PUBLIC DOMAIN BY STANZA

Using live CCTV systems to enhance gallery space, and to make artwork.

Click on image to enter online labyrinth where live images get updated in real time across the network to make the visual experience.

The above image shows Amber Stanza ...which was used on the book cover Art Practice In A Digital Culture. it cannot be used reproduced in any form without written consent. Public Domain by Stanza

Installation using CCTV embedded in giant display to make the artwork..

Click on image to enter online labyrinth where live CCTV data gets updates in real time across the network to make the experience.

A number of interesting questions are raised.

1. How do visitors interact with each other and artworks?

2. How do visitors behave in public space and what patterns or communities do they form.

3. Can these outputs reshape our experience of public space and the art?

Art as practice based research

Public Domain is now also the title of a series practice led experiments by the artist Stanza investigating how visitors interact with art works, with each other  and what impact their experiences have in forming new user interactions within public space. The research will lead to new real time artworks based on visitor interaction and new visualizations of the gallery space based on gathered sensor data.

In further research environmental monitoring technologies and security based technologies are used to question audiences experiences of the event and space and gather data to show: what they do, how they interact, and how much they spend time inside the space. The project also focuses on the micro-incidents of change, the vibrations and sounds of the gallery using wireless sensor based technologies. see version one prototype Gallery . The gallery interior has been made virtual and placed online. "Gallery", is part of a series of process led experiments in data visualization within the context on an art gallery.

The work goes further to investigate a number of issues including how technology affords new ways of working with audiences and curators as participants in artworks. The concept of the exhibition as an active site for experimentation and collaboration between curators, artists and audiences prefigures a general cultural movement towards the centrality of experience and away from the reification of the object. However, how audience activities and movements can be used as the subject of new artwork as well as modify engagement with existing collections is a cultural and technological challenge.

See another installation in this series made at Plymouth Arts Centre. Visitors to a Gallery- referential self, embedded (http://www.stanza.co.uk/cctv_web/index.html)

(pilgrims image 2003)(c) stanza

Are CCTV systems of use in thinking about the new museum of the 21st century?

Can we think of the gallery as public domain space, a commons space?

There is increasing interest in the gallery space as a place for social engagement, audience participation and curatorial innovation and interaction around the convergence of arts and technology. This concept of the exhibition as an active site for experimentation and collaboration between curators, artists and audiences theoretically informs the project, Public Domain whilst new sensing technologies provide a platform for investigating and creating new types of interactive artworks for art museums and galleries. Interactive computational based art is a provocative cultural form which breaks down disciplinary boundaries and leads to the emergence of hybrid spaces for production, experimentation and exhibition. Culturally and technologically, Public Domain operates within new interdisciplinary and participative models for production, experimentation and exhibition.

image 2002 Pilgrims (c) stanza

Public Domain asks how visitors interact with art works, with each other and what impact their experiences have in forming new user interactions within public space.

The artworks are focused on answering these question. How do visitors interact with each other and artworks, what patterns or communities do they form?

How can interactive artworks and new user based experiences based on where people go and how they spend time in the gallery be made from the real time data and the analysis of CCTV.

In what ways can real time data and interaction analysis be transferred to marketing and education experiences, shaping where people go and how
they spend time in the gallery through the flow space?

Public Domain will access and analyze available data relating to gallery spaces and public interactions to make informed, interpretive media artworks by deploying wireless sensor networks to gather various types of data in the gallery and to collect (temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, noise, proximity measuring). The information will be incorporated into generative artworks and online visualizations of the gallery that will change over time. In addition artworks using CCTV systems in the gallery to trace public interaction patterns using software in existence and to create new software and new algorithms.

In a series of seminars, "Tate Encounters Research in Progress", at Tate Modern, the question was asked "To what extent does the web visitor have agency to 'act back' or to 'author' their interactions with museum websites? How is new media being conceived as an 'interpretative' or 'augmenting' dimension of the museum experience and with what effects?
How do museums see and understand the value of the use of personal mobile media within the museum?"

There are ways to address these questions online and offline through engaging closer with technology not just using it.

This is what Public Domain seeks to do. One has to experiment with the technology and understand how to get under the bonnet, and then new novel outcomes will shed light on this question. Analysis of website performance by tracking users hits and stickiness allows web designers to adapt the site to users needs. By doing effectively the same analysis in the museum/gallery space Public Domain will help inform our understanding of what the institutions might become in the 21st century.

The institutions can grow into a networked system with connected infrastructure and be in touch with measurable visitor experience which could equally be shared used to make artworks and of use for marketing and curatorial perspectives..

Researchers and curators at UK art galleries and museums could benefit from the impact of this project. It addresses audience participation utilizing technologies that most of these spaces will already have. Many key new media curators participating in the seminars, and technology testing sessions will benefit. Our partners have stated that this kind of investigation through experimental practice based research, new technologies, discourse and debate is part of thinking about strategies for audience engagement, visitor experience and sustainability within an ever diminishing public purse. Public Domain is a cross disciplinary project, involving art and new technologies is experimental form. This will benefit interactive and interface design, fine arts and wireless sensor networks. Stanza's prototypes and artworks help answer questions about user interaction and create version for types of interfacing with live audiences and real spaces.

Creative and marketing staff in public spaces are asking how does user interaction support the brand. They ask again how the users act back, can we use this agency in the space. Public Domain demonstrates this agency.

Questions about qualitative analysis of data in gallery space.

For example, ‘Taking Part’, a survey of cultural engagement states; “The Arts Council set out to understand the range of complex, interrelated factors that influence cultural consumption and participation patterns.“ On the other hand, the Arts Marketing Association (AMA) 2008 states: (10) “Arts organizations need to learn how to read and understand 'why' people engage or don't engage with their work on an ongoing basis if they are to continue to exist and thrive". The Tate Encounters: Research in Process (March 2008); Andrew Dewdney asks; “who comes and what is the experience of the user in the museum”. Andrew posed this question in the seminar, “how do the users act back, can we use this agency in the space”?

These are but three key examples of how public investment in the arts needs to be more closely tied to shifting and more complex ideas about the nature and quality of public engagement in the arts. Whilst the AHRC’s report, Leading the World: the economic impact of UK arts and humanities research (2009:8) acknowledges that, “Visits to museums, galleries and historical sites are a major activity of the British people. Approximately 40% of all adults visit a museum or gallery at least once a year,” we have yet to measure the quality of the visitor’s experience.
The Museum of Ireland has already recognized this by stating on its virtual web space that,” quality is more important than quantity… museum”.

Public Domain provides evidence of visitor experience from within an artist’s perspective, from within public debate about user engagement, interaction and feedback previously un addressed in the seminars and conferences named above.

The gallery (or museum) is turned into an artwork and the visitor (or audience) into collaborators.

A proposal and programme of work of the same title was developed with Prof Janis Jefferies ands submitted to the AHRC. The research document covered many more aspects than above including new many uses of new technologies in public space. The document is available on request. The proposal was rejected.

Art as practice based research

disclaimer

Stanza artworks images and texts all rights reserved. The copyright for any material published on this website is reserved. Any duplication or use of objects such as images, diagrams and texts is not permitted without Stanza's written agreement.

Stanza is a London based British artist who specializes in net art, data sculptures, and networked space. Work has been shown at The Venice Biennale, Tate Britain, The Victoria and Albert Museum. Recipient of Nesta Dreatime Award, AHRC creative fellowship and numerous prizes.

www.stanza.co.uk

email: stanza at sublime.net