Panel Statement

Panel: Unsitely Aesthetics: the Reconfiguring of Public Space in Electronic Art

Tra­di­tion­ally, pub­lic art or art in pub­lic spaces has been as­so­ci­ated with work that is, as Claire Do­herty stated in her cu­ra­to­r­ial pro­ject One Day Sculp­ture, “per­ma­nently sited, mon­u­men­tal and com­mem­o­ra­tive.” In my paper I will pre­sent and dis­cuss work that is made for, and in, pub­lic space, but in con­trast to this de­scrip­tion or de­f­i­n­i­tion, is nei­ther mon­u­men­tal nor fixed. Rather the prac­tices I am con­cerned with play out in pub­lic spaces (in­clud­ing the in­ter­net) but are not con­sid­ered pub­lic art. They work si­mul­ta­ne­ously across a num­ber of sites, both on­line and of­fline, and uti­lize a range of media strate­gies and in­ter­ven­tions. They are ephemeral, net­worked and per­for­ma­tive. I call these art prac­tices un­cer­tain and argue they exist at the in­ter­sec­tion of media art and con­tem­po­rary art. I pro­pose that these un­cer­tain prac­tices cre­ate a dif­fer­ent aes­thet­ics, one that I call un­sitely.

• Maria Mi­randa is a post-doc­toral fel­low in the School of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, Arts and Crit­i­cal En­quiry at La Trobe Uni­ver­sity, Mel­bourne. In 2009 she com­pleted her Ph.D the­sis en­ti­tled, Un­cer­tain Prac­tices Un­sitely Aes­thet­ics at Mac­quarie Uni­ver­sity, Syd­ney. Maria is a media artist who works in col­lab­o­ra­tion with sound artist Norie Neu­mark as Out-of-Sync. Their work has been ex­hib­ited na­tion­ally and in­ter­na­tion­ally. She lives and works in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia. out-of-sync.com

Full text (PDF) p. 1732-1737 [Title slightly different]