The Soundartist as Urban Planner – A Glance at the Cooperation of Artistic and Urban Practice

Project-Blog: http://urbanartresearch.wordpress.com/

The integration of art projects into urban planning techniques currently produces an attractive field of research and has caught the interest of various disciplines. The Project The Artist as Urban Planner - A Glance at the Cooperation of Artistic and Urban Practice responds to current developments and the ongoing discourse, analyzing possibilities to integrate art into the planning and creation of public space.

In order to provide an in depth analysis, the project focuses on artistic developments within the fields of film and sound art, which both are in their origin and structural composition closely connected to urban space and its perceptive disposition. Moreover, they currently step outside of their traditional settings into the public space, where they fuse with existing urban structures opening up new sensual spaces. This brings up several questions: What impact does art have on urban structures? What new structures, relationships, opportunities and potentials emerge from such interventions? In how far does art affect and alter semantic systems of concrete locations?

A special focus of the project is put on the investigation of representative cooperation's between artists and urban planners. Thereby existing structures, strategies and productive conditions are analyzed and potentials worked out to enable an integration of art into urban practice on a long term basis.

Anamarija Batista is working on her dissertation project "The Soundartist as Urban Planner" as one of three DOC-team Fellows of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her two DOC-team colleagues are Carina Lesky on the topic "The Filmmaker as Urban Planner" and Szilvia Kovacs on the topic "The Artist as Urban Planner".