College Art Association 2012

College Art Association, 100th Annual Conference

Public Art in the Virtual Sphere

Christiane Paul, Ben Rubin and John Craig Freeman, Photo by Vaneeesa Blaylock.

Thursday, February 23, 2012, Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 S. Figueroa St. Los Angeles, CA

Chairs: Mary M. Tinti, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum; John Craig Freeman, Emerson College

John Craig Freeman, Emerson College

Christiane Paul, The New School

Ben Rubin, EAR Studio

Whereas the public square was once the quintessential place to air grievances, display solidarity, express difference, celebrate similarity, remember, mourn, and reinforce shared values of right and wrong, it is no longer the only anchor for interactions in the public realm. That geography has been relocated to a novel terrain, one that encourages exploration of mobile location based public art. Moreover, public space is now truly open, as artworks can be placed anywhere in the world, without prior permission from government or private authorities – with profound implications for art in the public sphere and the discourse that surrounds it.

Browse the Emergent Technology as Art Practice and Public Art as Intervention Presentation.

Please see Vaneeesa Blaylock’s review “Public Art in the Virtual Sphere,” in I Rez Therefore I Am.

Mobile Art: The Aesthetics of Mobile Network Culture in Place Making

Jenny Marketou, Sarah Drury and John Craig Freeman, Photo by Vaneeesa Blaylock.”

February 25, 2012, Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 S. Figueroa St. Los Angeles, CA

Chairs: Hana Iverson, Visiting Scholar, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and Dr. Mimi Sheller, Director, Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, Drexel University

I-5_Passing/52 Food Marts Project, Christiane Robbins, Jetztzeit

Narration in Hybrid Mobile Environments, Martha Ladly, Ontario College of Art and Design

Silver (Gateways): Being Here and Everywhere Now, Jenny Marketou, independent artist

Mechanics of Place: Textures of Tophane, Sarah Drury, Temple University

ManifestAR: An Augmented Reality Manifesto, John Craig Freeman, Emerson College

The integration of mobile and locational technology into physical place has broadened the possibilities for the creation of new spaces of interaction and opened the disciplinary boundaries used to define and understand the public arena. When real places are merged with virtual worlds, or augmented with interactive digital media, the result is a completely new “hybrid” environment where physical and digital objects coexist in real time. What are the potentials of mobility spaces as new sites for integrating creative invention, public participation, and social interaction? With presentations from artists, scholars, and interdisciplinary collaborative teams that engage art that incorporates cell phones, GPS, and other mobile technologies, this session focuses on emergent forms of mobile art that engage, subvert, or recombine perceptions of the definable (visible) and indefinable (invisible) aspects of place that simultaneously reveal and construct their stabilities and instabilities, their materiality and nonmateriality.

Browse the ManifestAR: An Augmented Reality Manifesto Presentation.

Please see Vaneeesa Blaylock’s review “Where is Public Space?,” in I Rez Therefore I Am.

About John Craig Freeman

John Craig Freeman is a public artist with over twenty years of experience using emergent technologies to produce large-scale public work at sites where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. His work seeks to expand the notion of public by exploring how digital networked technology is transforming our sense of place. Freeman is a founding member of the international artists collective Manifest.AR and he has produced work and exhibited around the world including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, FACT Liverpool, Kunsthallen Nikolaj Copenhagen, Triennale di Milano, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Beijing, He has had work commissioned by the ZERO1, Rhizome.org and Turbulence.org. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, El Pais, Liberation, Wired News, Artforum, Ten-8, Z Magazine, Afterimage, Photo Metro, New Art Examiner, Time, Harper's and Der Spiegel. Christiane Paul cites Freeman's work in her book Digital Art, as does Lucy Lippard in the Lure of the Local, and Margot Lovejoy in Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age. His writing has been published in Rhizomes, Leonardo, the Journal of Visual Culture, and Exposure. Freeman received a Bachelor of Art degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990. He is currently a Professor of New Media at Emerson College in Boston. Freeman writes, “If Andy Warhol set out to create a distinctly American art form in the twentieth century, I identify with those who seek to create a distinctly global art form in the twenty-first.”

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