Reveal our City was made for Geelong After Dark 2019 in response to the City of Greater Geelong’s cultural vision and policies, in partnership with Art Thinking Australia and Ars Electronica Australia.
At its centre was Beehive, an ongoing artistic research experiment by Ars Electronica and Art Thinking: a crowdsourced video platform. Like bees, participants swarm out, film what is happening from many angles, and bring the footage back to a collective hive.
Across the festival, content was gathered from about 80 artworks and curated into a performance installation. In the atrium of Geelong City Hall, disembodied voices of the past moved through the room’s acoustics, alongside residents recording how they felt about Geelong’s culture. Through the Beehive app, people answered prompts about the Council’s cultural vision; the footage was sorted in the app and fed into policy.
Over a set period, locals contributed what they found about their city, and their contributions built up as a live feed in the Town Hall. Around 2,000 people took part, through the app or at the live performances. The work was later presented with Art Thinking at the Pivot Innovation Conference in Geelong in 2019.
‘The City Hall is a place for residents of Geelong to have a voice.’
