Charlotte Kent – författare

Shortlisted for the 2023 Lumen Prize, a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book, which retells Dante’s Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City.Voidopolis is a digital performance about loss and memory presented as an augmented reality (AR) book with a limited lifespan. The book loosely retells the story of Dante’s Inferno as if it were the dystopic experience of wandering through New York City during the pandemic; instead of Virgil, however, the narrator is guided through this modern hellscape by a caustic hobo named Nikita.Voidopolis is meant to culminate in loss. It features images that are created by digitally “wiping” humans from stock photography and text that is generated without the letter “e”—in homage to Oulipo author Georges Perec’s A Void, a 300-page novel written entirely without the letter—by using a modified GPT-2 text generator. The book, adapted from a series of Instagram posts that were ultimately deleted, is likewise designed to disappear: its garbled pages can only be deciphered with an AR app, and they decay at the same rate over a period of one year, after which the decay process restarts and begins again. At the end of this decay cycle, only the printed book, with its unintelligible pages, remains. Each July 1, the date the project first started on Instagram, the book resets again, beginning anew the cycle of its own vanishing.A first-of-its-kind augmented reality book from a major university press, Voidopolis is a unique and deeply affecting artwork that speaks as much to our existential moment as it does to the fragility of experience, reality, and our connection to one another.

The first and only book on Times Square’s iconic Midnight Moment series, the world’s largest and longest-running digital public art programPresented nightly to millions of viewers each year, Midnight Moment showcases the work of contemporary artists on one of the world’s most iconic canvases – the electronic billboards of Times Square in New York City. A collaboration between Times Square Arts and artists – both established and emerging – this is a coordinated display of cutting-edge moving-image content and has earned the distinction of being the world’s largest and longest-running digital public-art program. Synchronized on over 90 billboard screens in the heart of Times Square nightly from 11:57 pm to 12:00 am, Midnight Moment has brought innovative and accessible public art to local and global visitors for more than a decade.A celebration of this monumental platform for public art, this eponymous retrospective memorializes ten years of the more than 130 artists that have participated in the program. The complex and immersive experience of public art in Times Square is brilliantly captured in this book with reflections from some of the program’s most notable artists; and behind-the-scenes information about how it’s coordinated, executed, and commemorated.Featured artists include Jeffrey Gibson, Shantell Martin, Christian Marclay, William Kentridge, Rashaad Newsome, Nick Cave, Pipilotti Rist, Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, Tracey Emin, Björk, JR, Isaac Julien, Ryan McGinley, Alfredo Jaar, Charles Atlas, Marco Brambilla, Andy Warhol, Shahzia Sikander, Fischli & weiss, Alex Da Corte, Alex Prager, Sophie Calle, Chitra Ganesh, Peter Campus, Lucy Raven & 13BC, Allison Janae Hamilton, David Hockney, Studio DRIFT, Cory Arcangel, and Joan Jonas.

Some have called this an age of absurdity, and as such Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art presents the contributions of artists, theorists, and scholars whose words and works investigate the absurd as a condition of, a tactic for, and a subject in the contemporary.The absurd is a lens on the disturbances of our moment and a challenge to the propositions about and solutions for the world. The absurd shakes off the paralysis that what we know must be the only thing we (re)produce. Those willing to recognize that and confront it, rather than flee from it, are thereby introduced to the political writ large.This edited collection adopts ideas and practices associated with the absurd to explain how the contemporary moment is absurd and how absurdity is a useful, potentially radical tool within the contemporary.Critical art allows the absurd a space within which audiences can observe their own tendencies and assumptions. The absurd in art reveals our inculcation into hegemonic belief structures and the necessity to question the systems to which we subscribe. Today we see the absurd in memes, performative politics, and art, expressing the confusion and disorientation wrought by the endless, emerging crises of our 24/7 relations.