Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

N.B. This exhibition will not take place at Vooruit, but at the S.M.A.K.

Electrified 02 – Hacking Public Space wants to show how artists from different disciplines look at public space and investigates how the content of the concept ‘public space’ has changed over the past thirty years.

Sixteen contemporary and internationally active artists will contribute to the Electrified exhibition. Vooruit and the S.M.A.K. will also offer a retrospective on the (relatively new) history of hacking public space. A look back on – or a tribute to – thirty artists who launched innovating ideas for public spaces.

Exhibition

Lucas Murgida

exhbition S.M.A.K.

By way of sculpturally ‘furnished’ activities in the public space Lucas Murgida balances on the boundary separating private and public.

Lucas Murgida (b. 1976, San Francisco, USA) is a furniture-maker, locksmith and yoga teacher, skills which he uses in an artistic study of the way we attempt to demarcate our personal space within the public space. He sees the key as a powerful metaphor for this search for private security, an object that can disrupt or confirm this system. In this context Murgida has, among other things, given workshops in the public space with such titles as ‘how do I find my keys again?’, ‘how can I force a lock?’. As a yoga teacher he examines on a more psychological level how people attempt to ‘bolt’ their own body as well as their house. In Electrified 02 the focus is on sculptural activity in the public space. As a furniture-maker Murgida designs tables and chairs whose proportions are slightly incorrect and then places them on the pavement as an improvised, temporary meeting place. One of the sculptures is a chest of drawers on wheels that is just big enough to crawl inside. In New York, Murgida put this hiding cabinet (2008) on the pavement and waited patiently until someone decided to take it home with them. The result was a clandestine invasion of the private property of the cabinet’s new owner.

Julius von Bismarck

exhbition S.M.A.K.

Who would have thought that your own ‘private’ snapshots were no longer safe? Using the Image Fulgurator Julius von Bismarck hacks the idea that ‘everyone is a photographer’ while at the same time criticising mediatised society.

Julius von Bismarck (b. 1983, Germany) operates on the boundary separating art, science and technology. The perception, documentation and manipulation of the public space play a central role. Von Bismarck develops interactive objects that criticise our mediatised society. In 2008 Von Bismarck developed the Image Fulgurator, a converted camera, which hacks into and manipulates other people’s photos. While someone is taking a photo the Fulgurator projects, in a split second (and invisible to the human eye), a text or image onto the building, object or person being photographed. The photographer is unaware of this and the manipulation is only apparent later. The camera is activated by the photographer’s flash. Every photo taken at precisely the same time and of the same object the Fulgurator is focused on is affected by the manipulation. Inspired by the unerring trust people place in their photographic reproductions of reality, he activated his Fulgurator during a speech by Barack Obama in Berlin, on Tiananmen Square in Beijing and at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. In 2009 Bismarck developed the Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus, a drawing machine, which translates texts into patented drawings and in this way depicts the texts in the form of a narrative.

Christophe Bruno

exhbition S.M.A.K. / intervention

How do publicity and advertising affect the surfing behaviour of the everyday user of virtual public space? For more than ten years Christophe Bruno has been studying this using Google (the most visited website in the world)as his field of activity.

Christophe Bruno (b. 1964) focuses on the relationship between language, communication and their economic relationship with the Internet. He examines how we use search engines like Google to evolve towards a new form of textual, semantic capitalism. In concrete terms, this results in such works as Epiphanes (2001), a Google hack in which words and sentences are randomly linked to a search term. In 2002, Bruno developed The Google Adwords Happening: he opened an account and bought certain key words. Google links each key word to advertising space for which the advertiser pays each time someone clicks on the advertisement. Instead of advertisements promoting goods or services, Bruno wrote short poems, which, according to Google norms, were ‘worthless’. In this exercise the artist wanted to focus attention on the fact that every word (in whatever language) has a price, which fluctuates according to the laws of the market. Electrified 02 presents the wifi Human Browser internet performance in which an actor enters the public space wearing headphones and receives Google text-to-speech information and recites it live. A system like Google operates on the basis of an economic logic in which analyses of trends and statistics predict and direct our individual thoughts, actions and wishes as Internet users. In this sense Human Browser embodies the Internet user’s irrational behaviour. Google makes a pact with him: our online privacy is reduced in exchange for ‘happiness’ and ‘comfort’.

Miet Warlop

exhbition S.M.A.K. / intervention

Poetry and emotion are the ingredients Miet Warlop uses in her work. Rusty objects and ideas are turned upside down and absurd, everyday routines are prized loose by way of ‘manic-optimistic’ interventions.

Miet Warlop (b. 1977) creates visual art, theatre, dance, performance and interventions in public space. The ‘reanimation’ of lifeless objects and situations in our everyday lives play a central role in her work. She stubbornly seeks a new significance or task for objects that have become so familiar to us that their potential seems to have been exhausted. She mixes up the predetermined relationships between then in the way a natural disaster would. When a hurricane passes over a residential area, the destruction blows new life into every object and a new logic dominates the area. The relationships between the objects change. Chairs which once stood in the garden are now on the roof; a tree protrudes horizontally through a window and no longer stands vertically in the ground, and so on. Her performances and stage work are hugely poetic and emotional: a table acquires a woman’s legs complete with stiletto heels, figures take shape and so on. In the public space, Miet Warlop carries out very specific actions under the name Play The Life, in which she attempts to break down everyday routine by introducing minimal gestures or actions: one night she ventured out with some garden chairs and showed them some idyllic spots in Ghent. She also sat in her car singing love songs to passers-by on the pavement. She describes Play The Life as manic-optimistic interventions that react to the lack of human contact between people who are stuck in their daily routines. For Electrified 02 Miet Warlop will undertake several new interventions.

Pierre-Laurent Cassière

exhbition S.M.A.K. / intervention

In his work the sound artist Pierre-Laurent Cassière explores the limits of human perception and how the spectator becomes confused and loses his sense of balance when there are subtle shifts in sound.

The sound artist Pierre-Laurent Cassière (b. 1982, France) focuses on the dynamic relationship between space, the spectator and the experience of environmental sounds. The artist literally plays with the limits of human perception and the confusion and imbalance created when sounds are subtly shifted. By means of very specific interventions, Cassière makes the spectator aware of the ‘sound pollution’ that surrounds us. In 2006 he created Schizophone, a hearing aid that makes the spectator doubt his perception of sounds in his environment. With no electronic applications, the Schizophone comprises a set of headphones with two cone shapes left and right so that the slightest shift in space (even just turning one’s head) causes the spectator to become disoriented. A logical result of this is the Transphere (urban soundscape bending), a sound object which Cassière devised at Summercamp Electrified (2009) and which he here places in the public space in a way that is very subtle but ‘effective’. The Transphere behaves like an electro-acoustic ‘performance’ in which the performer breaks into the normal arrangement of ambient sounds. The instrument consists of two parabolas, one in each hand, whereby one acts as a microphone and the other as a speaker. Schizophone and Transphere are also used during Electrified 02 as sound sculptures in the exhibition. Transphere will also be ‘activated’ by several unannounced actions in the city.

Helmut Smits

exhbition S.M.A.K. / intervention

Helmut Smits – City Three (Reep en Keizer Karelstraat in Ghent)
Helmut Smits – Dead Pixel (Citadelpark in Ghent)

Upsetting the smooth functioning of the public space; this is what Helmut Smits attempts to achieve by way of subtle interventions. Giving objects a new, other life. In this way the artist/designer gives the public space more style.

The work of Helmut Smits (b. 1974, the Netherlands) is not easy to categorise. In his work as a visual artist and designer, he crosses disciplinary and museum boundaries so that he can get to work in the public space. Smits gives everyday objects a second life as an art object by displaying them in a museum context or assembling them into a new appliance. Paint rollers change into press microphones, tin cans are recycled into a lamp base or sports trophy, inflatable water rings – assembled into a fountain – add style to the public space. The objects or sculptures Helmut Smits creates trigger both the autonomous thinking of designers and the applied thinking of artists. They reflect on social phenomena, structures and habits without resorting to a finger-pointing idiom. By means of minimal interventions, Smits manages to disrupt the public space – or at least the way it functions. For example, he puts small water pumps into existing holes in the road surface so that fountains begin to spout as soon as it has rained. He plants a tree in front of a billboard next to the road or supports a young tree with two ‘dead’ trees – wooden supports in the ground. For Electrified 02 Helmut Smits will be going into town. Under the motto: ‘bring nature into the city’ he plants a green billboard in the centre of the urban fabric. On the other hand, in the Citadel Park he will burn away a Dead Pixel – a square piece of green 82×82 cm, which is precisely the size of one pixel in a Google Earth picture taken at an altitude of 1 km. Dead Pixel changes into a piece of land that does not exist; here the artist alludes to the human desire to discover a place nobody has been to before.

Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost / Alec De Busschère

exhbition S.M.A.K. / intervention

Ivo Provoost and Simona Denicolai don’t have to think for long when it comes to answering the question of how art relates to the very society that produces it. By way of performances, video, installations and objects they redefine the artist’s position in the public space.

The artistic interventions by the artistic duo Ivo Provoost (b. 1974, Diksmuide) and Simona Denicolai (b. 1972, Milan), play on the conventional divide between public/private and art/reality. Their work is a statement against art that positions itself outside society and opposes an artistic practice that hides behind the boundaries of one particular medium. In their performances, video films, installations, objects, printed matter, drawings, and so on, this duo ‘redefines’ the status of the artist in the public space. For Electrified 02, several works are displayed which respond to the ‘traditional’ way of looking at our society. Chambre avec vue (2004) is a video in which a mosaic made up of individual pieces goes for wild rides on a skateboard so that dozens of small mosaic stones are constantly being smashed to smithereens. In an urban setting the mosaic exhibits freestyle behaviour, which has a secondary effect on the landscape images mounted in between and of which the mosaic is the title sequence. With the volume button on 10 this heightens the effect of the skateboard’s aggressive behaviour even more. In the film To be here (happy) (2005) we see them at work precisely crafting a fake cactus, before personally transporting it to Death Valley in California where they return the imitation plant to its so-called natural biotope. In this film, Denicolai & Provost react to the circumvention of American legislation prohibiting the import of ‘living’ species. Nature is played off against culture, the imitation is openly confronted with the original. Pace 2014-2028 (2009) consists of an edition of 15 different prints in which the universally recognised PACE logo is depicted in gradations. At each colour stage the vector codes – available on the Internet under the so-called copyleft or creative commons – are indicated so that the artists as it were ‘release’ this print for personal use. At Electrified 02, we shall see both the gradation prints in the museum and a ‘virus edition’ of this work, which is spread and exhibited throughout the city.

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Ben Benaouisse

exhbition S.M.A.K. / intervention

The dancer and visual artist Ben Benaouisse seeks the boundary separating art and life, and questions the relationship between the artist and the spectator: what happens when a migrant tramp asks you(as you just happen to be passing by) to take a snapshot of him?

Ben Benaouisse (b. 1971, Familleureux) is a dancer, performer, artist and other things, but above all cannot be conclusively classified under any of these disciplines. He has danced with Les Ballets C. de la B., Victoria, Latrinité and others. Since 2007 he has provided a new platform called Fondamenta where performances, actions and exhibitions are given free play on the boundary between art and life. The tone set by Fondamento – ‘Everything has already been done/Everything still has to happen) – is ambitious. Benaouisse reacts to this leitmotiv with the questions: ‘What has already been done?’ and ‘What can I still do?’ This results in, among other things, performances in the public space in which he constantly crosses the boundary between the performer and the spectator/chance passer-by by actively coming into contact with them. During the LiteSide Festival in Amsterdam (2008) he shut himself up in a cage for 24 hours, on a protest strike against ‘barbarism’. From his cage he actively communicated with passers-by. As part of Electrified 02, he will visit various suburbs where, dressed as a tramp, he will sit on the roofs of various buildings (as a roofless (homeless) person on a roof), from where he will address passers-by, asking them to take a photo. In this way the artist manages to ‘capture’ the view of the passer-by. How does a chance passer-by frame a homeless man of migrant origin? Benaouisse did the same thing in The Hague. Now the scene will also be filmed by someone, after which it will be presented as a video film. The remarkable collection of self-portraits (including those photographed in The Hague) will be placed in the exhibition as silent witnesses.

Ivan Moudov

exhbition S.M.A.K. / intervention

The mechanisms of the world of art – rules regarding the art market, previews, the ‘value’ of a work of art or a collection… – these form Ivan Moudov’s starting point in his attempt to undermine this system. Do you know the trick with the two-euro coin? I will let you in on the secret if you pay me five euros!

Ivan Moudov (b. 1975, Bulgaria) is an artist who mainly attempts to undermine the ‘rules’ of visual art. Traditional systems, structures and sector-oriented ‘customs’ – collecting art to form museum collections, determining the ‘value’ of art in accordance with the laws of the art market, previews which are unavoidably accompanied by receptions, and so on – are used in a visual game which the artist plays unabashed and sometimes brazenly. Between 2002 and 2007 Moudov collected fragments of various works of art from museums and galleries in Europe. His collection includes Panamarenko, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren and Douglas Gordon. Like a Noah’s Ark, he collected these unique fragments in wooden Fragments boxes. In 2006 he developed his own Wine for Openings, a Cabernet Sauvignon from Bulgaria, which was also served at the 2007 Venice Biennale and elsewhere. For Electrified 02, Moudov will spread a trick or treat vibe in Ghent. With the simple yet tempting question: ‘Would you, in exchange for five euros, like to know how to split a 1 euro coin in two?’, the artist will launch a black economy barter system which initially appears fairly innocent. Nothing is further from the truth, especially as Moudov uses this sales trick to break into the S.M.A.K. purchasing policy system. He is willing to reveal the trick in a performance in the museum, but in exchange the museum has to purchase a work by a young Belgian artist and give it to Moudov. In this way not only does he force the purchase of new work for the collection, but he immediately incorporates this work into his own personal collection. The work by the Belgian artist will be exhibited together with Moudov’s installation.

Messieurs Delmotte

exhbition S.M.A.K. / intervention

Messieurs Delmotte initiates amusing, disarming but at times hard activities in the public space. In this way he plays with the boundary separating reality and imagination, genius and dilettantism.

Messieurs Delmotte (b. 1967, Belgium) calls himself Messieurs because of his personal appearances in performances in the public space. His work can be positioned between reality and imagination, genius and dilettantism. It is not an outpouring of the self but play-acted attempts to go beyond reality and its limitations. This frequently results in hypersurrealist, but very recognizable, strip cartoons. Delmotte’s work is best described by a quotation from Jacques Lacan (which is about love but is nevertheless highly applicable): ‘Giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.’ Like a Buster Keaton-type dandy, Messieurs Delmotte initiates amusing, disarming but also very hard and shocking activities. He falls out of a tree, tries to make chickens fly by flinging them into the air with his mouth, waters the road surface with a watering can (even though it is raining) and embraces trees in a park. His imagination knows no limits when it comes to devising banal and absurd situations. He is thorough when it comes to putting things into perspective, he trivialises life and art and especially the ‘art scene’. His video films are way of distancing himself from it as much as possible; indeed they come close to being about nothing and nobody. For Electrified 02 Messieurs Delmotte will carry out several unannounced actions in the city, which will then be incorporated into the exhibition.

Wilfredo Prieto

exhbition S.M.A.K. / intervention

Using a humorous lightness Wilfredo Prieto manages to address social and political themes in his work. With a minimum of means he draws the very maximum out of what he is trying to tell us. Or, why a red pen with a blue cap has to say what it has to say…

The work of Wilfred Prieto (b. 1978, Cuba) can best be described as Baroque Minimalist. Although his visual idiom is always distilled down to the essence, and he uses only a minimum of material, Prieto always manages to inject his work with maximum narrative power. The spectator is consequently presented with ‘concentrated’ images, which are effectively almost ‘overloaded’ with meaning. Which does not mean that Prieto’s work is always ponderous, quite the contrary in fact. Although he does not avoid social and political themes from his homeland, Cuba (and the rest of the world), his work also has a lightness that is both humorous and puts things into perspective, which renders the problems more bearable without trivialising them. Work like Infidelity (2009, a red felt pen with a blue cap), Coffee and Milk (2009, two stains next to each other on the floor, one white and one black) or Limonada con dos Pares de Cojones (2007, limes, sugar and water on the floor) are imbued with such poetic humour, but, and this is really important, are all ephemeral, direct and temporary. For Electrified 02 the artist will ‘scatter’ several of these almost flash mob-type sculptures in the exhibition. He will also incorporate his only digital work, Observe a moment of silence, a poetic (but benign) computer virus, into the digital invitations to the exhibition in such a way that not only will the sculptures ‘hack’ into the exhibition space but his work will also hack into the computer of each and every viewer.

Carlos Rodríguez-Méndez

exhbition S.M.A.K. / intervention

Carlos Rodríguez-Méndez uses his own body – size, arm length, relationship to space or other objects – to perform clandestine activities in the public space. The results of this trickle through into the ‘institutional’ context.

Although Carlos Rodríguez-Méndez (b. 1968, Spain) is a sculptor, he approaches the creative process of his sculptures in highly individual and ‘performative’ way. Starting out from his own body, Rodríguez-Méndez uses his height, width, arm span, posture in relation to objects or space and so on, to carry out clandestine actions in (urban) public space.
Unannounced, he breaks open pavements, digs holes and builds walls using roof tiles or bricks. Nevertheless, these radical actions do not stand alone, but are the first stage in the realisation of a sculpture. The sculptures, some of which are several metres high, are brought into the museum setting by means of a procession– without taking into account the limits of a specific architectural space – and leave the destructive traces of the action on the walls for what they are. For Electrified 02, Rodríguez-Méndez will present a new sculpture, preceded by a performance. The artist will sail around Ghent in a small boat, seated in a dentist’s chair. While he undergoes his annual dental check-up, one of the cleaning staff at S.M.A.K. will Hoover the banks of the river. The dentist will clean Méndez’ mouth, removing dental plaque and bits of food stuck in his teeth – which will be an uncomfortable experience for him, especially as it will take place on a boat and in the public space – and then the waste collected from the banks and these impurities, from both the individual body and the public space, will be placed together in a Hoover bag and exploded. Public v. Private are united in one exploded sculpture.

Special thanks SEACEX, the Spanish Government & Ivago

Amilcar Packer

exhbition S.M.A.K. / intervention

Amilcar Packer uses his own naked body as a tool for studying architecture, space and the conditioned ‘rules’ to which every individual is tied.

In his performances, Amilcar Packer (b. 1974, Chile) usually starts out from his own body. He uses what is most familiar to him – his own naked body – as a tool to examine the relationship with the surrounding architectural space and the conditioned rules of behaviour and regulations associated with it. By means of short performances recorded in photos or on video – Packer never performs live before an audience but presents the result afterwards – he questions functionality, sexuality and physical and psychological limits. In Video #04 (2005) we see Packer sitting in an closed room, naked and wrapped in black shoes, exploring the space. In Video #57 (2006) we see him balancing on a chair on top of an open door, in Video #10 (2005) he balances naked on a circle made up of various bits of furniture. The search for stability is an important and recurring factor in Amilcar Packer’s work, always presented with humour and imagination, challenging and occasionally provoking. Electrified 02 shows one of his most famous, poetic and oppressive works, Video #14 (2006). We see a wooden chair falling through the air. Referring to Yves Klein and his idea that the air is a completely abstract experience, the chair appears to carve a line through the clear blue sky. There is no beginning and there appears above all to be no end… while the suspense gradually builds up. Packer’s latest work, Video #15 (2008) will also be shown for the first time at Electrified 02. Here he is locked up naked in the loading space of a lorry which races through the hectic traffic in his home city of Sao Paulo in Brazil. We see the artist grimly trying to maintain his balance while the chaos of the public space in Sao Paulo shakes and tugs at the loading space. Here too his private body is united unstably with the aggression of the public space in the huge metropolis of Sao Paulo.

Javier Núñez Gasco

exhbition S.M.A.K. / intervention

Claiming the footage of a participation in a dating show on television as a work of art… In his work Javier Núñez Gasco tests the authenticity and public worth of the media, communication and entertainment.

Javier Núñez Gasco (b. 1971, Spain) from Madrid uses existing, often public communication tools, which he uses and ‘claims’ as his own work. This method generates a wide range of actions in which media, communication, entertainment and issues, which may or may not be worthy of public interest, are questioned and tested for their authenticity. In 2002 Gasco had a microchip with a serial number implanted, a simple surgical operation that is performed on dogs so they can always be identified and traced. The artist documented the whole process – the search for a vet who was willing to do the operation, the operation itself and the huge media attention – in several video films and newspaper articles. Another reflection on the authenticity of things is Copyright (2005), a tattoo Gasco had done on his skull, with the words: ‘© forever Javier Núñez Gasco’. In law, copyright is only legal if it is written down. Electrified 02 will incorporate a very explicit hacking into the public space in the form of Telemadrid (2002), a dating show of the same name on a broadcasting station in Madrid, in which Javier Núñez Gasco appeared as a candidate.

Roberta Gigante
In her work, Roberta Gigante (b. 1986, Arpino, Italy) explores relationships between public space, image and sound. More specifically, she examines the resonance frequencies of various objects and how sound behaves as an ‘image’. As part of Electrified02, Gigante will be going to the harbour in Ghent. It is not so much the setting that interests her as the site, where twelve gigantic metal pipes are being stored. The pipes lie next to one another, like separate organ pipes waiting to be brought together in one instrument. Each pipe – depending on its thickness, diameter and length – has its own resonance frequency, which is recorded and then used as a keynote in a site-specific sound installation. In OrganOOn the artist ‘hacks’ the port site in Ghent with a sound installation that appeals to the imagination and will be activated just once, namely on 9.5.2010. This unusual organ concert also questions the classical organisation and setting in which concerts like this are held.

Flashback

1. TOMMASO TOZZI (°1960) and STRANO NETWORK - netstrike, 1995 [the net as a public space for protest]

During the first wave of the World Wide Web, the old, standard media described it as a new ‘virtual reality’ in which to immerse oneself to forget the physical world. Meanwhile, a group of Italian artists and activists rethought it as a global medium for protest, where anybody could actively and effectively express his position. Tommaso Tozzi and Strano Network (founded in 1993) organised the first ‘netstrike’ ever in 1995. Their ‘netstrike’ was a coordinated action where thousands of people simultaneously loaded the homepage of an institution whose decisions they opposed, effectively blocking it for a few hours. Similarly to crowds constantly walking over pedestrian crossings to block access to a specific place, it worked successfully against the French government website, protesting against its senseless nuclear tests that destroyed the beautiful Mururoa atoll.

2. SURVEILLANCE CAMERA PLAYERS (SCP) – George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, 1998

Surveillance Camera Players opened the eyes of the art world to the approaching omnipresence of surveillance cameras as a socially accepted form of generalized video control. Their action raised the awareness of a scattered ‘big brother’ that pretended to ‘protect’ public and private properties in a mass recording of people walking nearby. Surveillance Camera Players performed street dramas in front of cameras in public places, such as the New York Subway (Orwell’s 1984 was one of their favourites). There, curious passers-by were implicitly made aware of the almost invisible cameras and, consequently, their watchers.

3. THE YESMEN - Gatt.org website fake, 1999

‘On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog’ was a popular aphorism in the first years of the web, expressing the manipulation of identity that was easily accomplished by pretending to be somebody else in a chat, or by building plausible web pages. The Yesmen were the first to combine this ambiguous aspect of the web with a determined questioning of the online presence of public institutions, always too slow to adapt to new technologies. Their Gatt.org fake, a sham but perfectly plausible website was a radical (and sarcastic) critique of some of the worst acts performed and attitudes shown by the Gatt and the WTO bodies. Their actions then extended to government bodies and global corporations, enlightening the audience on the activist approach to manipulation.

4. VV. AA. – Telestreet, 2002, [street pirate television with an online shared database to be re-broadcast. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EKQNtLXm4o]

Television only truly envisioned its first revolution after the net became involved in its mass diffusion, being digitized and re-transmitted at will (often illegally) through the web. In a social and cultural context poisoned by a Prime Minister who is the owner of the three major private networks (in addition to his control over the remaining three major public networks) the Italian mediascape saw the rise of ‘Telestreets’: improvised channels with low-power transmitters that mostly invited normal people to experience the machinery of TV and broadcast radical information (both local and general). Having peaked with several hundred street television channels, the Telestreet movement has left a heritage of a valuable shared and free online video archive (originally meant to be a shared resource for their programme schedule).

5. WILFRIED DE BOEK/SOCIALFICTION.ORG – walk, 2002 [algorithmically rethinking the city,
http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography/dummies.html]

Wilfried de Boek (and his platform socialfiction.org) has a psycho-geographical vision of urban space. He views it as potentially active, where people can walk the streets following instructions and so potentially emulate very simple microprocessors. In his performances, a few people follow instructions (formalized as if they were programming code) while wandering the city. His vision is that this process can be extended to a level of complexity that can, ideally, calculate moves in a chess game between a human and a ‘human-based computer‘. Public urban space could then be part of a human-fuelled machine, and become an autonomous entity.

6. MICHELLE TERAN - Life’s a User’s Manual: Argos Walk, 2003 [viewing the invisible and transmitted space]

In the public space, surveillance cameras are the eyes of control, filming and recording a space that nonetheless remains invisible, stuck in the eyes of the controller or in the storage of the recorded data. This space is often transmitted from a wireless surveillance camera to a receiver that records it. Michelle Teran eavesdrops dressed as a homeless person with a live monitor in a half-full trolley, holding an aluminium tube (as an antenna); she becomes a living (walking) sculpture who steals signals that reveal these hidden spaces through a vivid, imaginary cyberpunk world.

7. BLAST THEORY, GAME – Uncle Roy All Around You, 2003, [playing in the city, mixing real and virtual characters in the streets]

The flooding of the net into our everyday physical reality started at the beginning of the two thousands. The alternate-reality games (games played both online and in physical reality) were and still are a hybrid territory that involves the player’s mind on two levels simultaneously: real space and virtual space. Uncle Roy All Around You was a game and a performance, where there were actors on the street and online. Here, the theatrical aspect is dominates and players may start to wonder whether they are part of a fiction set in reality and life, and where the boundaries lie.

8. MOLLEINDUSTRIA - Netparade, 2004, [http://www.euromayday.org/netparade/]

Strikes (like every public gathering of people) are going to be under increasing threat from the virtual dimension of the event appearing somewhere on a screen. The representation of a physical presence (the individual) can make a difference, changing the online perspective of participation in such events. Netparade offered the chance to choose how to represent oneself in the context of an alternative ‘first of May’ public demonstration. The overwhelming virtual participation (17,000 avatars were) speaks for itself, together with the extreme variety of individual representations. A virtual class is born.

9. JOSH ON - They Rule, 2004 [the hyperlink as a space for revealing the astonishing intertwining of power relationships]

The power of a database is still largely underestimated. How much can properly associated data reveal of a specific phenomenon? Data that is meant to be public, but is too complicated to be analysed without digital tools, can assume a completely different perspective. Josh On unquestionably proved this by building a database of all the business and governmental boards of directors he could find, coupling it with impressively designed interface. The navigable
results (centred on powerful people sitting on different boards) are astonishingly revealing of unknown concentrations of power in the hands of single subjects. The public power becomes truly public and nothing is the same again.

10. CHRISTOPHE BRUNO - Human Browser, 2004 [the hypertextual nature of the net spoken in the streets]

Searching the web has become a global activity, mostly personal, but more than just routine. The results are trusted, and so they guide our life and knowledge. Bruno plays with the publicness of searched data, de-contextualizing them in a disturbing and yet familiar environment. Through live web searches he guides a professional actor who approaches people in a public space. The actor hears the results of searches through hidden headphones and speaks them out loud, spicing them up with a rich variety of gestural and facial expressions, addressing people directly, and quickly pretending to be familiar with them. The terrific and disturbing mixture of language and gesture exposes most of the contradictions in the seamless mixing of a virtual and a real environment.

11. 0100101110101101.ORG, Nike Ground, 2004 [a plausible nightmare of corporate communication taking over the city]

The power of global corporations, and their brand image, has occupied a frightening amount of public space, nonetheless without any perceivable public dissent. 0100101110101101.ORG duo, supported by Konrad Becker and his Institute for New Culture Technologies, wanted to test this out by pushing it to the extreme. They were able to simulate a dark futuristic situation where, as a result of sponsorship, a gigantic new sculpture of the Nike logo has completely transformed a historical square in Vienna. Played on the level of public communication, the action yielded controversial results. It played both on a form of ‘boomerang marketing’ (marketing that can backfire) and on citizens’ reactions to this ‘imposed‘ presence that expressed their lucid or obfuscated feelings.

12. CORY ARCANGEL - Friendster Suicide, 2005 [the first artistic gesture of anti-social networking]

In 2005 there was no Facebook, only its important ancestor: the unfortunate ‘Friendster’, which had most of the characteristics of its multimillion-dollar descendant. Nonetheless, the behaviour the two sites induced was very similar, including the endless obsession with ‘having more friends’ and the consequent unnatural social practices. That’s why Cory Arcangel decided to commit ‘suicide’ on the early social-media platform, acted out during a public event. The decision to definitively terminate his personal presence in a social environment was an exemplary symbolic act, with a precognition of how millions of people were later to become entangled in induced social labour (perceived as ‘social activity‘) on behalf of Facebook.

13. GORDAN SAVICIC - Costraint City – The Pain of Everyday life, 2007 [provoking visible physical pain from invisible communication waves]

The public space is continuously pervaded by invisible electromagnetic waves of data. How frightening would it be to feel them physically on our skin? Gordan Savicic shows us how. He wears a jacket that tightens each time he encounters a new Wifi network transmission. Our laziness in reacting to the pervasiveness of industrial technologies in our living space (implemented even without any explicit consent) is thus sculpted as the resulting wounds on Savicic’s body. On one side it relates to some kind of masochism we unconsciously express in our laziness. But his resulting injured body is both the visualization of data and conceptual sculpture.

14. IMPROV EVERYWHERE - Frozen Grand Central, 2008 [smart mobs turned into perfect public theatre, http://improveverywhere.com/2008/01/31/frozen-grand-central/]

Well before the fashion for ‘smart mobs’ (spontaneous gatherings of people who acting together with an apparent cause and then disperse) Charlie Todd was experimenting with similar interventions in public space, with a solid theatre background. His ‘smart mobs’ turned into amazing public theatre performed by disguised actors together with ‘normal’ people, all involved together in funny and unique, apparently random, public events. The different view of public space that Improv Everywhere made possible by their actions is admittedly amusing, but it smartly raises questions between the lines, such as the role of the individual in a mediated society and reclaiming the use of public space (or space perceived as public).

15. PAOLO CIRIO - The Big Plot, 2008 [narrative within the intricacies of social networks]

‘The Big Plot’ by Paolo Cirio is an intriguing multifaceted plot that intertwines the threads connecting its four protagonists. The pieces of their respective public identities are created not by short descriptions or memory flashbacks, but are scattered about on several platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, personal blogs, MySpace and a few others). They make careful use of the respective reference media: video, pictures, curriculum vitae and bits of personal activities. The infinite possibilities opened up by the combination of these platforms completely redefine the concept of public identity. Cirio let them act both as private subjects and public entities. The more the user views and connects, the more gratified he is to be fictitiously closely acquainted with the single person/character concerned, in a space that is increasingly perceived as hybrid private/public.