LECTURES

Public City
Artist Muntadas investigates notions of ‘City’ and ‘public.’ Is there still a public space? Is the city a place for interventions? City authorities and the private sector provide surveillance and control. Yet it is the city dwellers who should make critical decisions over the city. Can they? What contribution can artists, architects, designers, city planners make today to this discussion?

Antoni Muntadas
Antoni Muntadas is a visiting Professor of the Practice in the MIT Visual Arts Program. His work addresses social, political and communication issues, and the relationship between public and private space within social frameworks. He investigates channels of information, and points to the ways they may be used to censor central information or promulgate ideas. Muntadas works in different media such as photography, video, publications, internet and multi-media installations. This summer, Muntadas was awarded the prestigious Velazquez Prize for his outstanding contribution to the arts from the Spanish Culture Ministry.

This is part of a lecture series, "City as Stage, City as Process" sponsored by the MIT Visual Arts Program. City as Stage, City as Process brings together speakers from art and (counter) culture, architecture, urbanism, and media technology to discuss such questions as: In what way is the city not a fixed entity, but a process? How do artists and cultural activists reclaim the street, activating the city as backdrop and insisting on public space? What makes a city a city? Who owns the city? How can media technology be designed to intervene in and navigate the city? The MIT Visual Arts Program (VAP) lecture series is directed by Ute Meta Bauer and Amber Frid-Jimenez. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the VAP this term, the lecture series highlights the issues at the core of the academic program and the work and research of the faculty.