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Singer use to «serve up a lot more than just wine and spirits.» In their performances, they use real-time datamining to present detailed profiles of patrons based simply on reading the magnetic stripes on their drivers’ licenses. Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon’s «The Status Project» (2004) looks at how people can utilize a database of Do-It-Yourself strategies to meet the bureaucratic requirements for the possession of official identification – from birth certificates to passports. An exhibition such as «Kingdom of Piracy» is an «open work space to explore the free sharing of digital content—often condemned as piracy—as the Net's ultimate art form.» [48]

Making Things Public

In 1997 Eleanor Heartney identified a «third way» of public art, different than the prototypical examples of Richard Serra and Scott Burton, writing: «Although they exist at opposite ends of the public art spectrum, these two examples are united by a failure to grapple with the real complexities of the public context—Serra by reenacting the old standoff between avant-garde artist and philistine public and, Burton by conceiving of

 

the public as some kind of uniform mass unproblematically joined by common interests. . . Recently, however, a third approach has begun to surface in the work of artists like Dennis Adams, Alfredo Jaar, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Jenny Holzer that conceives of the city as a locus of competing interests, ideologies, and languages, and infiltrates preexisting forums and forms in order to dramatize rather than resolve conflicts inherent in modern life.» [49]

Heartney’s formulation, similar conceptually to Mouffe’s contested, agonistic democracy, cites the city as the public sphere, but the cybrid environment cannot be ignored—public space is both physical and virtual. Even more importantly, how do we interpret this contest? If not consensus, how do we measure the «will of the people?» As Bruno Latour writes about the exhibition «Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy»: «Our notions of politics have been thwarted for too long by an absurdly unrealistic epistemology. Accurate facts are hard to come by and the harder they are, the more they entail some costly equipment, a longer set of mediations, more delicate proofs. Transparency and immediacy are bad for

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