In the network society everyone puts together their own city. Naturally this touches on the essence of the concept of public domain. The modern city is most easily understood as an archipelago of enclaves, and if the citizen is continuously occupied with maintaining his or her own small network with as little possible friction with other groups, then that does indeed ostensibly spell the demise of any form of public domain. However, that is not how the private space of the archipelago resident looks.The paradoxical fact is that many people are still searching for that experience of intensely felt public places. Public domain is, in our firm opinion, not so much a place as an experience. Public domain experiences occur at the boundary between friction and freedom. On the one hand there is always the tension of a confrontation with the unfamiliar; on the other, the liberation of the experience of a different approach. In the main, our public domain experiences are in fact related to entering the parochial domain of 'others'.

- Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp ¹

When we put the AIDS posters in the New York subway system, we were interested in the fact that they passed through every geographic and ethnic barrier within the urban context.

- AA Bronson ²

Preamble

Throughout their three decades of activity, the Canadian artists' collective General Idea crossed through various cultural boundaries and discursive systems, presciently understanding the art world as a microcosm of the broader popular culture, and in the process redefined what it meant for visual artists to generate new kinds of public-domain experiences. They injected the language of visual