Visible Virals - Transport and Parks Public Art

Artist Nils Norman has spent the past few months working closely with Liverpool’s Parks & Environment Service and parks experts – exploring and photographing Liverpool's major green spaces including Greenbank, Everton, Princes, Sefton Parks and Wavertree Botanic Gardens and Birkenhead Park on the Wirral. The result is a light-hearted advertising campaign, launched on 3 June, which draws attention to Liverpool’s unique and often little-known parks. Complementing the campaign, he has linked the parks through the city’s public transport system by creating online maps so that everyone can explore the secrets of the city’s parks.

Exploring and recording these diverse and historic public spaces on foot and by public transport, Nils has developed an interesting spin on the conventional advertising campaign and reveals the hidden places and activities of each park. This playful campaign repackages the Parks as if they were a product or holiday location, sometimes alluding to phrases and buzzwords of classic popular adverts. The posters will be rolled out this summer on buses, bus shelters, in stations, and billboards citywide.

In parallel to this poster campaign, a unique interactive website has been developed so the public can explore the parks online using Google maps and highlighting the parks’ histories, curiosities and interesting details as well as special walks between and inside the parks. Visitors to the site will be encouraged to email their own parks images and favourite places about to be added to the site – creating a very special online archive of material for each park.

The website will include the photographic material Nils has gathered during his research and the maps and artwork produced for the poster campaign are available to download at www.liverpoolparks.org from 3 June 2008.

Dates

Opening 2008 1 May 2008 - 30 Dec 2008