Public smog is an ongoing conceptual project, that subtitles itself: Public Smog is Kyoto Gold Standard. It is a park in the atmosphere that fluctuates in location and scale.

Public Smog … consists of a gesture in which the artist buys and withholds carbon gas emission credits from international trading markets in order to create a temporary clean-air park. Aiming to highlight the complexities and contradictions of current environmental protocols, Balkin will attempt to submit an application to qualify the entire atmosphere as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. .. (read on)

Public Smog is a project by Amy Balkin, who is one of the participating artists of the just recently opened exhibition “Radical Software: Art, Technology, and the Bay Area Underground” in San Francisco Bay Area. The aim of the show is to chart previously unexplored connections between art, technology, radical politics, and the psychedelic avant-garde by bringing together radical and experimental work by internationally known and emerging artists, plus commissioned projects, public works, historical artifacts, and new research.

At the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, Stewart Brand—former Merry Prankster, founder of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” Global Business Network, and Long Now Foundation—made his often-quoted claim that “information wants to be free.”
This exhibition will combine artworks, experimental film and video, documentary material and artifacts that trace the countercultural discourse that made Brand’s assertion possible: from its early manifestations in the postwar bohemian underground to its adoption as a basic principle by a new generation of artists, hackers, and activists.