Commons.art

My research focus is around Commons.art, a digital platform that I am developing from Casco Art Institute, where I am the director, in close collaboration with designer and artist Yin Aiwen.

Commons.art is a digital platform that supports the care and maintenance process of socially engaged art projects contributing to the culture of the commons.

Binna Choi with Yin Aiwen

This to-be-launched digital platform and gathering place functions as an economic ecosystem for sustaining a new generation of socially engaged artworks, collective (art) practices and artistic tools for the commons. Works of art are connected via the platform to new users and caretakers who maintain the works, breathe new life into them and place them in the current social context.

This is supplemented with a collection of texts, images, translations and sounds that show what commons (can) are so that they can be easily recognized by the wider audience. This strengthens the concept of commons and links it to existing practices that are already alive in our culture.

Commons.art responds to a need within the art sector for new subsidy resources that recognize care and maintenance as valuable currencies. By bringing together knowledge and examples of commons with active acts of community care and maintenance, the platform provides a digital commons infrastructure for “preserving” socially engaged artworks for and by communities. – Binna Choi.

Contributors to commons.art include Yin Aiwen, concept designer; Binna Choi, curator, and You Mi, Caroline Woolard, advisors, Casco Art Institute.