the tactility of the paper, the design of the page, the orienta- tion of the pictures on the double spread, they all in uence the understanding of the images the book contains. In the regular analysis of the photobook these material aspects are normally suppressed. The book itself, so it seems, is nothing more than a vessel that contains images and organizes them in such a way that a ‘story’, a ‘his- tory’, a ‘viewpoint’ unfolds. In my experience as a researcher of several photobooks on the city, however, I noticed that the material and formal conditions of the books were able to express an experience of the city that goes far beyond a mere visual description of it. As I will demonstrate in my analysis of two particular photobooks of avenues in New York the alliance between book (printing culture) and image (visual culture) made it possible for the photographic image to translate in visual terms the experience one has when strolling, walking, running through a street.

streets are our brushes, squares are our palettes

“What’s (that) gleaming white in a forest green ? Is it snow, are that flocking swans?…”. The Slavic antithesis, the introductory part of Hasanaginica poem by an anonymous author, certainly without that intention, but successfully describes the usual reaction of an audience to Public art projects. The public art is leaving a gallery’s White Cube addressing to potentially new consumers of contemporary art, demanding from an audience to observe or to take part (the audience as the other party in a dialog) and of course an indifference is always the undesired feedback of the audience - that was Heisenberg who contested the dogma claiming that an object is independent of a subject observing it (“Big Other”). In a case when contemporary art is placed into a public space, Nada Beroπ considers that “ it’s being addressed in that way to a larger audience, a number of potential “consumers” increases and a work of art becomes more accessible, although not necessarily more available to the wide audience. Therefore the context of a public space is pretty often acting as a double edged sword, incurring damage to the audience as much as to the work of art.”. At the time of postscientism, or as Houellebecq would say “the third metaphysical mutation”, a visual aspect of perception is dominant, and as well as the visible object is prior to a visual medium, the visual culture also takes “precedence” over a notion of “visual arts” (the limits and rules of (un)contaminated visual perception are comprised in a statement of J. Gagarin, the first man who entered the outer space: “I was watching and watching, but I haven’t seen the God!”).

Google Street View: Artistic Practices as Lines of Flight

Google Street View presents the world as fact, mapped and documented, and reconstituted online; a virtual representation of a street condition. The raw material of the urban realm is rendered as a static, albeit fluid, image; an interface that invites a range of user practices—from both producers and consumers—that resists easy categorization. What emerges are a multiplicity of practices that produce a supple plane of organization: anticipated practices like advertising to way-finding, as well as a range of innovative uses that advance or augment a variety of disciplines and broaden the horizon of various consumers: ranging from academic research to sensationalist curatorial practices; from interactive advertisements to a controversial backdrop. This paper proposes that the conceptual organizational categories of the molar, molecular, and the line of flight, are three broader categories in which to situate the range of uses of Google Street View, and focuses on the artistic practices that exemplify the intrinsic qualities of the line of flight. In turn, these lines of flight are axiomatized by the fascist regime of Google; their ardent support of innovative, creative practices further advance the overall conception of the possibility of this technological plane and with it, our growing dependence on it.

With, On and Against Street Signs. on Art Made out of Street Signs.pdf

Street Art & Urban Creativity, 2018

In The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), Michel de Certeau suggests the idea of a city in which there are, on one side, strategies of information, surveillance, control and infrastructure design laid out by the system and, on the other one, tactics defining the how-to-do of the users with regards to that system, that is, the operations by which they adapt them to align their own interests and needs. The texts allows us to examine the interventions of urban artists as a tactic characterized, as defined by De Certeau, as the harnessing of the system's resources (making do). This is more specifically translated into adaptability, development on a space they do not own, identification and utilization of the occasion (time) and the inventiveness of diverting time and resources (shortcut and la perruque). In this work, we will take traffic signs of restriction and prohibition as one of the urban components that highlight the normativization of public spaces through the direct message of "NO" (not doing). Many artists have, in previous years, developed an interest in the artistic and symbolic possibilities of these signs and have developed works (tactics) as their response to them. Dan Witz (Chicago, 1957), Clet (Bretagne, 1966), Brad Dowey (Louisville, 1980) or DosJotas (Madrid, 1982) are good examples of this. Key words: De Certeau, strategies, tactics, street signs, Dan Witz, Clet, Brad Dowley, DosJotas

Nedelkova N. (2021) Book review. Annie Dell’Aria (2021) The Moving Image as Public Art: Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of Enchantment. Cham, Palgrave MacMillan.

The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture, 04: 174–177., 2021

This book provides an elaborate analysis of moving image artistic projects exhibited in public spaces in the United States of America. Annie Dell’Aria examines moving images as public art, focusing on a non-exhaustive but relevant selection of artworks that, over the past four decades of their presence and engagement with viewers in cities, have produced new forms of spectatorship. At a time when screens are increasingly becoming a constitutive issue of the urban fabric—especially since 2010, the year that marked the omnipresence of LED screens in public spaces—Dell’Aria offers an analysis of moving image public artworks by mapping their aesthetic innovation and values, as well as their social significance. Moving images, in the context of public art installations, can produce ‘new spaces, construct new modes of attention, and generate varied responses to a place’ (p. 16)

Inside Out: when objects inhabit the streets.pdf

This essay will explore the contemporary intersection of art and interior design on the level of social practice, surveying two projects that deal with pubic participation from a critical art perspective and Jacques Rancière's 'art as dissensus'.These 'design activations' offer urban inhabitants a phenomenological exchange that occurs with shifts between art and design, interior and exterior, and the subjective and intersubjective awareness of the city. A manual sewing machine and manual typewriter offer a different representation and experience of the Tenderloin District in San Francisco, the Berlin Wall and San Francisco parks.