Traces of Time Transit - Co-creating ambiance in a mobile art installation

Martha Radice (1)

1 Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology

Interactive public art installations generate fascinating ambiances, but seldom undergo rigorous social-scientific analysis. Informed by urban anthropology and the "mobilities turn" in the social sciences, I present a qualitative analysis of the 4000 text messages displayed on the screens of "Time Transit", an installation by Kim Morgan, which ran on city bus route number 4 in Regina, Saskatchewan, 2006. The messages, sent by people riding the bus or surfing the installation's website, invoke matters global and local, profane and poetic. Together, they can be understood as microdocuments of social interactions, privately composed but publicly displayed, which collectively created unpredictable ambiances on the number 4 bus. Overall, this paper helps us understand how people actually interact with interactive public art.

Mots clés: public art; public transit; text messages; social interactions; mobility

Domaines: Architecture, aménagement de l'espace; Sociologie

Martha Radice. Traces of Time Transit - Co-creating ambiance in a mobile art installation. Ambiances in action / Ambiances en acte(s) - International Congress on Ambiances, Montreal 2012, Sep 2012, Montreal, Canada. pp.299-304. ⟨halshs-00745030⟩