European wide Public Technologies exhibition shows artists Mina Arko and Ben Dromey’s CityBeat installation in Lasipalatsi Square, starting from 26.8. until the end of September 2011. The work invites the public to touch and feel the ‘heartbeat’ of four European cities.
Artists Mina Arko and Ben Dromey are masters students from the Aalto School of Art and Design. Their work is collaborative, emerging on the crossroads between technology, art, design, anthropology and sociology.
The installation appears as a large cube on the corner of Lasipalatsi Square near Simonkatu. By touching its surface, people can feel and compare the heartbeats of four cities - Helsinki, Riga, London and Lisbon. We are live recording sound in central places in these cities and translating it to a heartbeat. You are able to feel and compare the changing pace of the cities by touching the installation form. We expect the heartbeats to alter during the day depending on the amount of activity in each respective city. Artist Mina Arko explains that “CityBeat suggests that we are losing touch with our cities. By giving life to a city through the metaphor of a heartbeat, something we can universally identify with, we bring back into focus what a city is, an organism created, inhabited and continuously changed by man.”
CityBeat is produced by the Finnish Society of Bioart and is part of the European Public Art Centre - Public Technologies exhibition.
CityBeat was chosen via an international open call to be part of European Public Art Centre’s Public technologies exhibition. The call was organized last spring by the Finnish Bioart Society, the Finnish coordinator of the project. Public technologies is the first exhibition ever organized in Europe that spreads to four European cities at the same time. In the beginning of October 2011 CityBeat will travel to Riga, and Anne Brodie’s work BEE BOX will come to Helsinki in return.
The European Public Art Centre is a network of international organizations that promote and foster interdisciplinary contemporary culture and particularly collaboration between art and science. Finnish Bioart Society supports, produces and creates art and science activities with a focus on bioart. It initiates public discussions about biosciences, biotechnologies and bioethics.
