My PhD

I recently was admitted as a new PhD student in the Paris Sorbonne University. My specific project will likely focus on «The Role of New Media Art in Urban Planning». My supervisor is Olga Kisseleva, Founder of the Art and Science Laboratory at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. I had written draft of my project and this post is going to explain what my research is all about!

Key words: new media, public art, community art, urban planning, cultural policies, smart cities, creative cities, creative economy.

Nowadays Public art and Community art are recognized as artistic expressions and activities that engage a community in a dialogue about local and global issues, and are being identified as an effective tool in social cohesion and development. It can use different mediums, and can vary in its duration. Such art projects are often a response to social conditions such as poverty, community identity, racial dynamics, urban renewal, the loss of heritage spaces and shifting cultural values as well as environmental issues. Providing opportunities for everyone to participate, art in the city able to create experiences that are universally accessible to all people. Therefore, public art projects are structured around learning experiences, and engaging people in an enlightening process that promotes new ways of thinking.

Public art and Community art projects that employ "new media" have increasingly entered the urban realm. More and more cities, corporate businesses and property developers take advantage of the attention-grabbing qualities of new media-based public art and invest in projects with a clear social, community-building nature. Permanent or temporary public media art, however, is still something of a rarity and occurs in cities mainly in the shape of media facades or short-term installations.

Such situation provokes a question about the future of new media-based artworks. This research asking how can physical and virtual worlds be combined, to produce multi-sensory environments? How stories can be folded onto physical space in order to create memorable human experiences and produce places that have distinct identities. What is the role of user participation? How can narrative environments address social, economic and environmental sustainability? Can such art be maintained on a long-term basis?

Hence developing a contemporary interpretation of the contribution of the art to the urban spaces and landscape of a city requires careful consideration of the specific context, the studying of a range of disciplines and appropriate artistic practices, attentively planned strategies and teamwork among contributing professionals.

I seek to understand how forms of artistic expressions using new media tools can be used in urban development and social cohesion. How public media art allows citizens to engage with, organize around and act upon collective issues and involve in co–creating the social fabric and built form of the city. As innovation in all fields moves further it is essential to understand how artists that often looks towards for new ideas are responding to this tendencies, and then how their works can be integrated into the sustainable development of the cities and societies.

Various experiments have been done with this. Olga Kisseleva is possibly the world's most important contributor to the new media art, art and science theory with an unique approach to public art. She engages in ongoing projects that involve a socially important themes and environmental ethic. Olga incorporates intertwined narratives, city and ecology, as well as what can only be called user psychology. The artist welcomes a contextuality related to time and place. For instance, Olga Kisseleva represented Bio-Sculpture that tells the story of the elm of Biscarrosse, which is moreover the story of all the French elms that are virtually eliminated of the French landscape by an illness called “elm disable”. This extinction has weakened the traditional ecosystem and led to the spreading of some species less rich or even harmful for this ecosystem. In collaboration with the team of biologists from INRIA, the artist created a method to include into a tree’s ADN a fragment of the ADN of a dead parent. The planted tree becomes a kind of memorial alive. Other significant of Kisseleva's current activities is the «Formula of the City», the large-scale public art project, that specifically designed to reflect the narrative of the city's origins. «Formula of the City» is an installation in the shape of a “molecule” that mirrors unique spirit and heritage of the cities and adds an extra dimension experience of the place.

One of the the purposes of the research is to examine how artists can remediate environmental problems and to incorporate environmental themes into their work, as well as to explore how artists can work with communities to achieve common goals.

In today’s cities our everyday lives are shaped by digital media technologies such as smart cards, smartphones, social media, surveillance cameras, quasi–intelligent systems, location–based services, wireless networks, and so on. These technologies are inextricably bound up with the city’s material form, social patterns, and mental experiences. As a consequence, the city has become a hybrid of the physical and the digital. But even in these conditions, one of the more permanent parts of this organism is the community that inhabits and uses an urban territory.

In this way, taking media-based public art as the point of departure, I wish to broaden the debate about the role of new media art in urban design from an infrastructural to a social point of view, from «smart city» to «social city», from «city management» to «city making».

The significance of this research is that urban planning strategies and public art projects potentially have many areas of intersection that have yet to be explored in theory and in practice as well, and although their relationship has become increasingly evident there is still little academic literature on the subject.

Finally, in general, my aim is to explore the relationship between urban planning, cultural policies and role of the artists’ practices in these strategies. Much importance is placed on the role of the artist as an agent for transformation. Research is going to be based on several methods including: Literature overview, Benchmarking studies, Comparative case analysis of three-five cities that have made significant efforts to integrate new media-based initiatives into their city plans in order to become smart cities (Vienna, Paris, London); Interviews with artists, city leaders, urban planners, company executives, and entrepreneurs; Implementation of the research-project in one of the selected cities.

I see perspectives of this research in economic and political popularization of the importance of art in urban spaces in order to encourage governments, NGOs, cultural organizations and other institution to support the consolidation of art in the city and to assist in expanding the necessary infrastructure.