Audience interaction?

Last week I gave a talk at the University. One of the questions and reoccurring themes is about the way this sculpture will be used.

The site of the sculpture at the left side of the entrance to the Art Dep. building is a place where students hang out it its nice weather. I wanted to keep that open use and extend it to create a place where people can also make something public, present something. A sculpture that can also be seen as a pavilion, but without the roof.

I was influenced by the notion of the Thing,  (Ting or Ding). The Oxford Dictionary gives a range of senses: “Origin: Old English, of Germanic origin (…). Early senses included ‘meeting’ and ‘matter’, ‘concern’, as well as ‘inanimate objects’.” The Thing in the old sense refered to the concerns that would bring people together because it devides them. An archaic meeting to discuss and decide. Today variations of this word are still used for the places where these meetings are or where held. For instance Tynwald Hill in the Isle of Man. There are also examples of places where these meetings where held under significant trees. [See Latour, B., & Weibel, P. (Eds.). (2005). Making Things Public, Atmospheres of Democracy. Karlsruhe: ZKM Centre for Art and Media. Chapter 4.]

My idea was then to use the notion of a special place where people would gather to make things public, as an ‘artwork’. In this case I am not extenting the rol of the artist towards curation but towards architecture.

The question for the owner, the University, is then how is it going to be managed? I hope the use will evolve organically, not only from the visual art, but also from dance, theatre and poetry performance. Meetings of any (unforseen) kind.

The question for the students is then to come up with ideas. While its not build yet this blog could be used to drop in your ideas.

The notion of the ting also relates to the notion of the public sphere:

The public sphere is an area in social life where people can get together and freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. It is “a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment.”^[1] The public sphere can be seen as “a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk”^[2] and “a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed”.^[3]

The public sphere mediates between the “private sphere” and the “Sphere of Public Authority”,^[4] “The private sphere comprised civil society in the narrower sense, that is to say, the realm of commodity exchange and of social labor.”^[5] Whereas the “Sphere of Public Authority” dealt with the State, or realm of the police, and the ruling class.^[5] The public sphere crossed over both these realms and “Through the vehicle of public opinion it put the state in touch with the needs of society.”^[6] “This area is conceptually distinct from the state: it [is] a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state.”^[7] The public sphere ‘is also distinct from the official economy; it is not an arena of market relations but rather one of discursive relations, a theater for debating and deliberating rather than for buying and selling.”^[7] These distinctions between “state apparatuses, economic markets, and democratic associations…are essential to democratic theory.”^[8] The people themselves came to see the public sphere as a regulatory institution against the authority of the state.^[9] The study of the public sphere centers on the idea of participatory democracy, and how public opinion becomes political action.

The basic belief in public sphere theory is that political action is steered by the public sphere, and that the only legitimate governments are those that listen to the public sphere.^[10] “Democratic governance rests on the capacity of and opportunity for citizens to engage in enlightened debate”.^[11] Much of the debate over the public sphere involves what is the basic theoretical structure of the public sphere, how information is deliberated in the public sphere, and what influence the public sphere has over society.

source: Wikipedia and see also: Habermas, Jürgen (1962, English Translation 1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-58108-6.