Mediated place: The effect of digital functionality in selected site-specific artworks

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe role of digital media has become increasingly foregrounded as a means to not only produce the work and give it form, but more importantly extend the significance of the work as a powerful indicator or marker of place, self and community. This article considers the function and purpose of digital media and technology in recent site-specific installations, and proposes an altogether alternative understanding of place through digitally produced site-specific practices. If place refers to a fixed point in the world, loaded with and determined by geographical, cultural and historical coordinates, then in what ways does the implementation of digital media and technology become a viable means to challenge this assumption? More importantly, can this mode of visual production shift our understanding of sitespecific art and its purpose as an expression of self and community? To address these questions we analyse selected recent local and international site-specific projects. The focus of this research highlights the significance of digital interactivity and interfacing as a means to not only activate the artwork, but also cast into profile the important question of place. An experience of place through the fluidity of collective identity becomes implicated heavily in the making of the artwork through digital means. This article contributes to an existing critique on site-specific art. We argue that in such cases, public environments become charged in the way they are powerfully contingent on and produced by a sensory and emotional response to the work. We suggest that it is the voluntary labour of the viewer as active participant in these works that amplifies the role of place in a unitary realisation of self and community.