Digital image archives as public artwork and community engagement

This paper focuses on two recent projects developed by the author in which social media and conceptual art strategies were adopted to present alternative ways of exploring the production and dissemination of digital archives. Projects for this examination are: EK Modernism (eknewtown.com) – an archive of over 8000 digital images used to map and conceptualise Scotland’s first New Town of East Kilbride, and Glocal (glocal.ca) – an open source and collaborative global community project that evolved into a live-projection media presentation at the Winter Olympics 2010 in Vancouver, Canada. The author further explores how different social geographies were captured through digital photography to create the digital image archives forming both these projects and how these archives opened new channels as public ‘net’ artworks and as platforms for cultural and community engagement.