Amelia Barikin

Mega Screens for Mega Cities

This article considers how networked large urban screens can act as a platform for the creation of an experimental transnational public sphere. It takes as a case study a specific Australia-Korea cultural event that linked large screens in Federation Square, Melbourne, and Tomorrow City, Incheon, 1 through the presentation of SMS-based interactive media art works. The article combines theoretical analyses of global citizenship, mobility, digital technologies, and networked public space with empirical analyses of audience response research data collected during the screen event. The central argument is that large public screens can offer a strategic site for examining transformations in the constitution of public agency in a digitized, globalized environment. The idea of ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ is finally proposed as a conceptual framework for understanding how new forms of transnational public agency in mediated public spaces might operate.

Public screens and participatory public space

As social, locative, and mobile media render the intimate public and the public intimate, this volume interrogates how this phenomenon impacts art practice and politics. Contributors bring together the worlds of art and media culture to rethink their intersections in light of participatory social media. By focusing upon the Asia-Pacific region, they seek to examine how regionalism and locality affect global circuits of culture. The book also offers a set of theoretical frameworks and methodological paradigms for thinking about contemporary art practice more generally.

Translating Gesture in a Transnational Public Sphere

Translation is a key concept for interpreting cross-cultural exchanges. In this article, we track the development of an artistic project that we developed in conjunction with Federation Square Melbourne and Art Centre Nabi in Seoul. It involved the performance of a live telematic dance that occurred in both cities and was transmitted via the use of large screens. The interaction across these physical and mediated spaces produced a dynamic exchange of learning and communication. Through our active involvement as curators, participant observers and the gathering of audience participation data, we discovered that the corporeality of the dance placed both the addresser and the addressee in the context of the social practice of translation. In this context, we note that artistic projects can provide an embodied experience of the forms of heterolingual address and cross-cultural translation as analysed by Naoki Sakai. We conclude that the fascination for engaging in transnational communication was stimulated by the cross-cultural process of translating gestures.