The concept of 'public space' also requires further explanation. The most common interpretation of public space is the urban space of the streets. ... The term refers to spaces that are accessible to everyone, in which no other rules but public ones apply.
p. 7
The increase of video art in public space is inseparably connected with a huge increase in the number of commercial applications of video in the street, such as outdoor screens, projections on the facades of buildings, or forms of interactive applications as part of the architecture.
p. 14
Within this interdisciplinary tendency, video proved to be an extremely suited medium, much used by artists.
p. 59
... The message was that video art needed to reinvent its own visual idiom.
From its inception, video art has focused on looking across the borders of other disciplines. In this context, art historian Rosalind Krauss spoke of a 'post medium condition'. ... In Krauss's view, video had thus determined the end of the modernist medium-specific approach to art.
p. 60
Just as many video artists nowadays show a selection of their work on the internet, they also seem to be less and less hesitant about presenting it on the street, despite the limitations. However, an opposite reaction can also be seen in the work of artists who only show their video installations under strict conditions and want to guard their exclusivity through limited presentation rights. ... This dichotomy in fact corresponds to the historical development of video art, in which the search for a visual idiom specific to the medium has developed in tandem with the search for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. Video art in public space is first of all a flexible form of video art, in which artists are repeatedly prepared to let their images relate to the different media and images at different sites in public space.
p. 86
The street is seen as a new platform, a meaningful environment for the selected works of art.
p. 87
Bakker thus capitalized on the 'visual noise' caused by the many advertising expressions and signboards, but also other sources of light such as lampposts, traffic lights and shop windows. Even when you project on an isolated minimalistic structure, even when you show a video with only abstract show on the screen, a work presented at such a location always derives its meaning from its urban context.
For that reason, existing works that are shown on the screens are also carefully selected for the twist they can give to such an urban context. Cineboards 2007, whose theme was 'Architecture Year' in Rotterdam, showed many works that humorously, but certainly not without earnestness, showed how the rise of digital media has shaken the core values of architecture.
p. 88
... as a kind of 'video graffiti', ... the video work becomes part of the noise of the city. At a rapid pace, the building is overgrown, the plants burst into flower and subsequently lose their leaves.
...
To different degrees, video artists are using the city as a new exhibition space. The above-mentioned examples are all unilateral interventions by artists where the video work is added to existing facades.
p. 89
Not only the people living in the neighbourhood, who are bothered by the flickering lights, but also the architects are not always enthusiastic. After all, this video art, just like the commercial videos in the streetscape, is simply added to the architecture that they design.
p. 93
Aitken says something about the experience of art, which in his eyes should be part of a greater metropolitan experience. Literally and figuratively, he breaks through the walls of the museum with his work.
p. 95
By connecting through the internet, the limitations of physical place are overcome and the design truly becomes a 'terminal'. As a result, the public experiences the physical and virtual environment as an inseparable whole.
p. 129
These works not only make these differences visible, but simultaneously address inter-passive individuals, who farm out their subjectivity and retreat into virtual capsules, on the subject of their personal involvement in the urban environment.
p. 132-3
Various video art works focus on creating a collective experience in an environment through which the individual generally only travels anonymously. ... Through its inherent stratification and temporality, video art is the medium par excellence for emphasizing the heterogeneity and variability of public space.
p. 151
Allan Kaprow saw the boundary-crossing power of video art as one of the most important characteristics of the new medium, but also detected a huge concentration in the medium itself and an enthusiasm for its newness. ... Through this increasing accessibility, their gadget value will soon diminish, while the actual boundary-crossing value of video art will be used increasingly effectively to play a role in the daily lives of twenty-first-century city dwellers.
Pixels and Places, Video Art in Public Space (2010, Stichting Picos de Europa, NAi Publishers: Rotterdam.)
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