The course’s project therefore relies on the willingness of the public to engage with it, and is built around the resulting constraints. How can artists make complete strangers into active participants? The answer may not be found through making a mark on the environment itself, but in thinking of ways to use digital technology to allow a greater participation of the public. This is why "Media Archaeology of Place" and "The Mixed-Reality City" both focus on developing a web-based platform. Shapins is interested in "building open-ended dynamic structures" so that one is able to add onto the artwork; even once the initial artist is finished, the process of creation is not over.

A first year PhD candidate in VES, Joana C. Pimenta took "Media Archaeology of Place" and is currently enrolled in "Mixed-Reality City." An essential part of her work is public feedback. "How can you create space for your own work when you are reacting to others’ work?" she asks. In trying to answer this question, Pimenta is working on a piece that responds to a series of public art installations around campus called The Divine Comedy that is on display in the Carpenter Center’s Sert Gallery, the Northwest Science Labs, and the GSD’s lobby. Despite the presence of well-known artists such as Ai Weiwei, Pimenta hopes to make the public itself a contributing artist by creating an online application that will support audio-visual responses to the installations. She hopes to expand her work so that will be of use for other public art pieces in the future. This project is mind-bogglingly meta—a publicly-driven digital interface on public works that take as their main subject matter public art.

At the GSD, a post-graduate program called Art, Design, and the Public Domain is in its inaugural year, and represents the increasing interest for artwork that directly engages the public. The coordinator for this program, Professor Krzysztof Wodiczko, projects video onto buildings and makes sound pieces in his own art. Wodiczko’s projections often involve video culled from interviews with a wide variety of figures—whoever he believes knows the most about the issue he wants to explore.

"In those projections, there are people operating as co-artists," he says. "They are always the people of whom we know the least. They are the ones who communicate through the structures about themselves … The process of communicating is more important on some levels than the actual projection." Wodiczko takes the role of the public as an artist one step further by actually making the public into contributors.

Remeike J.B. Forbes ’11 has focused on similar ideas in his VES senior thesis, in which Forbes is exploring theoretically the appropriation of graphic images and producing posters for student and community organizations. The creative decisions that go into making these posters are collaborative, and though Forbes does not decide where the posters will be used, he acknowledges that "how the posters are seen depends on the context of where they are viewed." This loss of control does not bother him, however. "The way people actually use images is sort of as important as anything," he says. "I see the people I work with as much of an active participant as anyone." He recalls one instance in which he created a poster he found undistinguished. The organization that he gave it to used it on the podium of a church where a rally was being held, and, he says, "it took on a whole other life." It was just as much the organization as Forbes who was accountable for the impact of the poster, once again giving the public agency that is usually reserved for the artist.

ACHIEVING TRANSPARENCY

Harvard itself has tried to blur the lines between artist and viewer by creating spaces in which interaction between the public and the artist is inevitable. The Laboratory at Harvard, for example, is a space in the Northwest Labs reserved for rotating public exhibits. The interdisciplinary and aptly-named metaLab is another newly created forum through which the entire Harvard community can get involved in public art and humanities projects. "[There is a] new intense creative energy at Harvard going on right now around these questions," says Pimenta.

Still, the fact remains that these buildings are part of a larger university. The Carpenter Center is an historical building that is part of a private institution, and may never be able to achieve the transparency Le Corbusier intended. So Harvard artists work within these confines, and create art that acknowledges the layers of history and exploring the possibilities for public involvement, without obscuring the original armature. In doing so they are invested in a different art of the street—one that acknowledges the inherent limitations of bringing art into the outside world, and one that directly engages with these constraints.

—Staff writer Rebecca J. Levitan can be reached at rlevitan@fas.harvard.edu.