Special Lecture
Martin Zebracki:
Whither Digital Public Art?
The Question of Amphibian Matter

Date: Friday, April 7, 2017
Time: 16:45〜
Venue: Room 5-407, Department of Music, Ueno Campus, Tokyo University of the Arts
Speaker: Dr. Martin Zebracki (Lecturer, University of Leeds)
Chair and Discussant: Dr. Yoshitaka Mōri (Professor Tokyo University of the Arts)
English only: No translation available
All welcome. Free

©Sjoerd van Leeuwen – All rights reserved

Abstract:
Digital technologies have increasingly reconfigured the roles and uses of art in public spaces. Not only have they come to question dichotomous spatial boundaries between the physical and digital, online and offline, public and private, and so on. (Mobile) digital and online technologies have also empowered everyday users of spaces to engage with, curate, co-produce and alter existing works of public art, which query the traditional dualism of artist/amateur. Building on my recent publications below, I will deconstruct the ‘amphibian’ (i.e., coexisting and transitional) values of public art, where I will focus on three themes central to this metaphorical argument: (1) Spatiality: Where is public art within digital mediations and augmentations of online and offline spaces and here-and-now and there-and-then?; (2) Materiality: How does public art materialise, i.e. take on and relay new forms, experiences and senses, beyond its physicality within realities/imaginaries of networked spaces of the physical and digital (i.e., hybrid space); (3) Sociality: How are inclusive/exclusive encounters with public art and its uses, misuses, reuses and disuses reconfigured through new affordances of digital technologies? I will end with some theoretical and ethical reflections on public art and the human condition in the post-Web 2.0, where social-networking and knowledge-organising technologies coalesce. I will propose the notion of public art robotics to question how such proliferating technologies operate as robots that may (problematically) redefine public art and cyborgian citizenship through new amphibian values of the organic/inorganic as well as human and more-than-human consciousness.

References:
Zebracki M Queerying public art in digitally networked space. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, forthcoming
Zebracki M (2016) A cybergeography of public art encounter: The case of Rubber Duck. International Journal of Cultural Studies. DOI: 10.1177/1367877916647142
(Zebracki)

profile:
Martin Zebracki
BScHons, MSc, PhD
He is Lecturer in Critical Human Geography in the School of Geography, University of Leeds. His research revolves around intersecting geographies of public art, (sexual) citizenship and social identity. Zebracki is the author of Public Artopia: Art in Public Space in Question (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), The Everyday Practice of Public Art: Art, Space, and Social Inclusion (edited with Cameron Cartiere, Routledge, 2016) and Public Art Encounters: Art, Space and Identity (co-editor: Joni Palmer, Routledge, 2017). His recent publications focus on emerging digitally networked spaces of public art and their potentials for and limitations to socially inclusive engagement, public creative engagement and identity performance. Zebracki serves on the Editorial Boards of Art & the Public Sphere and Geo: Geography and Environment and acts as Secretary of the Sexualities and Queer Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers).
https://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/m.zebracki (institutional)
http://www.zebracki.org (personal)

Inquiry:
Faculty Room, Department of Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts
Office Hours (Ueno): 10:00-19:00 (Mon, Thu, Fri)
Tel (Ueno): ＋81-(0)50-5525-2725
Office Hours (Senju): 10:00～19:00 (Tue, Wed)
Tel (Senju): ＋81-(0)50-5525-2732
info-ga(at)ml.geidai.ac.jp