Alan Ruiz is a lecturer at The New School in the Visual Studies Department.
With Dennis Adams, BB (Francisca Benítez and Christina Bueno), Colby Chamberlain, Lucas Freeman, Marisa Jahn, Ann Lui, Jill Magid, Antoni Muntadas, Alan Ruiz, and Gediminas Urbonas
Public space is perpetually being lost and found in accordance with constant changes to the social and technical makeup of our lives. We desire public space because we want our shared landscapes and institutions to reflect and respond to the facts governing our lives. We want our spaces to be contemporary—to be present in our time, to value important cultural heritage, and to perceive common threats obscured by scale and technical complexity or by greed and indifference. Part of our civic selves yearns to be not just collective, but connective.
However, therein lies the problem: this swirling mess of connectivity troubles our sense of public and private, on-time and off-time, and inside and outside, changing our orientation toward common sense and common ground.
Cabaret Series: The Public is in Bits and Bubbles presented a series of performances by artists, architects, and cultural producers that explored the changing states of public space in the age of oversharing, overexposure, and post-fact politics.
The event was hosted by Storefront in collaboration with Lucas Freeman, Ann Lui, and Gediminas Urbonas, editors of “Public Space? Lost and Found” (MIT Press, 2017).
Learn more here!
