1. INTRODUCTION

VIBE: Video In the Built Environment is an ongoing, international, artist-led project that explores the impact of media in the built environment through curated, site-specific interventions, presentations and published documentation. Video In the Built Environment grew out of multifaceted, ongoing conversations about the proliferation of video screens in the urban mediascape and their potential use in the transmission of art content. Politicians, urban planners and architects have shaped cities by means of infrastructure, zoning and buildings. However, we speculated that other modes of interaction exist that are capable of influencing the experience of a city. The VIBE project attempts to present communicative media interventions in urban space to explore and transform public viewership in the built environment. Through coordinating, participating in and presenting VIBE we hope to challenge perceptions of the built environment, the act of viewing and engaging with an artwork, and to champion the role of video and interactive technologies within a public art and architecture discourse.

In a proposal for the renewal of Milan’s urban ring road, architects Maurizio Marzi and Nicoletta Ancona describe the process of ‘urban acupuncture’ as “… neither a discipline, nor a project technique, but a philosophy of approach… (whereby) catalytic procedures on a small scale are possible in relatively short time frames, and are able to obtain the greatest impact on the environment in the immediate vicinity.” [2]

This seems like appropriate and applicable terminology to summarize the VIBE project. In trying to present and make accessible to broad audiences new works in contemporary art which provoke thought and action with regards to the built environment we are sticking a ‘needle’ into a plaza and hoping that there is a positive effect on its surroundings. VIBE serves as a counterpoint to the everyday function of and commercial content in our cities’ public spaces.

The project attempts to initiate and explore the dialogue between artist and public in creating content to be viewed in an anonymous and open environment.

2. UBIQUITOUS MEDIA

As a consequence of the development of complex networks enabling a globalvirtual urbanity, we have had to revise our notions of public and private space. The ubiquity of screens in our everyday lives and the use of projection and video board technologies in particular have increased the pervasiveness of our exposure to unsolicited information and imagery. Screens of all sizes compete for our attention. However, unlike our willful participation in going to a museum, gallery or the movies - as random passers-by we have an open set of expectations that can be re-shaped by the combination of the built environment, the screened content and other viewers. This presents an intriguing set of circumstances to be explored. Who are we talking to? Who is listening? What are we saying? Are we invited, tolerated, appreciated or ignored? How does place influence content? When is a public an audience? These are some of the questions we are beginning to investigate.

Ubiquitous access to mediated content through the application of mobile, wireless devices is no longer only within the purview of science fiction. Furthermore, this content is leaking into physical space as networked computing components become embedded into objects and environments. The brick and mortar world is evolving digital abilities - our surroundings will soon be able to react to what “they” sense. The distinction between the ‘on screen’ perceptible world and the world around our screens is growing narrower. Similarly, the space between buildings is increasingly the site where a huge diversity of forms of social conduct is enacted. Rather than causing a decline of civic engagement, machine-mediated communication has merely shifted the locus of communication from the personal to the distributed. We can now work and play as we move around transacting with others across time zones and political borders. Likewise, urban screens have introduced something new into already existing social and spatial structures - a way of watching TV in public. But is that all it is?

3. RELATIONAL DYNAMICS

Architecture can be viewed as a frame or boundary for social interaction; video is a popular medium through which artists can address time. With VIBE, we hope to bring these together to define a distinct territory in the relationship between everyday spaces under extraordinary use. Places are symbolically marked by memory, tradition and ideology - through manipulation and combination of these presences and absences we can animate public space by creating instances of momentary, urban ephemera. Screens provide a space for such ephemera. In order to do this effectively, the work we insert into public space should resonate with the city (its particular vibe?) the scale and conditions of the space. Otherwise, we are just playing video in public. This has to do with the critical distinction between art in public places and public art.

The different relational dynamics between works and their settings applies VIBE Summer 05: Grabbing attention – the function of public artc video art as equally to video as to physical works of art. These have been defined [3] as: site dominant, site adjusted, site-specific and site conditioned/determined. Site dominant works are concerned with the maker’s subject matter, intentions and placement in reference to their inherent “artness” and virtually any setting would do. The artwork itself does not respond to its context, there is no interaction between the site and the work although the viewer may experience psychological or emotional connection to the work. Site adjusted work is similar but considers beyond itself adjustments of scale, appropriateness and placement but are still essentially gallery pieces placed in public space. Site-specific work is conceived with the site in mind - the site sets the considerations and constraints for the work and is at least in part the reason for the making the work. There may be an aesthetic symbiosis [4] in which an attempt is made to create a relationship between the work and its setting which draws attention to and enhances its setting and vice versa. Site conditioned/determined work makes the initial step towards being integrated into its surroundings and draws all of its reasons for being made from the interaction between the work and its setting. There may be a dialectical relationship [5] in which interaction between the work and its setting brings into being a third entity - the result of this interaction.

At present, the majority of works presented by VIBE have been site dominant or site adjusted. Some of the projected projects (need more info) shown in Chicago were site-specific. Hopefully, in future we will have opportunities to commission site conditioned/determined projects.

4. PUBLIC VIDEO ART

During the Nineteenth Century, public art declined and was relegated to the manifestation of memorial sculpture. However, since the 1960s the street has become an extension of the gallery. Video installations are now thoroughly mainstreamed in contemporary art practice - it is not a huge leap of the imagination to envisage public video installations.

“What is the new public art?” asked an art journalist in one of the earliest articles reporting on the new phenomenon: Definitions differ from artist to artist, but they are held together by a single thread: it is art plus function, whether the function is to provide a place to sit for lunch, to provide water drainage, to mark an important historical date, or to enhance and direct a viewer’s perceptions.” [6]

So what could be the function of public video art? Conventionally, most public art can be shoe-horned into 4 major categories [7] the aesthetic, the didactic, the symbolic and the functional. Can we correlate between these categories and the video works we have been programming in public spaces? Aesthetic works would be those that are primarily visually stimulating and that appeal to the spectacular. A great deal of this work could be considered to be most like merely playing video in public – except that a great deal of it is so unlike regular broadcast media that it becomes strikingly incongruous in an urban screen context. Didactic works are meant to instruct or educate the public – perhaps the more documentary-based works or works which point out the harshness of the urban environment would fit, in this case. Symbolic works would be those that attribute meaning or significance through the application of evocative images and metaphor in which subject matter is suggested rather than directly presented.

However, what might the function or purpose of placing contemporary artist’s video in an urban context? In conversations around the VIBE project a phrase that continually resurfaces and is often used as a metric of the success of a piece of video in public spaces is its ability to “grab attention”. This recalls the imperative of Brecht and Artaud’s theatre [8] to transform the familiar into something peculiar and unexpected. To hold the attention of someone on their way to and from somewhere else, to give them pause for thought or reflection as to what they have just seen or even just put a smile on their face is at present anyway, enough. It is anticipated that as we become more familiar with curating and making work for this context that the work and our methods of evaluating it will increase in sophistication.

5. CONCLUSION

There is growing evidence that a distinct genre or area of practice is emerging around the use of large scale projection and video board technologies in presenting artists video in urban public space. The author asserts that although this is not a radical innovation, this practice is becoming more widespread through increased technological capability and opportunity to present in this way. These new sets of creative, cultural and economic conditions are stimulating intriguing levels of inquiry by creative practitioners to work in this way and to seek out and use technologies that facilitate a particular dialectical relationship between the work and its setting. Insights gained from the initial projects completed are likely to feed into future presentations. Whilst much of the work in this area is experimental its impact is potentially significant for current professional and academic models.

VIBE presentations:

• Spring 05 12th – 25th March, 2005 - a 30 minute program hosted by The Bigger Picture (a Cornerhouse project funded by Arts Council England) screened 5 times daily on the BBC’s 25 square meter screen in Exchange Square, Manchester, UK and at the International Digital Media and Arts Association (iDMAa) Conference in Orlando, Florida.
• Summer 05 1st – 14th August, 2005 a 30 minute program shown 5 times daily on BBC screens in Exchange Square, Manchester, UK (hosted by The Bigger Picture); Clayton Square, Liverpool, UK; and together with a 30 minute program of work from the UK shown 9 times daily at Columbia College, 600 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. In addition, in Chicago there was also shown 4 site-specific, projected interventions on the evening of 2nd August to coincide with the University Film and Video Association’s 59th Annual Conference.

REFERENCES:

www.v1b3.com
Marzi, Maurizio., Ancona, Nicoletta., Urban Acupuncture, Renewal of Milan’s Urban Ring Road. 40th ISoCaRP Congress 2004 [online] Available from: http://www.isocarp.org/Data/case_studies/553.pdf [Accessed September 27, 2004.]
Irwin, Robert., Ed. Weschler, Lawrence., Being and Circumstance: Notes toward a Conditional Art. Lapis Press, in conjunction with the Pace Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Larkspur Landing, 1985.
Crawford, D., Ed. Kemal, S. and Gaskell, I., Comparing Artistic and Natural Beauty in Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993.
ibid.
Deutsche, R., quoting McGill, D.C., Ed. Ghirardo, Diane., Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture. Bay Press, Seattle, 1994.
Swales, Paul., Ed. Jones, Susan., Art in Public: What, Why and How. AN Publications, Sunderland, 1992.
Brecht, Bertolt., Ed. Willet, J., Short Description of a New Technique of Acting which Produces an Alienation Effect in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Hill and Wang, New York, 1964.