Public art galleries go to considerable lengths to construct cavernous white rooms, place an object in them for you to look at, then, at the critical
moment, position a small card at eye level telling you exactly what you are looking at.

In psychological research, if you deliberately introduce information intended to change someone’s experience of an object, you would have to do some kind of ethics application, get informed consent and create a control condition. But in public art galleries, this is called “interpretation”.

For the past four years, I have curated public art video projects for a 110m-long, 13m-tall digital light wall called The Lightship. Built by Port of Auckland, the wall runs along the side of a car-handling building by Bledisloe Wharf. Its location means that, if you’ve been around the waterfront at night, you’ve probably been exposed to 1430sq m of contemporary art without your informed consent.

For me, this is one of the best parts of the project; the public’s encounter with an artist’s work comes first and the explanation later – or not at all. Someone might notice something happening on the side of the building before they have any reason to call it art: work by a great artist such as Sean Kerr or Tamsen Hopkinson, Turumeke Harrington or Oscar Perry.