The Art of Participation 1950 - Now

Whilst doing some internet research, I have come across an example of participatory art that I would like to share with you.

The piece is a part of an exhibition called 'The Art of Participation 1950 - Now' and is located at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition presents an overview of participatory art practice during the past six decades, exploring strategies and situations in which the public has taken a collaborative role in the art making process.

In particular, I came across this piece which I think is absolutely brilliant:

Image reference: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lizzie009/3261494450/

The piece is called 'Communimage - a moment in time VI' The piece has been developed by a range of multimedia artists and designers from across Europe, and in particular, Austria. 

Due to advances in technology, in particular the internet, new opportunities for communication and networking have been created. So with this in mind, the artists/designers wanted the internet to act as a tool in taking and applying a new meaning in 'shared authorship and collective production (communimage).

The artists/designers invited and encouraged the internet community to upload pictures onto a website. Contributions by those who participated range in varied subject matter. They include photorealistic images, animated images, to the intimate and the exhibitionist images!

When these images were put together, they created a large scale collective map, which represented the global internet community in relation to those who participated within the project. Almost 26.000 images were uploaded and used within the piece. 

The Austrian Cultural Forum on their website state that, "Viewed as a whole (one encounters it in the gallery as a large-scale print), communimage forms an abstract, polymorphous shape." So does this piece of participatory art reflect on the status of the image in the public realm and domain?

This has given me something else to think about within my practice & which follows on from yesterday's visit to The Public...intention and purpose of my art in relation to public realms/domains.