Artists Statement

“Occupy The Screen” by Paul Sermon and Charlotte Gould was a site-specific work commissioned by Public Art Lab Berlin for the Connecting Cities Festival event “Urban Reflections” from 11 to 13 September 2014, linking audiences at Supermarkt Gallery Berlin and Riga European Capital of Culture 2014. This installation builds on practice-based research and development of previous interactive works for large format urban screens such as “Picnic on the Screen”, originally developed for the BBC Public Video Screen at the Glastonbury Festival in 2009.
This new installation pushed the playful, social and public engagement aspects of the work into new cultural and political realms in an attempt to ‘reclaim the urban screens’ through developments in ludic interaction and internet based highdefinition video-conferencing. Through the use of illustrated references to site-specific landmarks of Berlin and Riga, audiences were invited to “Occupy the Screen”. The concept development of “Occupy the Screen” was inspired in part by 3D street art as a DIY tradition, referencing the subversive language of graffiti. The interface borrows from the “topoi” of the computer game, as a means to navigate the environment; once within the frame the audience becomes a character immersed within the environment.
“Occupy the Screen” linked two geographically distant audiences using a telematics technique; the installation takes live oblique camera shots from above the screen of each of these two audience groups, located on a large 50 square metre blue ground sheet and combines them on screen in a single composited image. As the merged audiences start to explore this collaborative, shared ludic interface, they discover the ground beneath them, as it appears on screen as a digital backdrop, locates them in a variety of surprising and intriguing anamorphic environments where from a particular position the characters can look as if in a precarious situation.
“Occupy the Screen” aimed to include the widest range of urban participation possible and aligns to a Fluxus “Happening” in a move away from the object as art towards the street environment and the “every day” experience. It also borrows from a tradition of early cinema where audiences were transfixed by the magic of being transported to alternative realities though screenings at the traveling fairs. Lumière contemporaries, Mitchell and Kenyon, whose films of public crowds in the 1900’s present a striking similarity to the way audiences react and respond to “Occupy the Screen”.
Through this research we found that the environment and timing have a large impact on the way that an audience responds. The inspiration was drawn both from the cities of Riga and Berlin, with input from the communities. The area of play was clearly demarked as a space via a blue box groundsheet in both cities identifying a theatre of play, once in the space the participant engages as they wish. In many ways “Occupy the Screen” broke down cultural and social barriers, both in the local communities, but also between two cities, Berlin and Riga, where new collocated spaces and creative encounters could be founded and occupied. paulsermon.org/occupy

Videos: Documentary Pub Art Lab Documentary
Project Partners Public Art Lab Berlin: Project Partners Public Art Lab Berlin
Connecting Cities: Connecting Cities

• Charlotte Gould (UK) has developed a number of interactive environments for urban screens. She is currently developing location specific work in which the user becomes an active participant in the narrative and explores methods of user driven content. She graduated with a BA Honours Degree in Graphic Design from Chelsea School of Art in 1990 and was awarded an MA in Creative Technology from the University of Salford in 2003. Charlotte Gould is a Principle Lecturer and Academic Programme Leader for Visual Communication at the University of Brighton. charlottegould.org
• Paul Sermon is Professor of Visual Communication at the University of Brighton. He has worked for over twenty years as an active academic researcher and creative practitioner, primarily in the field of telematic arts. Having worked under the visionary cybernetic artist Professor Roy Ascott as an undergraduate Fine Art student, Paul Sermon went on to establish himself as a leading pioneer of interactive media art, winning the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Linz, Austria, shortly after completing his MFA at the University of Reading in 1991. An accolade that took Paul to Finland in the early 1990s to develop one of the most groundbreaking works of his career Telematic Dreaming in 1992. paulsermon.org