Social and Public Kiosks

Social and Public Kiosks represents a body of artworks comprised of four pop-up structures that are activated in seven different contexts. The iterations were developed to try out artistic methods that enable democratic encounters in public spaces. Typically, participatory arts projects take place inside the gallery and are tasked with developing new visitors for the institution.

The projects tend to be designed for existing community groupings which can inhibit wider inclusion. Group participants work collaboratively to produce an art object, this method promotes technical skills but is not focused on understanding new forms of citizenship, which could see diverse audiences engage with the art gallery. Therefore, while participatory art projects constructed by galleries and museums aim to achieve wide diversity of engagement there are limitations to current programming.

To address these issues, we work with participants to publish social and political values as a positive function of participatory art practice for citizen engagement. We contribute new methods of engagement to the area of audience development by installing a pop-up structure (kiosk) in the public space of a town centre, shopping mall etc. The kiosk is operated by the artists who facilitate conversational encounters about values and beliefs. The kiosk provides several ways in which a passer-by can engage with opinion formation. The visitor is invited to write a slogan or choose one of the existing slogans to reproduce. They can do this by making a badge, using vinyl text, printing a poster, or programming a teletext sign. They publish their slogan by displaying it on the kiosk structure. Some kiosk events incorporated our collective method of agreeing and disagreeing which we call a ‘spoken choir’.