Public - Volume 23, Issue 45, 2012

The unavoidable necessity to sleep acknowledges the built-in limits humans have to the nearly inescapable demands of work and consumer culture. International art events such as Nuit Blanche present a resistance to this mortal ‘sleep’ as a version of participatory art. Though such events foreclose traditional notions of spectatorship, they nevertheless reinforce spectacle as a systemic challenge to individual subjectivity. Arguably, contemporary art’s increasing sleeplessness and its contradictory implications compel a kind of ‘activation’ that affirms rather than resists the global market.

This article considers the impact of Nuit Blanche and participatory art on public behaviour and interaction, the quality of participant engagement in Nuit Blanche shared via social media (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, blogs), and how this phenomena might inform contemporary discussions of utopia and ‘ourtopia’. Within this context, Nuit Blanche offers an extraordinary demonstration of the mobilization of a large and diverse public actively seeking the experience of the transformation of a familiar urban fabric into a cityscape that is mutable, surreal, disruptive and, on occasion, enchanting.

This text examines ‘NIGHTSENSE’, an exhibition of fifteen projects curated by DisplayCult for Toronto’s 2009 Nuit Blanche. Given the location in the financial district, the curators explored how artworks could intervene into the symbolic and affective value of the locale’s charged sites, shift the bullish business atmosphere, and initiate a critical discussion about economics, citizenship and public space. ‘NIGHTSENSE’ articulated two curatorial concerns: broadening aesthetics to encompass a wider sensory engagement, while configuring context-sensitive installations to respond to the recent economic crisis. Synaesthetic and immersive artworks encouraged critical and ludic participation by diverse audiences in Canada’s financial epicenter, where the conventional sensory economy gave way to an interrogation of the subtle but powerful links between bodies, aesthetics and capital.

The city of Paris is a primary cultural site for western/European modernism. Creative and critical projects engaging with Parisian modernities work collectively to remember the city as spectacle: as myth, legend and icon. This study examines Philippe Soupault’s Les Dernières Nuits de Paris (1928), seeing it as a modernist work typifying the Surrealist fascination with the city at night. It argues that Soupault’s novel renders Paris as urban spectacle, manifesting an experiential urban mode, or poetics of place, that foreshadows the experiments of the Situationists and the contemporary civic festival, the Nuit Blanche.

Halifax’s Nocturne: Art at Night has been met with almost universal enthusiasm from both the city’s arts community as well as local political and business elites. This article argues that, while there is much laudable about events like Nocturne, and while many of the works and performances they feature are reflexive and critical, they risk participating in (and promoting) what I term ‘neo-liberal civics’. Ironically, these public events take place and have resonance only within a cultural, social and political landscape already dramatically privatized, one where the meaning of ‘creativity’ has become a battleground.

Manhattanhenge, a twice-annual solar occurrence that witnesses an alignment of the setting sun with the grid of towers and streets in New York City, has become increasingly popular due to institutional legitimization and the proliferation of dedicated online communities. This article not only argues for the consideration of Manhattanhenge as an informal mass street spectacle, but also identifies its very appearance as the product of an ongoing 200-year experiment in urban design. Manhattan, defined in terms of geography, city plan and vertical expansion, makes visible the solar phenomenon, which itself makes possible a renewed engagement with the urban setting itself.

Recent developments in projector technology and mapping software have enabled more artists and promotional firms to pursue large-scale, outdoor projections onto architectural and other public surfaces. Projection mapping techniques now have the ability to radically transform diverse surfaces beyond the ‘white screen’, including animate bodies, with dominating and powerful light images. What are the politics and ethics of such an emerging ‘projection culture’, wherein any surface has the potential to become screen? How can interventionist architectural light projections be distinguished from promotional projections? Recent examples of such projection practices in contemporary art and in the commercial sphere are examined.

For over fifteen years the Madrid-based Eat Art group Ali&Cia has built up an extensive repertoire of projects in which aspects of reality (clothing, urban and natural landscapes) are reinterpreted through food in a fantastical semiotic game of illusion and visual pun, and then devoured collectively. A type of public performance art, these collective actions are participatory in their creation, presentation and in their final consumption by all those that attend the grand rituals of catharsis. This article examines Ali&Cia’s urbanophagy events, where edible cities are collaboratively cooked, constructed and then eaten.

Montréal’s ‘Quartier des spectacles’ development plan represents a substantial investment in the city’s creative economy and built infrastructure. A striking element of this urban initiative is the manner in which the architectural structures and public spaces of the area are themselves in the process of becoming spectacular through the incorporation of numerous media technologies. Traditional dividing lines between public art, urban design and site branding are significantly blurred in the mediatic space of downtown Montréal. This article will discuss a number of public art installations that have already taken form within the Quartier des spectacles and consider how these projects coincide with or challenge existing interpretative models of aesthetics, economy and public space.

Freee proposes a new conception of participation for art. We address current debates on art and participation, for example in the theories and positions of Grant Kester and Claire Bishop. These two positions set a polarized debate between a social and collaborative ethic in art, and the shock tactics of an avant-garde art. For us, publics are not reducible to the individuals found in the marketplace or the political and cultural encounters of the spectacle (consumers, fans, viewers, customers, etc.). A public has agency, which is why we prefer performative actants (witnesses, signatories, advocates, etc.).

The 2008 Freewaves festival HollyWould featured the exhibition of 160 artists whose experimental video art, new media works and staged performances took place in storefronts, tattoo parlours, galleries and restaurants along Hollywood boulevard. Festival curators used the five-day event to interrogate Hollywood’s 30-year urban revitalization programme – a plan that has dramatically transformed the built landscape and social demographics of the neighborhood. Using Guy Debord’s theories of the spectacle and détournement, this article will explore whether HollyWould was an effective attempt to détourn urban renewal itself by reframing the neighborhood’s ongoing transformation for viewers, tourists and local residents.

This article contributes to the ongoing discussion about the loss of public space and the means by which citizens reclaim it by examining the antics of the urban playground movement’s large-scale public pillow fight events. The phenomenon of the public pillow fight is analysed in terms of playful movements that have preceded them, theoretical implications of play as an important human engagement, and the author’s own participation in the International Public Pillow Fight Day in Boston, 2009. This article contends that public pillow fights are a significant event for redefining public space through play.

New media art and activist organizations, such as FutureEverything in Manchester, Bootlab in Berlin, and the Waag Society in Amsterdam, sound a strikingly Productivist tone in their avowals to employ digital technology to turn consumers into producers, availing mass participation for social innovation. As such practices seek to reconstruct the public sphere, the question remains whether this access to information and the technological means of its production actually redistribute ownership of knowledge, labour and experience, or whether such projects further institutionalize an ideal bourgeois public sphere by creating a mere semblance of cultural participation.

This article examines the Dublin St. Patrick’s Festival’s official intercultural parade performance group, City Fusion, through my perspective as a volunteer artist and group facilitator in 2009. By tracing City Fusion’s 2009 process from concept to performance, I critique the project’s reliance on performative ‘essences’ from various minority groups. These dramaturgical choices reveal City Fusion’s version of interculturalism as negotiated primarily by Irish(-born) artists and designers, resulting in a refusal to situate participants’ histories, issues and performance techniques in context. City Fusion’s blind spots ultimately reveal key challenges hindering dialogical theorizations of interculturalism in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.

This article considers how misbehaviour in the form of performative gestures can contest the borders of social and spatial normativity as determined by neo-liberal economic and social policies. At the heart of this discussion is the necessity of public space for democratic debate and imagining possible futures. By explicating the participatory art project, ‘Z’s by the C: A Radical Crafting and Public Napping Project’ and drawing upon a methodology called bubonic tourism, the article argues that not only can the body generate temporary public spaces and infectious modes of operating in the world, but that civic agency can be renewed and subjectivity altered.

In a context of the rapid development of air travel over the last century, this article posits flight as a performed spectacle and investigates the relationship between ‘aeromobility’ and ideas of national identity. It explores some of the ways in which aircraft have been employed and addressed in arts practices from Futurism to the 2012 London Olympics. In doing so, it argues that such practices are revealing of a complex and shifting relationship to an increasingly mobile world.

In February 2010, the public was part of the action. The Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver staged a plethora of cultural projects that called for involvement. During Vancouver 2010 forms of social practice art for both sanctioned and resistant aims co-mingled with the deliberate choreography of crowds and the ubiquitous use of interactive digital forms.

Untitled, Khvay Samnang, Sa Sa Bassac, Phnom Penh (curated by Erin Gleeson), 15 July–21 August 2011