Sites Unseen: A site-specific intervention online with Add-art.org
December 19, 2010 - January 2, 2011 Extended until February 14, 2011
Curated by California College of the Arts graduate students Benôit Antille, Erin Fletcher, Elizabeth Glass, David Kasprzak, Noah Krell, Charles Moffett, and Kristin Timken, in collaboration with Christian L. Frock, as part of the interdisciplinary graduate seminar “Sites Unseen: Contemporary Art Practice in Public Spaces.”
Add-art.org is a FireFox add-on which replaces advertising on websites with bi-weekly rotating shows of curated art images. It is a free and open source project initiated by artist Steve Lambert and developed by the Eyebeam Development site. Visit www.add-art.org to install on your computer or learn more.
Sites Unseen explores alternative public art practices, the expanded notion of public space via new technology and media, and the increased significance of photographic documentation in an increasingly dematerialized culture. In this project Sites Unseen literalizes the agenda of Add-art.org through a focus on “ad art,” or rather images of artworks that co-opt the strategies of advertising, such as billboards and skywriting. Through the programming developed by Add-art.org, these selected images variously replace advertising on any number of sites and provide a distinctly unique experience from one viewer to the next, often highlighting the ways in which ad content is designated by the viewer's interests. For example, an image of a billboard intervention by Hewitt & Jordan, in association with FREEE, that reads "The economic function of public art is to increase the value of private property" provocatively appears on the Bank of America Personal Banking website, while an image of skywriting by Bruce Nauman that reads "Leave the land alone" appears on Martha Stewart's website for home and gardening tips.
Viewers are invited to participate: submit screen shots from your experience of the project to [email protected] to be posted online here.
Sites Unseen features details cropped from web-hosted images of works by Anonymous, Sylvie Fleury, Public Ad Campaign, Mike Mandel (in collaboration with Larry Sultan and students from the Sun Valley Center for the Arts), Bruce Nauman, Hewitt & Jordan (in association with FREEE), Douglas Gordon, and Robin Pacific.
Source information for each image and full project description is available on www.add-art.org.