Smart Public Art: Interactive Technology and Public Art Evaluation

Katherine Gressel

This article focuses on the role of web and mobile technologies in evaluating, promoting and explaining public art. The author explores this topic through through interviews with public arts organizations innovating with interactive technology, close analysis of several organization's social media and online photo albums and her own experience curating FIGMENT sculpture garden in New York. The main finding of this article is that it is difficult to evaluate the impact of public art itself on an audience separate from the impact of engagement tools, but that these tools can nonetheless play an important role in the public art evaluation process.