ABSTRACT
This chapter describes an important aspect of contemporary culture through the examination of the nexus of public art, digital and online technology, and society. The presented cybergeographical case study on Rubber Duck attended to digitally networked spaces of engagement and how online roles of public art can be explored along new senses of social and spatial publicness, temporalities and uses. The chapter analyses the central notion of the 'virtual relationality' of encounters with public art by dovetailing human geographical, new media and public art scholarship. It challenges prevailing understandings of public art as associated with the material world by analysing engagement along reconfigured comprehensions of spatialities and temporalities of public art's uses as manifested in cyberspace. The under-examined spatial and temporal dimensions of online (mis)uses of public art, alongside new possibilities for and critiques of online engagement are discussed. Amin's notion of 'micropublic', originally designating offline spaces for intercultural encounter, offers a relevant angle for exploring public art's social significance.
