Flying-U-TOPIA : Info Balloon
by Jenny Marketou, 2004

Event: A proposal submitted for a public project to be realized during the Olympic Games, Athens, Greece.
Venue: Catch the Light: Look Of the City, Athens, 2004
Location: Santa Rosa Square, Omonoia, Koumoudourou or any other location on Route 1.
Duration: 13-29 August, 2004

The project:

1- Flying- U-TOPIA “ is an art project which articulates the definition, distribution and reception of “ public art” and which is implemented as a social activity .The project can be described as an intervention which suggests an emerging and dynamic imaging and visual representation of the city surfaces which are full of stories in real time. The interaction of art and public aims to generate a dialogue which are brought via city structures which bind our social lives together. The objectives of the project point to a new direction of image making ,sharing and communicating.

2- Intervention as Art:

I propose daily interventions with the Info Balloon which will take place around the city in preselected places called “landing sites”. The project calls of the participation of the audience. The artist by making the tools of her process and technology available to public to use and experiment.

Like the situationist “derive” or “drift” it will provide each participant with the guidance and instructions provided from the artist the opportunity to have access to use the Info Balloon. Each intervention will give the opportunity to each participant to hold the Info Balloon from the tether and to walk through designated “landing sites” of the city and to record the city from above. By doing so she/he engages her/himself directly into the art of intervening, mapping and Imaging the city while the artistic process and technology used have been revealed in a playful and dynamic way. The Flying balloon wireless interface allows the general public to see the city from a different point of view and escape from the official form of representation.

As part of the project I suggest that the recordings from each intervention will be archived and will be projected at the end of each day locally on the surface of a building in the neighborhood where each intervention took place.

The Info Balloon which has been conceived as a “tool” for a self organizing imaging intervention and agency in the city allows the general public to see the city from a different point of view and escape from the official form of representation.