Digital Art/Public Art: Governance and Agency in the Networked Commons

Abstract

Digital art has expanded, challenged, and even redefined notions of public art and supported the concept of a networked commons. The nature of agency within online, networked “systems” and “communities” is crucial to these developments. Electronic networks enable exchange and collectivist strategies that can question existing structures of power and governance. Networks are public spaces that offer enhanced possibilities of interventions into the social world and of archiving and filtering these interventions over time in an ongoing process. Networked activism and tactical response as well as artistic practice that merges physical and virtual space and augments physical sites and existing architectures are among the practices that are important to the impact of digital public art on governance.