In contemporary culture, a number of spheres of activity intersect: speech, art, identity, communications systems, economic and legal regimes. In the so-called public domain, these activities increasingly conflict. This is not necessarily a new development, but with the increasing mediatization and hybrid virtualization of each of these spheres, the boundaries between public, private, commercial and government are in flux. As legal regimes and marketing imperatives adjust to incorporate the new virtual realities, it appears as if these boundaries are being gerrymandered. Nevertheless, digitalness challenges historic assumptions about scarcity and networks can have an asymmetrical relationship to centralized authority. Many artists are using these «tools» to contest, as Kryzsztof Wodiczko paraphrases social philosopher Chantal Mouffe, «a new, agonistic concept of public space, which […] invites and accommodates passion as well as adversarial positions. For her, democracy is not a solution but a process of engaging more actors (and I hope artists as well) in an ongoing energetic discourse in the form of an ‹agon,› that is, a contest.» [1] «Public Sphere_s» is about thesecontests, which artists continue to foment to enlarge our understanding and practice of multiple public spheres. Various ideas of ‹the public› have been theorized at least since the Greeks, but whether it is Socrates confronting Callicles about mob rule in Plato’s «Gorgias» [2] or Jürgen Habermas’ «public sphere,» [3] Walter Lippmann’s «big picture» [4] or Mouffe’s agonistics, this public has almost always been intimately connected with a parallel notion of public space. From the agora to the piazza to the commons to the park, in some sense robust public discourse can only flourish in public space. In part this is an issue of audience. What makes discourse public is having an audience. With the rise of the printed press, radio, television, and now Internet-enabled communications, the potential public expands beyond physical space into the virtual spaces of communications systems. More important than reach and some concomitant notion of agreement, however, is debate. To return to Wodiczko on Mouffe: «Her recognition of antagonisms and the need for agonism in a democratic process radically questions the prominent liberal philosopher Jürgen Habermas for his popular legalistic and rationalistic position on democracy which seeks to resolve disagreements in a blind drive for consensus.» [5] What are the new tools and methodologies for both enabling and mapping such debates?

Parallel to debates about the public, artists have been challenging consensual notions about art as well. As Allan Kaprow put it: «The Japanese Gutai, Environments, Happenings, Noveau Realisme, Fluxus, events, noise music, chance poetry, life theater, found actions, bodyworks, earthworks, concept art, information art—the list could go on—confronted publics and arts professionals with strange occurrences bearing little resemblance to the known arts.» [6] From Umberto Eco’s theories of the open work [7] to Joseph Beuys’ influential formulation of social sculpture as «an art that ‘releases energy in people, leading them to a general discussion of actual problems’ and which «would mean the cultivation of relations between men, almost an act of life,» [8] there has been over half a century of practice and theory expanding art into the everyday realms of public life.

In part this has been an attempt by artists to expand their public, as Dieter Daniels writes: «The useof new technologies like film and radio, which are potential mass media, is associated with the hope that the avant-garde can be released from its self-imposed isolation so that ‹art and the people can be reconciled with each other,› as Guillaume Apollinaire put it in 1912.» [9] In part, however, it is recognition of the need for public discourse to create a public at all—and hence a public sphere. As Patricia Phillips writes: «A growing number of artists and agencies believe that the responsibility of public artists and agencies is not to create permanent objects for presentation in traditionally accepted public places but, instead, to assist in the construction of a public—to encourage through actions, ideas, and interventions, a participatory audience where none seemed to exist.» [10] As Phillips states, part of the creation of an audience is through the participation of the audience. This has often meant «community art» such as the murals created by Judy Baca with community participation or projects by Tim Rollins and K.O.S. [11] Increasingly, artists such as the collectives Superflex [12] and PDPal are creating platforms (webcasting and mapping) for local audiences to utilize without getting very involved in the actual creation of content. More importantly, projects such as «PDPal» use people’s «image of the city» [13] to self-represent «their» city. Aggregated together, these imagemaps create a «communicity» that is an emergent public space based on use and knowledge «on the ground,» rather than a formally articulated park or plaza. While some artists and artist groups create tools and platforms for a participating public to self-represent, others entice the public into participating in public spaces, such as Valie Export’s classic «Tap and Touch Cinema» or Keith Obadike’s selling his blackness in the virtual public marketplace of eBay. [14] Other artists, rather than personally performing, intervene in the spatial fabric of the city, so to speak, from Nicolas Schöffer’s «Tour Spatiodynamique Cybernétique de Liège»(1961) to Peter Cook and Colin Fournier’s Kunsthaus Graz (2003) to Diller + Scofidio’s «Facsimile»(2004). In the case of both public performances and public architectural interventions, the contemporary situation is hybrid—it is both physical and virtual, just as the realm of the new public sphere is.

It is in regard to communications systems thatartists have perhaps most clearly and decisively expanded notions of the public sphere. As Inke Arms notes, «Since the 1970s, artists have used their work to address the way public space is increasingly being transformed by the influence of (mass) media and private commercial interests.» [15] From the mail art correspondence of Ray Johnson to the billboards and signage of Les Levine and Jenny Holzer to the media walls of Dara Birnbaum to Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s «Electronic Café» to Guillermo Gómez-Pena’s [Pena mit Tilde auf n!]hijacking of cable television to Robert Adrian X’s «World in 24 Hours» to the streaming media and low power fm radio transmissions of radioqualia, artists have been instrumental in understanding the possibilities of this infrastructure as more than a marketing channel but as a system of communication to engender a questioning, participatory public.

In her essay, «Constructing Media Spaces,» Josephine Bosma argues that forms of networked art, in particular, are progenitors of what media theorist calls «public domain 2.0,»and that the works of the artists described in her text «bring people closer to technology on many different levels. Some only create curiosity and wonder (the first level of familiarity); others clearly aim at audience participation or even education. All of these works deal with the public domain as a virtual, mediated space consisting of both material and immaterial matter.» [16]

Mark Lewis argues in «Public Interest» that in any of these public systems, despite the rhetoric of censorship, «today in the west there is nothing that cannot be said, nothing, that is, that when released (as everything eventually is) can in any way mitigate an assumption of liberation, revolution or victory.» [17] Increasingly, however, private contractual agreements are subverting the public domain of expression. The artist group Knowbotic Research, whose «IO_dencies»(1997) was one of the earliest and most significant projects exploring the real effects of virtual flows on the urban public sphere, refers to the concept of the «legal bug» to describe this phenomenon of the privatization of rights. In their case, they were prevented from presenting a legal project, «Minds of Concern,» (2002) because the Internet service provider for the exhibiting museum didnot allow in its terms of service contract the particular use of the Internet that Knowbotic Research was exploiting. This is a specific example of what Lawrence Lessig has argued more generally is the increasing usurpation of representative law making through code and its attendant web of contractual relations. Code is law. [18]

In the face of both the privatization of the public sphere and government curtailment, often on security grounds, a number of artists are leveraging the network to monitor the monitors. Ryan McKinley’s «Government Information Awareness,» [19] for instance, was a distributed platform linking various publicly available databases and constituent input to create a knowledge base about U.S. government officials that mirrors, at least metaphorically, the government’s renamed versions of its Total Information Awareness program. Swipe’s performances also perform data-mining to present detailed data profiler to users based simply on reading the magnetic stripes on their drivers’ licenses. [20] Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon’s «The Status Project» [21] looks at how people can utilize a database of Do-It-Yourself strategies to meet the bureaucratic requirements for the possession of official identification—from birth certificates to passports. An exhibition such as «Kingdom of Piracy» is an «open work space to explore the free sharing of digital content—often condemned as piracy—as the net's ultimate art form.» [22]

In 1997 Eleanor Heartney identified a «third way»of public art, different than the prototypical examples of Richard Serra and Scott Burton, writing: «Although they exist at opposite ends of the public art spectrum, these two examples are united by a failure to grapple with the real complexities of the public context – Serra by reenacting the old standoff between avant-garde artist and philistine public and, Burton by conceiving of the public as some kind of uniform mass unproblematically joined by common interests. . . . Recently, however, a third approach has begun to surface in the work of artists like Dennis Adams, Alfredo Jaar, Kryzsztof Wodiczko and Jenny Holzer that conceives of the city as a locus of competing interests, ideologies, and languages, and infiltrates preexisting forums and forms in order to dramatize rather than resolve conflicts inherent in modern life.» [23]

Heartney’s formulation, similar conceptually to Mouffe’s contested, agonistic democracy, cites the city as the public sphere, but the cybrid environment cannot be ignored—public space is both physical and virtual. Even more importantly, how do we interpret this contest? If not consensus, how do we measure the «will of the people?»As Bruno Latour writes about the exhibition «Dingpolitik: Making Things Public» at ZKM in 2005: «One of the recent fruits of the so-called science studies is the fact that researchers have realized the fundamental importance of small practices, scientific tools and various gadgets in mundane, everyday activities of laboratories for the production of scientific knowledge aside from the theoretical aspects of science. Now this success seems to be extended to the very leitmotif of this exhibition, i.e. not grand theories, but things, tools and apparatuses in different domains of society, for discovering any clues for solving the problem of what is generally called the crisis of representation.» [24] What are the «things, tools, and apparatuses,» such as Christian Nold's «Community Edit» that create a public art for the public sphere? The question finally remains how that also leads to public knowledge and how this knowledge could be defined.