The Academy explores the domain of ‘urban media art’ as denoting a current orientation in performative, environmental, entrepreneurial and artivist initiatives across a broader context of the arts. A highly momentous artistic orientation today, urban media art obtains a domain in which artists make, explore and make use of innovations in software and technology – and natural kinds of mediation – to create works, installations and situations in urban environments in critical responses to urgencies of our times. In the urban context, artistic initiatives evolve in contingent exchanges with technological innovation, shifts and imaginations, digital cultures and communicative infrastructures, encouraged by opportunities offered by our global connectivity of responding to urgencies with potential worldly resonance. Urban media art engages the city, technological culture and our communicative conditions of co-existence with artificial and natural forms of media.
In the framework of the Urban media Art Academy we examine urban media art as a domain for challenging, interrogating, reflecting, shaping and facilitating conditions of complexity, consciousness and human well-being in the urban hybrid sphere. We explore artistic, creative and curatorial approaches to the art at the interfaces of urban culture and media aesthetics, media architectures, science and biological forms and processes, creative technologies and city making.
Our curriculum builds around Urban Media Art as a domain of research, production, curation, and knowledge production in three dimensions:
- Context (the environments, relationships and ‘times’ the art engages)
- Presence (how the art interferes with human perception and conditions of feeling ‘present’ here and now, as a supplementary state of mediation);
- Change (how the art instigates processes of change – in the physical and environmental urban context as well as in human perception and memory).
Foundation on Book Publication
The Academy develops from the knowledge foundation of the handbook What Urban Media Art Can Do – Why When Where & How?, edited by Susa Pop, Tanya Toft, Nerea Calvillo and Mark Wright (av edition, 2016).
