Public Art on the Internet

After spending the past four years in New York City (something I mention with annoying frequency), I have become very aware of “public art.” Artwork made for public display outside of the context of a private museum or gallery can come in many forms. There are the city-commissioned installations in almost every subway system in the U.S. or the intricate found-glass mosaics one man decided to put on many of the sign posts in Manhattan. In any of the cases, what makes public art public is that it is placed in a space where random passerby’s can see it without actively seeing it. They don’t have to purchase $20 MoMA tickets, they just have to cross the street on their way to work.

This raised the question: can public art exist on the internet? If we look at the world of digital art, is it impossible to capture the randomness of audience that is captured by the sculpture at the intersection that everyone must drive past? In this post, I’m taking a look at three examples of online art that I think attempt this sort of spontaneity of viewership that occurs in tradition public art.

The Google Logo

It’s easy to argue that Google, as the most widely used search engine in the U.S., is the main street of the internet. Almost everyone who conducts their business on the internet will log onto Google for a search – probably several times a day. That makes the company’s practice of changing its logo for special occasions an interesting instance of public art.

Over the past few years, the Google logo has been transformed several times to reflect an artistic style or incorporate the iconic images of important events in the history of art, science, and pop culture. While some of these incarnations have been a bit more silly than “artistic” – such as the cartoonish Martians that adorned the logo on Percival Lowell‘s birthday – there have also been allusions to artists and illustrators such as the recent Norman Rockwell-esque tribute to Veteran’s Day. The result is a demonstration of art to unsuspecting site visitors, the pedestrians of the web.

What makes this display particularly interesting is that Google incorporates a feature unique to the internet: it links these logos to a Google search related to the altered logo’s theme. The result? An interactive version of those plaques you see next to a public exhibit in the train station. Not only is the visitor visually introduced to the art, he is given an informational introduction to the concepts it embodies. Furthermore, instead of a didactic plaque, he is offered a tool for immediate personal research – and in a post-Twitter society with increasingly shorter attention spans, this immediacy is vital.

The Bing Front Page

Like with most aspects of Bing, the brand new search engine derives its front page art from Google and expands upon it. Its creators introduce additional interactivity by accompanying it’s ever-changing large photo backgrounds with click-able hot spots. The hot spots feature questions related to the photo’s content and links to resources for answers. While Google’s stripped-down functionality gives the page visitor more independence to conduct their own research, Bing offers a more controlled digital exhibit while still offering the sort of interactivity only the internet can provide.

The MTV Homepage

The MTV homepage may not offer the infinite informational resources that Google and Bing do, it takes advantage of web technology by featuring a different illustration with every page reload. No information is provided about the individual illustrators, but a visitor can experience a variety of artwork relatively unrelated to their task at hand (finding information about music trends), often seeing several works in a single visit. It would be interesting to see this rotating background concept be used to feature the artists themselves or have the sort of interactivity seen in the above examples.