urban art forms

"…urban art is not site-specific but relationship-specific. The relation always arrives, coming to us through a leading perceptual edge-- usually visual-- in advance of its next sequential unfolding. In other words, it arrival is a promised event that has yet to occur: an appointment with a known but not yet actually afforded outcome. To afford oneself of the outcome is to eventuate the relationship, to perform it: to follow through with its actual step-by-step unfolding.
…The art parasitizes the expected event with its own happening. The Situationists also had a name for this practice of inserting unexpected encounters-with-potential into existing landing sites: detournement (hijacking or detouring).
"Documentation is the art event’s park bench: the form in which it rests. Except that documentary rest is for transport, since it is in documentary form that the event may move from one “park” to another. Documentation as vehicular event benching. To vehiculate the event, the documentation cannot be conceived merely as reflecting or representing it. It must be thought of as, and designed to be, the event in seed for. If the documentary germ falls on fertile urban ground, the performative prototyping may well resprout. … It is the event’s way of angling itself, or generally affording its own rehappening. (11-12)
-- Massumi, Brian. “Urban Appointment: A Possible Rendez-Vous With the City.” In Making Art of Databases, ed. Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder. Pp. 28-55.