Carl Skelton “Signage: States of Public Mind”

Josee Bienvenu Gallery

This event has ended.

Josée Bienvenu Gallery presents States of Public Mind, a video projection by Carl Skelton.

The digitization of signage will soon fully pervade the public sector, from “Welcome to ___Ville” to road hazard warnings and traffic signal systems. When that happens, it will be possible for the sign welcoming you to a city by a road or at an airport to represent qualitative information in real time, by supplementing the usual greeting and population statistic with icons representing everything from degrees of welcome for strangers to the quality and provenance of IT infrastructure. Depending on the jurisdiction, those icons may as easily be set dynamically via citizen survey as by standing committees or engineers. Carl Skelton offers a sampling of a possible icon set, to be projected as an animated triptych of random combinations of three icons, in the windows of the gallery, facing West 20th Street. The piece will be visible from dusk to dawn with titles such as States of Public Mind 41: Discourse Unrelated to Pressing Issues, States of Public Mind 29: Strangers Welcome, and States of Public Mind 25: Overthought and Underconceived.

Carl Skelton, Dr.-Ing. experiments and builds projects at the intersection of art, technology, and public space. His oeuvre spans from public sculpture (Still Life, 2006, facing highway 401 in Toronto) and installation (Real City, 2011, on the Manhattan Bridge Colonnade) to massively participatory urban art-design-planning tools (Betaville). Dr. Skelton currently serves as President of the Gotham Innovation Greenhouse in New York City, a new kind of public interest oriented “Think Studio”, and Director of the Centre for City Ecologies in Toronto. This is to be the first in an ongoing series of States of Public Mind window projections organized by Dr. Skelton.