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This is Public Space is an ACE-funded programme by UP Projects which considers the online realm as a site for public art and creates space to investigate how we navigate between the online and physical worlds, exploring the impact of digital media on our relationships with people and places.

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Commissions:

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Fordland by Danielle Dean, 2018

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Animation Fordland by US-based artist Danielle Dean deconstructed Ford adverts dating to the 1920s, which together instrumentalised the American landscape in selling the 'American Dream.’ Through the use of multiplane animation, this is spliced with Ford's real exploitations of nature such as rubber plantation, Fordlândia - whose sap we see bleed from the column's of Ford's Detroid HQ. Multiplane animation industrialised the production of adverts 1930s, when Disney transformed automobile parts into its mechanised system. Dean explains, “Disney effectively turned the multi-plane camera into a Fordist assembly line for the production of subjectivity”.

 

Formality* by Ewan Atkinson, 2019

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Formality* was an interactive digital visa application service by Barbados-based artist Ewan Atkinson, which granted (or rejected) citizenship to Atkinson's discovered realm, The Neighbourhood. Built on obsolete 1980s software, HyperCard, it highlighted the use of outdated technologies in bureaucratic practice while its riddles and nonsensical questioning referred to the political, cultural and linguistic limitations that impact free movement. 

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The Terrarium by Shezad Dawood, 2018-2021

 

The Terrarium is a major new VR work by London-based artist Shezad Dawood, co-commissioned by UP Projects, Folkestone Triennial and Kai Art Center, Estonia. The Terrarium imagines the marine ecology of the Baltic and Kent shorelines, 300 years in the future when the surface of Planet Earth is 90% water. The viewer has been released from the experimental lab where they were genetically modified into a cephalopod hybrid. This immersive experience blends scientific prediction and science fiction to highlight the implications of climate change and rising sea levels for all forms of life.

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This Is Public Space in-conversation at Barbican Centre

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A series of conversations between artists Ewan Atkinson, Shezad Dawood and Danielle Dean, and Shumi Bose, Curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects and Senior Lecturer in Spatial Practice at Central Saint Martins, and Dr Charlotte Frost, Associate Context Editor at Furtherfield. Speakers discussed the intersection of technological development and environmental degradation, citizenship and social acceptability, and the relationships between climate change, mental health and migration. Audiences were invited submit their questions digitally, displayed on-screen to interrupt and guide the conversation.

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