A Response from Daniel Sauter, "Making Something out of Something" Guest Host
The exhibition For Public Consumption, and the conversation surrounding it, addresses a variety of very interesting questions that are inherent to exhibition venues such as the HPAC’s ‘digital façade’. Some of the artworks shown on the façade since April 2006 focus on the very nature of the projection screen as a permeable membrane between the interior and the exterior. Other artworks emphasize aspects of the semiotics of urban screens in the context of advertisement, intimacy and privacy, scale, ambient conditions, and site-specific features.
Within the recent years, an emerging international discourse has developed within the Arts, Urban Studies, and Architecture, addressing questions of cultural curation and contribution within the increasing visual culture of public spaces (i.e. the Urban Screens Conference in Amsterdam, 2005, and Manchester, 2007). Within this discourse, one of the most challenging is the question of site-specificity in relation to the local visual culture.
The façade and lobby of the SK T-Tower in Seoul, Korea, dedicated to present digital art works and curated by the Art Center Nabi, finds itself in the in an urban context where the screen represents a particular feature of Asian modernism, with hundreds of screens along the streets joining forces in a collective digital flow. The Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, built in 2003 with a 900 sq ft digital façade, represents another instance of a contemporary art museum that extends into the exterior, with a low-resolution screen collapsed into the blob architecture, standing out deliberately against the baroque roof landscape surrounding the museum. The architectural context of those media facades couldn’t be more different. ‘SPOTS’, a temporary digital façade located at the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (s. image), is another place dedicated to present commissioned works from artists such as Jim Campbell and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, during a 18 months period since Nov. 2005, until it has been dismantled this April. Earlier this year, the Victory Media Network announced the “first large-scale, outdoor digital arts gallery in the world” (in that specific format) at the heart of Victory Park in Dallas. Eleven large high-resolution LED screens are dedicated to exhibit in the realm of Digital Art, Visual Storytelling and Film Shorts (these are just a few examples, I recommend for further information to research the work of the New Media groups Art+Com, realities:united, and ag4 that will illustrate a variety projects from the perspective of the façade’s designers). It is particularly interesting to examine this development, also rooted technological change, in regards to the amplification of scale within artwork, related questions about the role and status of the art institution, and a potential ‘digital divide’ within contemporary art museums that are willing and able to exhibit this kind of work.
The widespread architectural features of many art museum’s interior spaces, disassociating the art space from the outer world and suggesting values of objectivity and neutrality, seem to be opposite to the idea that the museum’s exterior actively ‘broadcasts’ into the environment. The moving imagery actively engages, intentionally or accidentally, the site-specific features of the place with all the semiotics of an urban screen, including commercial messages, and issues of censorship and self-censorship (e.g. in regards to nudity and violence). The challenge is to allow this medium to find its voice in the context of art institutions, and to avoid highly regulated, often minimalist and safe gestures of public art.
It is a great opportunity for the HPAC to participate in shaping this discourse through it’s own programming and cultural production. ‘For Public Consumption’ as both exhibition and agenda is in this context an excellent point of departure.
Daniel Sauter
School of Art + Design
UIC Chicago