Bangkok | Live the City

Organised by Goethe-Institut Thailand, BACC Exhibition Dept., and Connecting Cities Network, LIVE THE CITY explores how to embed digital art in the urban context and how urban digital art contributes to shaping neighborhoods, networking citizens and creating platforms for visualizing science and technologies. The event comprises several exhibitions, installations and other events and runs 7-28 June 2016 at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. In opposition to the commercial use of these urban media, the goal of the project is to establish them as platforms for co-creating and shaping the human futures of our digital cities. What are new emerging forms of participation and digital place making? There is an urgency to pose such questions, especially in Bangkok where a massive growth of media infrastructures and permanent digital advertisements are increasingly defining the urban experience. The project addresses a critical view towards the use of media in the context of the city. In times of digital communication and smart cities, the communicative potential of the public space is reinterpreted in manifold ways. Urban media environments connect physical space with the digital world and encourages city inhabitants to actively and conjointly reshape the urban space. The project is a collaboration between the Goethe-Institut, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Siam Center and the ESIC Lab of King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi in cooperation with Connecting Cities and is shown simultanously in three locations in Bangkok. Read about the Open Call and selected artists to present at Live the City. Connecting Cities is a European and worldwide expanding network aiming to build up a connected infrastructure of media facades, urban screens and projection sites to circulate artistic and social content. The Connecting Cities book 'What Urban Media Art Can Do - Why When Where and How?' departs from the global, exploratory research undertaken by the Connecting Cities Network and reflects on its curatorial strands of the Networked / Participatory and In/Visible City in new participative forms of arts such as digital placemaking, urban activism, telepresence, sensing and urban ecology. It showcases around 50 urban media art projects and highlights urban media environments worldwide including theoretical articles of Inke Arns, Claire Bishop, Martin Brynskov, Maurice Benayoun, Marcus Foth, Martin Tomitsch, Mark Shepard, Kazys Varnelis, Nanna Verhoeff and Peter Weibel among others. The publication was launched at ISEA2016 in Hong Kong and presented at the Media Architecture Biennale Sydney in June 2016, as well as at Live the City, Bangkok.