[Commlist] Emergent Visions / Situated Dialogues on Urban Screens and Public Media Art / Times Square Provocation (#2)

Please join us for *EMERGENT VISIONS PROVOCATIONS: SITUATED DIALOGUES ON 
URBAN SCREENS AND PUBLIC MEDIA ART*

_MONDAY, 24 APRIL, 2023_

10AM Los Angeles & Phoenix (PDT & MDT) / 1PM Bloomington (EDT) / 6PM London

REGISTRATION LINK - https://bit.ly/timessquaredialogue 
<https://bit.ly/timessquaredialogue>

*PROVOCATION #2: TIMES SQUARE DIALOGUE*

This second in a series of online roundtable provocations is inspired by 
*Jennifer West’s 2021 /Painted Cat Hacker Film/*and***Nancy Baker 
Cahill’s 2022 /Slipstream Times Square/*and their distinct art 
interventions into North America’s iconic site for commercially screened 
urbanism. Each was commissioned by Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment to 
reimagine the electronic billboards for 3 minutes at midnight for one 
month. For /Painted Cat Hacker Film/, West compiled 16mm film clips of 
cats and manipulated the strips of celluloid with brightly colored dye 
before transferring them to high-definition video. The result is a 
massive multi-screen work of handmade digital GIFs that pay homage to 
the feline’s role across many moving image genres, including the 
internet. Baker Cahill’s /Slipstream Times Square/ extends her 
multi-media /Slipstream /artworks//– graphite drawings that undergo a 
long “odyssey” of hand, sculptural, 3D, CG, video, and print iterations 
– and transforms them to scale for a collective audience and shared 
immersive public space. The artwork gestures toward the organic, a 
simulated fiction of botanical and biomorphic forms, each offering a 
familiar referent with no natural analogue. Both artists attend to 
themes of materiality, architectural space, and embodied perception in 
compelling ways.

*Holly Willis,*critic, scholar, and chair of the Media Arts + Practice 
division in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern 
California, will engage in dialogue with West and Baker Cahill to 
reflect on the potentials and problematics of art in all its multiple 
mediums in the intensely capitalist arenas of the United States. 
Comprising millions of illuminated LED pixels on over 90 screens and an 
audience of visitors from near and far, how might Times Square as a site 
act as provocation and problem for art in public? Can media art in this 
context be subversive? How might audiences be invited (or invite 
themselves) into their spaces? And how do these artists expand our 
understanding of the “screen”? These questions and more, as well as 
questions from the audience, will be addressed in this continuation of 
the Emergent Visions conversations that prompt new understandings of 
urban screens and public media art.


_________________________________________

EMERGENT VISIONS PROVOCATIONS reflect on the distinct and diverse 
situations and scales of urban screens and public media art, gathering 
an assembly of places, practices, and people – artists, curators, and 
scholars/critics – for thoughtful and communally-inspired dialogue on 
their possibilities and perils from global and local registers. Curated 
and produced by Stephanie DeBoer, Associate Professor at Indiana 
University, and Kristy H.A. Kang, Associate Professor at Arizona State 
University, Emergent Visions dialogues are made possible by the support 
of Nanyang Technological University, The Media School at Indiana 
University, and Indiana University’s College Arts & Humanities Institute 
(CAHI).

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