Installation

Screening Publics

brittenhouse6 — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 19:23:19 +0000

Screening Publics

Screening Publics is a public art project in collaboration with Cousins, a real estate development company here in Atlanta. Cousins’s property 725 Ponce is an eight-story building adjacent to the Eastside Beltline Trail, and it will be the site of a new outdoor screening series that LMC Associate Professor Greg Zinman will be responsible for curating over the next year or more, starting in Fall 2022. 725 Ponce will be one of the largest screens in the United States, has the potential to be one of the most significant sites for the art of the moving image in the entire world. The art of the moving image has transformed and continues to shape visual culture, and is an anchor of international art fairs and biennials. During the pandemic, we’ve seen a growing audience for video art and other alternatives to mainstream entertainment, and a desire for experiences of togetherness and connectivity. 725 Ponce is poised to be the perfect site to meet and foster that desire. The project also represents an opportunity to collaborate with other Atlanta arts institutions, and to situate Georgia Tech as a leader in innovating art programming for the public, thereby fulfilling the Institute’s stated values in its Strategic Plan to “celebrate collaboration” and “nurture the well-being of our community.”

Programs at 725 Ponce will likely include a survey of contemporary Black video art, family-friendly feature films (e.g. Singin’ in the Rain), a historical selection of experimental dance films, and a live projection-performance that makes use of the site’s state-of-the-art laser projector, projection mapping, and wireless personal audio via visitors’ smartphones.

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brittenhouse6 Wed, 06/02/2021 - 15:23

Project Year

2021-22

Project Leads

Greg Zinman

Genre Tags

Civic Media

Installation

Media Art

Contact Email

gzinman3@gatech.edu

Atlanta Map Room

kkim733 — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 16:12:55 +0000

Atlanta Map Room

This past year, the Local Data Design Lab joined with data artist Jer Thorp to undertake a new design research project called the “Map Room.” The overarching goal of the Map Room is to develop local spaces for grassroots map-making, where people can creatively and collaboratively explore data. Initial funding in the summer of 2018 enabled our team to build a map-making space on the Georgia Tech campus using our own custom software. We received support from the National Science Foundation (through the Civic Data Science program) in addition to the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center. The project has since grown into a multi-site research endeavour focused on understanding how local conditions can productively shape critical and creative inquiry into data. Our regional partners include ATL Maps, the Atlanta Department of City Planning, and the Atlanta History Center. We have also been invited to bring the project to other contexts, such as Savannah, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Boston, Dublin, Istanbul, and Washington D.C.

Our goal is to eventually support the development of 100 or more Map Rooms with arts and education-oriented foundation funding. Several publications about the Map Room are out or currently in the pipeline. An essay on our use of the project with Georgia Tech students to map the Atlanta BeltLine appeared in the Atlanta Studies Journal. The project is also introduced in a paper for CHI, the top conference in human-computer interaction, entitled “Engaging Gentrification as a Social Justice Issue in HCI.” Our paper scored in the top 3.5% of almost 3000 submissions. Coming up, the Map Room will be part of a juried exhibition at the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science. It is also the subject of a new article, currently under review for the “essays and provocations” section of the journal Big Data & Society.

kkim733 Mon, 04/23/2018 - 12:12

Project Year

2018-19

2019-20

Project Leads

Yanni A Loukissas

Genre Tags

Civic Media

Digital Archive

Installation

Project Site

Atlanta Map Room Project Site

Contact Email

yanni.loukissas@lmc.gatech.edu

Public Art Goes to the Mall: The Digital Preservation and Reconstruction of the Rio VideoWall (1989)

morangi3 — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 03:10:22 +0000

Public Art Goes to the Mall: The Digital Preservation and Reconstruction of the Rio VideoWall (1989)

This grant will support the development of a course module on public art and site-specificity, centered around a project to digitally archive oral histories related to pioneering video artist Dara Birnbaum’s now-lost Rio VideoWall (1989), and plan for the artwork’s digital recreation. Birnbaum’s VideoWall was the first multi-screen video artwork to be installed in a public setting in the United States. It employed twenty-five identical 27” video monitors, stacked in a five-by-five grid, powered by 8 LaserDisc players and proprietary computer code written specifically for the piece. But the VideoWall was not only noteworthy for its technological innovation; it was also significant for the site that served as its inspiration and eventual home: The Rio Shopping Complex, a mall in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward. Combining scenes of the site’s natural landscape from before the mall’s construction with an unedited live-stream of CNN footage, all filtered through the moving silhouettes of mall patrons in real time, the VideoWall presciently interlaced a number of ideas that continue to resonate in the 21st century, including the 24-hour media cycle, surveillance culture, the legacy of segregation, the effects of gentrification, and the Anthropocene.

The project will focus on a set of related initiatives concerning the VideoWall, each incorporated into an undergraduate course. The first will be the design and implementation of a web-based digital archive to collect the artifacts and oral histories that document the artwork, which was dismantled in 2000. The goal of the archive is to raise civic awareness of the complex set of issues—social, political, financial, and aesthetic—surrounding the creation and preservation of the VideoWall. Indeed, public art is neither created nor received within a vacuum but reflects the site-specific environment in which it exists. As such, the study of the VideoWall can help illuminate for students the role of public spaces in Atlanta. This study includes investigations into the social, physical, and economic nature of the mall site before the art’s creation; the funding provided by the mall’s owner, Ackerman & Co., that supported the art; the levels of community engagement in its planning and construction; the rights of the artist; and plans for the work’s maintenance and preservation.

In the project’s effort to reconstruct the Rio VideoWall, Zinman will lead students in attempting to recover people’s memories of seeing the VideoWall through the accumulation of oral histories that will be shared on the project website. Oral histories privilege the telling of history from the perspective of unique individuals, in their own rhetorical, linguistic, and narrative style. They provide access to lived and felt experiences often necessarily absent from the histories provided by critics and scholars, and are an essential component of accounting for the impact of public art within a community. The second initiative will involve bringing the artist, who has already pledged her time and support, to Atlanta to give a public talk at Georgia Tech about her experience designing and constructing the VideoWall. In addition to the talk, Birnbaum will spend her time in Atlanta meeting with students, as well as members of the city’s artistic community, focusing on the question of how the VideoWall might be recreated with contemporary technology. Should the recreated VideoWall be a physical structure, a web-based project, or a virtual reality experience? How can the artwork’s public reach be extended through a web-based companion? How can the memories of those that experienced the artwork in its time be incorporated into the new design?

In 2018 and 2019, Zinman and Anna Weisling (Ph.D. candidate in Digital Media) designed and prototyped a version of a 21st-century VideoWall.

You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory (after D.B., 2019), is a multi-projector audio/visual installation that combines live camera feeds of spectators, who follow their increasingly abstracted silhouettes around the walls of the room, layered projections of nature scenery, and a real-time ticker from news services such as the BBC and Al-Jazeera. In the center of the room is a mirrored “infinity cube” that contains another live infrared camera—as spectators approach, the camera picks up their image and combines it with the other moving images on the walls. Taken in total, the installation asks viewers to wrestle with the ways individuals are mediated through time via technology—through registers of surveillance, the time of the natural world, and the temporal tensions found between the immediacy of one’s image on the walls and awareness of events simultaneously unfolding around the globe.

You can see documentation and a demonstration of the installation.

Zinman and Weisling are currently refining some of the technological elements of the installation, and have submitted proposals to exhibit the work in Atlanta, New York, and elsewhere in the coming year.

morangi3 Sun, 09/10/2017 - 23:10

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Publications, Exhibitions, Other Products

1. Gregory Zinman, “Media Publics”, panel chair and presenter, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, College Park, MD, October 2019.

2. Gregory Zinman, “Video Walls, Cocaine, and the Mafia: How 1980s NYC Nightclubs Provided an Alternative to the Gallery,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Seattle, WA, March 2019

Project Year

2017-18

2018-19

2019-20

Project Leads

Gregory Zinman

Genre Tags

Digital Arts

Installation

Contact Email

gregory.zinman@lmc.gatech.edu