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Scholarship has largely been conducted on publics’ ‘offline’ public art encounters, while public art practice has become increasingly integrated with virtual dimensions. This article aims to fill this gap by focusing on digitally mediated public art engagement. A case study on the travelling Rubber Duck exhibition (2012–present) interrogates how this artwork is appropriated and narrated through digitally networked spaces (mainly social media, forums and news platforms) after its repeated on-site installations. This article argues for the need to expand on ‘virtual relationality’: the communication, (re-)negotiation and (re-)siting of public art’s roles and meanings through (mainly text- and image-based) social mediations within hybrid, online-offline contexts. Public art encounters are examined along fluid cybergeographical understandings of its social and spatial publicness, temporalities and uses, which deconstruct binaries including material/digital space, permanence/ephemerality and human/non-human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotions have remained under-addressed in scholarship on public memorial art, particularly with sexuality content. This case study on the Amsterdam-based Homomonument attends to this gap by differentiating emotions according to multi-scalar, multi-temporal and multi-semiotic dimensions of everyday lived experiences of sexual citizenship. Based on discourse analysis of secondary materials and social media coverage, supplemented with auto-ethnographic experience, the study explores how present-day feelings of respect, agitation and celebration around Homomonument are mediated at intersecting levels of the body, local community, broader society and especially emergent virtual community spaces. Such understanding requires critical interfaces with reminiscences, contemporary values and normativities, and future imaginaries. Specifically, this paper puts in perspective how Homomonument operates as queer micropublic: a space for intercultural encounter and 'queerying' sexual difference. This appears to be a multifaceted meaningful process, too: Homomonument ambiguously holds contesting, reconciling, indifferent and empathic sentiments alongside belongings and sexual identity expressions in quotidian life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban regeneration in Dutch cities is increasingly accompanied by the cultural sector in general and by artists in particular. This paper presents comparative case studies on current artists-accompanied urban regeneration initiated by housing corporations in Utrecht and Rotterdam. On the basis of discourse analysis on the voices of decisive actors, it explores the rationale behind artists-accompanied urban regeneration and the sociospatial implications thereof. It empirically indicates that housing corporations are more inclined to deploy artists in urban regeneration when there are sufficient vacant buildings. It also illustrates that more decentralised housing corporations have a stronger and more long-term commitment to urban regeneration. The latter includes a greater commitment to interventions by artists within urban public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]