ABSTRACT
The contributors themselves examine a range of places, media, communities, subjectivities and politics that are constituted, explored or deployed by public art, and questions of audience, participation, application and evaluation are interrogated. To be certain, the role of the digital, especially mobile digital media, in public art is probably the least tangential and most obvious of these alternative themes. There are several pivot points that leverage the greater development of mobile digital public art. Mobile digital technologies may allow public art to be more mobile in mediated forms, as demonstrated by the works discussed by Martha Radice and Brenden Harvey and Harriet Hawkins and Ruth Catlow, in which the art is digitally mediated and audiences engage with its digital elements as much as its material forms. Pauline Guinard draws attention to themes related to rural mobilities and economies that underpin Thenjiwe Nkosi's work, and highlights a relative lack of focused exploration of public art about or located in the rural.
