This chapter examines the place of art in two concrete ways, first, as the location of the site-specific atrwork involving an artist's drawn-out commute during its production, and second, as a re-location the artwork undergoes as it is displayed in other venues.  The focus is on Sound Machine, by Paris-based artist Esther Shalev-Gerz, initially created for Norrköping's Industrial Landscape, before it began "commuting" to other venues, including Paris and Stockholm.

The overall aim of this project was to develop arts-based research involving, in various ways, urban space and its inhabitants. The project title — ‘art through city space’ — suggests movement and flow, as well as a perspective. Thus, the space of the city provided a conceptual framework for developing works that engaged with far larger issues than those conventionally associated with art in public space. The project participants were Johan Berglund, Jonas Dahlberg, Göran Dahlberg and Esther Shalev-Gerz, as well as researchers Bodil Axelsson and Karin Becker.  As initially formulated, ‘Art through City Space’ was to address issues concerning the place of art in contemporary urban space. The idea was that the work developed in the project would, in one way or another, be ‘public art’ even as it was expected to challenge and contest traditional views of the place of art in public space. Through the process and the artworks that were realised over the three-year period, the artistic research process led the project group into a range of other questions and practices central to contemporary urban life.

The chapter by Swedish writers Bodil Axelsson and Karin Becker analyses Sound Machine, a collaborative contemporary art project that was developed integrally with university activities in research and teaching.  This interface opened up the rare possibility of participant research into the work processes of a well-known European collaborative artist, Esther Shalev-Gerz. The researchers trace different modes of engagement with participating non-artist subjects - such as the women who provide 'cultural memory' of earlier forms of work and engagement with technology - as well as other forms of participation essential for Sound Machine's conceptual, technical and institutional development.

This article examines the amateur photographer as a common figure in contemporary news photographs, focusing on how the amateur’s gestures signify in journalism’s coverage of media events. Drawing on theories of photography as performance and ritual, I argue that the presence of the non-professional in the news photograph destabilizes journalistic discourse by challenging the role of the professional photographer and by redefining the event and its meanings. This is especially critical in coverage of catastrophic events, when the amateur’s gestures become a form of witnessing from a participant’s perspective, carrying both private and collective meanings for how the event will be understood in the future, and undermining the authority of journalism.

Recent scholarship on media witnessing, where street protest provides a clear example, has noted how images attain agency, ‘exceeding their frames’ as they call for an active response (Taylor 2003). This chapter addresses this phenomenon in a study of selected political protests, comparing their visual representations on screen in news coverage by four global television channels and in international award-winning press photographs. Is it possible to identify visual icons in this coverage, images that can be expected to shape how these events are remembered and that may reappear in future protests? Or has the photographic icon, as some scholars have suggested (Goldberg 1991), become a thing of the past?

This chapter explores, from several historical and cultural perspectives, the changing relationship between professional journalism and its amateur alternatives, i.e. images from private cameras.  Drawing on historical examples and various journalistic genres, I examine how the border between professional and non-professional photography in the press has been continually challenged and redrawn, and discuss the ethical dilemmas that arise in this uneasy borderland. Journalism’s ambivalence over using pictures from outside its professional domain has a long history, which I trace here, focusing particularly on the aesthetic and documentary character and appeal of the private photograph, and what happens when this appeal coincides with the interests of news.  I look at some of the routines and strategies that journalism has used to pull in these “outsider” images, explaining or “taming” them to fit within the news frame.

Photographs of non-professionals taking pictures are a common feature of contemporary journalism. Drawing on theories of photography as performance and ritual, this article addresses what it means when professionals include these photographing “others” in their images ofnews events. It argues that the image of the amateur, performing photography in the news, shifts and destabilizes journalistic discourse. Using examples from the daily press, the article accounts for these “meta-pictures” as a manifestation of participatory visual culture dating from 9/11, examines specific ways they challenge the authority of the professional andconsiders how they alter the significance of the media event.

The photo essay, a form of visual journalism that arose during the era of the picture magazines, has reemerged as a regular feature of global news channels, including CNN, BBC World, and, notably, Al Jazeera English, recognized for its live reporting of political unrest.  In 2017, a year marked by protest around the world, AJE published over 200 photo-series, including 37 on public protest. An analysis based in a four-year study of protest on screen, revealed that these photo essays share characteristics that in turn distinguish them from video broadcasts of public protests. The photo-reportage on screen, like its classic forerunner in print, employs a variety of visual perspectives and focuses on participants who are often quoted and identified by name. Scenes of public protest are complemented by visual and textual reporting from the private/domestic sphere. This visual strategy, in contrast to the immediacy of video coverage from the streets, supports knowledge of the protest issue and engagement with its participants. 

The photo essay, a form of visual journalism that arose during the era of the picture magazines, has reemerged as a regular feature of global news channels, including CNN, BBC World, and, notably, Al Jazeera English, recognized for its live reporting of political unrest. In 2017, a year marked by protest around the world, AJE published over 200 photo-series, including 37 on public protest. An analysis based on a four-year study of protest on screen revealed that these photo essays share characteristics that in turn distinguish them from video broadcasts of public protests. The photo-reportage on screen, like its classic forerunner in print, employs a variety of visual perspectives and focuses on participants who are often quoted and identified by name. Scenes of public protest are complemented by visual and textual reporting from the private/domestic sphere. This visual strategy, in contrast to the immediacy of video coverage from the streets, supports knowledge of the protest issue and engagement with its participants.

This paper presents a study of street vendors as entrepreneurs and the positions they occupy in the mix of urban public life. While current research on vendors focuses on specific groups of “global peddlers”– particularly migrants  - in specific cities, we trace the diversity of this global phenomenon across geographic locations, ranging from those who manage year-round stalls in fixed places near where they live, to those who carry their goods on their backs in cities far from home. For some it is seasonal work, following fairs and festivals, for others it is a steady job, and for many it is a way to scrape by as they try to get a footing somewhere.

Here we examine the ways vendors establish connections to other cultures and places, through the wares they sell and how they present themselves and their products in public space. We find many who use media and particularly Internet to develop and market their wares, and also to maintain organizational networks and support among vendors. Vending emerges as a cosmopolitan practice, involving commodification of culture and cultural products, that creates links between diverse localities and histories, performed in cities across the globe.

Visual culture continues to be seen as peripheral to journalism, despite the centrality of image flows and visual technologies in both the private and public spheres of contemporary media. This chapter addresses this lacuna, first by elaborating central concepts and theoretical tents from the field of visual culture, and then by suggesting how they can contribute to a better understanding of the cultures of journalism, viewed both historically and in the present media environment

What is it like to live in St. Ana Zegache? In March 2013, two workshops in trans-medial storytelling were held with young people and adults from the pueblo, giving them an opportunity to document in their own words and photographs what it is like to live there. Participants were asked to create two brief stories, the first focusing on what they saw as the most important features of the town, and the second a more personal story from their own lives.

The Art of Engagement explores the dynamics of arts-business-community collaborations, including their aesthetic, social and political dimensions. The chapter by Swedish writers Axelsson and Becker analyses Sound Machine, a collaborative contemporary art project that was developed integrally with university activities in research and teaching. This interface opened up the possibility of participant research into the work of well-known European collaborative artist, Esther Shalev-Gerz. The researchers trace different modes of engagement with participating non-artist subjects - such as the women who provide 'cultural memory' of earlier forms of work and engagement with technology - as well as other forms of participation essential for Sound Machine's  conceptual, technical and institutional development.

Texten följer hur figuren Santa Ana, Marias moder och katolskt skyddshelgon, framställs i olika sammanhang, medier och föreställande former i en by i södra Mexiko som bär helgonets namn. På vilka olika sätt kan Santa Ana - helgonfiguren såväl som platsen - träda fram i mötet mellan två skilda sociokulturella sammanhang där de relitiösa och politiska axlarna korsas? Tolkningarna som Santa Ana-berättelserna ger upphov till skifter mellan olika medietyper och lokaliteter, i vilka olika varianter av religiositet och konstnärligthet flätas ihop. 

This paper traces a collaboration between Stockholm-based video artists and an artisan workshop in the village of Zegache St. Ana in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the co-production of a video animation of the local patron saint St. Ana, mother of Mary. It examines the narratives of locality, religion and artistic practice that the animation gives rise to as it moves across different media platforms and locales. Religious (re-)inventiveness has played a crucial role in the cultural resilience of the indigenous population of Oaxaca. The venerative practices of Zapotecos, Mixtecos and Nahuas, though firmly Catholic in their faith, have repeatedly challenged the sacrament-orientated hierarchies of the Hispanicized clergy.

Today the church of Santa Ana Zegache constitutes the artistic, cultural and spiritual landmark of the town. Twenty years ago, this 16th-century building, and all of its artwork, was in ruins. The Community Workshop of Zegache was established to train local women in various techniques of conservation and restoration.  A decade later these local people had restored the the church to its past splendor - a masterpiece of "Indian Baroque" – and the community workshop had grown to 17 members, both men and women.

In 2008, the Stockholm-based video artists, Performing Pictures started a long-term collaboration with the Zegache artisans. Several inter-active video shrines with animated saints and apparitions are the result of this artistic, cultural and technical exchange. Together they have shaped new outlets for venerative practice that combine crafts with media technology, electronics and animation.

The paper examines the meaning of these works first, for the artists and artisans, and second, for other residents of Zegache, as they encounter the animated figure of St. Ana in different spaces and media formats. Its point of departure is the production of the video animation of St. Ana in November 2011, and its first local showing as an iPhone app. The second phase of the project involved building a small, solar powered chapel at the entrance of the town, to house the video-animation. Phase three is a workshop in digital story-telling to be carried out in March 2013, asking both children and adults to record their own stories of the meanings St. Ana has for the town. Plans are being developed to extend the project to include members of the Zegache expatriate community living in Oregon.

This article examines a 5-year collaboration between the Stockholm-based video artists Performing Pictures and Talleres Comunitarios, a studio based in the Oaxacan town of Santa Ana Zegache where local artisans employ traditional skills in the restoration of religious artifacts. In images and text, we trace the exchange of skills, knowledge, and aesthetic sensibility that took place as these two groups of artists collaborated in producing a series of video animations of venerative objects, against a backdrop of religious, social, and political tensions that characterize everyday life in Zegache. In the article and the accompanying series of three short films, ‘‘Wonder & Veneration 13’’ (http://vimeo. com/album/2682070), we examine how the artists negotiate questions of aesthetics and religious belief as their collaboration unfolds within the context of the Zegache community, where the Talleres contribute skills of carpentry and painting, while Performing Pictures provides skills of film, animation and micro-electronics. The processes and practices involved in creating three works provides the framework for this examination: the first, an animation of the Virgin of Guadalupe as she appears to a simple peasant, and the second, produced 2 years later, an animation of Santa Ana, local patron saint and mother of Maria, as she teaches her daughter to read the scriptures. Whereas both figures are central to the syncretic religious belief of southern Mexico with its challenge to the entrenched authority of the hispanicized clergy, the local figure of Santa Ana carries even more complex meanings for the community of Zegache. These meanings are embodied in the third work we examine, a small solarpowered chapel that the artists built to display the Santa Ana animation. With the mayor’s support and located at the entrance to the town, the chapel embodies a shift of power away from the church, standing as an example of indigenous empowerment in civil society.

Cinésenseprojektet ägde rum på gator och torg, i vänthallar och shoppingtempel, bibliotek, butiker och skyltfönster. Dramatiskt kondenserade karaktärer introducerades för en oinvigd publik på en offentlig plats. Konstnärer och forskare undersökte tillsammans hur tid och rum på och framför skärmen (i och utanför fiktionen) kan vävas ihop till en mer performativ rymd.

Projektet undersökte hur man utvecklar ett interaktivt berättande inom film men också hur en betraktare – vars roll utökats till att bli en mer eller mindre ofrivillig deltagare – påverkas? Växelspelet är avgörande; filmens utgångspunkt är att provocera fram en nyfikenhet som i sin tur utmanar filmen till att ta till nya konstgrepp. 

This essay traces the resurrection of the fotoescultura, a three-dimensional photographic portrait popular in rural Mexico in the early 20th century, as interpreted in recent works by Performing Pictures, a contemporary Swedish artist duo. The early fotoesculturas were an augmented form of portraiture, commissioned by family members who supplied photographs that artisans in Mexico City converted into framed sculptural portraits for display on family altars. We compare these ‘traditional’ photographic objects with ‘new’ digital forms of video animation on screen and in public space that characterize Performing Pictures' work, and explore how the fotoescultura inspired new incarnations of their series Men that Fall.  At the intersection between the material aspects of a ‘traditional’ vernacular art form and ‘new’ media art, we identify a photographic aesthetic that shifts from seeing and perceiving to physical engagement, and discuss how the frame and its parergon augment the photographic gaze. The essay is accompanied by photos and video stills from Performing Pictures’ film poem Dreaming the Memories of Now (2018), depicting their work with the fotoesculturas.

This paper examines the amateur photographer as a common figure in contemporary news photographs, focusing on how the amateur’s gestures signify in journalism’s coverage of media events. Drawing on theories of photography as performance and ritual, I argue that the presence of the non-professional in the news photograph destabilizes journalistic discourse by challenging the role of the professional photographer and by redefining the event and its meanings. This is especially critical in coverage of catastrophic events, when the amateur’s gestures become a form of witnessing, carrying both private and collective meanings for how the event will be understood in the future. I conclude with a discussion of how journalism resolves this challenge by employing the image of the amateur instrumentally as “eyewitness” in a move that retains journalism’s authority while acknowledging the vernacular perspective and the values of participatory media culture.