Landscape-Portrait (2007) [1] is a public digital artwork that has been touring around the UK since its launch in 2007. In 2007 public arts agency Forma [2] commissioned the work as part of a series of public art works for the Dott Festival (Design Of The Times) Newcastle, UK. [3]
The artwork was conceived by Kevin Carter [4] and produced by in association with Forma, SCAN, [5] web designer Pete McDonagh [6] and d|Lab at the University of Teesside [7] and features collaborations with artists and practitioners across the UK. These included: Tony White, [8] Diane Humphries, [9] Craig Gilbert, [10] Richard Jeffery, Steve Lewis, Helen Sloan, [11] Media19 [12] and Karin Coetzee. [13]
Landscape-Portrait investigates how postcode demographics, as represented by the Acorn System [14] might reinforce certain stereotypes of communities across the UK. The work hopes to promote a dialogue around the possible effects this practice entails, for example in around social service provision, types of commercial investment undertaken as well as personal decision making, all of which arguably exacerbates a reductive perception of person and place, potentially at odds with an experience on the ground. In response to the reductive methodology of demographics the work makes use of public art practices in combination with digital technologies to author a complimentary dataset, with which to critique a purely statistical understanding of person and place. Participants are interviewed online and offline using a standard questionnaire which is based on that used by the Census. The revised questionnaire employs a subjective reasoning as opposed to an objective one that used by the Census. For example, where the Census questionnaire asks how many people the recipient lives with, the Landscape-Portrait questionnaire asks “How do you get on living with the people in your house?”. [15]
The resulting data - video, text, meta data, image - will be made available under a creative commons license, allowing it to be reused by other practitioners, aligning it to ideas about public arts relationship with use [16] and legacy [17] value. Landscape-Portrait is an example of a digital public artwork which derives from a practice which makes use of digital technologies and community focused public art practices. [18]
Landscape-Portrait is an example of a digital public artwork which derives from a mixing of digital technologies and community focused public art practices. This practice although derived from Digital art or more accurately Digital Public arts, [18] but might be better understood as digital community art. As such it is at an early stage of development, and invites further definition. Other works and artists that might be included in this discipline are Graham Harwood. [19] This approach to the use of digital technologies within a public art practice is differentiated from other digital public art works, such as UnderScan (2005) by Raphael Lorenzo Hemmer [20] whereby the audiences relationship with the work is mediated via a formal spatial method of interaction rather than as a result of a dialogical practice familiar to community based arts [21]
The work and its practice (methods and methodologies) have been presented at various conferences. These include Digital Engagement, Sheffield, 2010, [22] Public Interfaces at Aarhus University, Denmark, 2011 [23] and CCID 2011: The Second International Symposium on Culture, Creativity and Interaction Design [24] held in Newcastle. An article about the work and the practice of digital public art has been published in a peer-reviewed journal [25] and Dr Ann Light [26] for Sheffield and Hallam University has written about the work Landscape-Portrait in Interactions magazine. [27]
Digital art refers to any artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process. It can also refer to computational art that uses and engages with digital media.
David Hockney is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.
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Lev Manovich is an artist, an author and a theorist of digital culture. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Manovich played a key role in creating four new research fields: new media studies (1991-), software studies (2001-), cultural analytics (2007-) and AI aesthetics (2018-). Manovich's current research focuses on generative media, AI culture, digital art, and media theory.
Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces. Placemaking capitalizes on a local community's assets, inspiration, and potential, with the intention of creating public spaces that improve urban vitality and promote people's health, happiness, and well-being. It is political due to the nature of place identity. Placemaking is both a process and a philosophy that makes use of urban design principles. It can be either official and government led, or community driven grassroots tactical urbanism, such as extending sidewalks with chalk, paint, and planters, or open streets events such as Bogotá, Colombia's Ciclovía. Good placemaking makes use of underutilized space to enhance the urban experience at the pedestrian scale to build habits of locals.
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Social practice is a theory within psychology that seeks to determine the link between practice and context within social situations. Emphasized as a commitment to change, social practice occurs in two forms: activity and inquiry. Most often applied within the context of human development, social practice involves knowledge production and the theorization and analysis of both institutional and intervention practices.
The conservation and restoration of new media art is the study and practice of techniques for sustaining new media art created using from materials such as digital, biological, performative, and other variable media.
Ian McKay is a British writer, art critic, publisher and translator. A former editor of Contemporary Art magazine, and the founder-editor of The Journal of Geography and Urban Research, throughout the 1990s he was best known for his writings on the arts of Eastern Europe, being cited as the first British art critic to emphasize the negative impact of the western art market in that region. Throughout the 1990s and early-2000s, he was a contributor to a wide range of art journals, as well as writing on subjects relating to photography, cinema, and music. Since 2007 his publishing activities have mainly centred on UK Rural Affairs, and the environment however. Though periodically he continues to publish works of art criticism, his most recent publications concern social justice in rural Britain, as well as environmental conservation in the wider European sphere. He has also worked as an academic in several UK universities.
Participatory art is an approach to making art which engages public participation in the creative process, letting them become co-authors, editors, and observers of the work. This type of art is incomplete without viewers' physical interaction. It intends to challenge the dominant form of making art in the West, in which a small class of professional artists make the art while the public takes on the role of passive observer or consumer, i.e., buying the work of the professionals in the marketplace. Commended works by advocates who popularized participatory art include Augusto Boal in his Theater of the Oppressed, as well as Allan Kaprow in happenings.
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New media art includes artworks designed and produced by means of electronic media technologies, comprising virtual art, computer graphics, computer animation, digital art, interactive art, sound art, Internet art, video games, robotics, 3D printing, and cyborg art. The term defines itself by the thereby created artwork, which differentiates itself from that deriving from conventional visual arts. New Media art has origins in the worlds of science, art, and performance. Some common themes found in new media art include databases, political and social activism, Afrofuturism, feminism, and identity, a ubiquitous theme found throughout is the incorporation of new technology into the work. The emphasis on medium is a defining feature of much contemporary art and many art schools and major universities now offer majors in "New Genres" or "New Media" and a growing number of graduate programs have emerged internationally. New media art may involve degrees of interaction between artwork and observer or between the artist and the public, as is the case in performance art. Yet, as several theorists and curators have noted, such forms of interaction, social exchange, participation, and transformation do not distinguish new media art but rather serve as a common ground that has parallels in other strands of contemporary art practice. Such insights emphasize the forms of cultural practice that arise concurrently with emerging technological platforms, and question the focus on technological media per se. New Media art involves complex curation and preservation practices that make collecting, installing, and exhibiting the works harder than most other mediums. Many cultural centers and museums have been established to cater to the advanced needs of new media art.
Ecological art is an art genre and artistic practice that seeks to preserve, remediate and/or vitalize the life forms, resources and ecology of Earth. Ecological art practitioners do this by applying the principles of ecosystems to living species and their habitats throughout the lithosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere, including wilderness, rural, suburban and urban locations. Ecological art is a distinct genre from Environmental art in that it involves functional ecological systems-restoration, as well as socially engaged, activist, community-based interventions. Ecological art also addresses politics, culture, economics, ethics and aesthetics as they impact the conditions of ecosystems. Ecological art practitioners include artists, scientists, philosophers and activists who often collaborate on restoration, remediation and public awareness projects.
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