Artist Laresa Kosloff has some advice for Melburnians. “If you see an old friend, try not to bore them, and others.” Pedestrians passing the arts centre in the next few months will also be reminded, via the loudspeakers out front: “It is fine to apply lipstick here, but don’t make it a big production”; “If you break something today you must pay for it with cash on the spot”; or, if none of that seems pertinent: “For more tips, visit the tip.” Kosloff likes a bit of public intervention, so she has hijacked the PAs as part of a citywide project called Who’s Afraid of Public Space?

Kosloff’s fake, quirky public announcements are delivered by a professional-sounding voice actor. They are funny and unsettling, but also difficult to distinguish from genuine announcements. The aim is not just to entertain. The work asks provocative questions about what makes public space such a complex zone. Boundaries between private and public have become less clear in recent decades thanks to changes in technology, social expectations and the law, bringing increased surveillance into public areas, along with intrusions on all our senses from advertising, overt and subliminal.

ACCA director Max Delany has been considering these issues in recent years while developing Who’s Afraid of Public Space? He began work on it well before the pandemic, and says lockdowns have made public spaces even more complicated.

“It has been fascinating watching the changes in our relationship to public space during the lockdowns,” he says. “First, we abandoned it and rapidly migrated to the digital realm. But, equally, over the past 18 months we have had a much more intense relationship with the public realm – such as doing a lot of walking and engaging with places like our local parks. It was interesting during the first long lockdown of 2020 to see how people improvised with public spaces. They were occupying the outdoors, laneways and so on in more creative ways.”

Delany has worked with a number of curators and other external partners for Who’s Afraid of Public Space? The project involves dozens of artists and is almost like a small festival, with components spreading from ACCA to the outer suburbs.

Her announcements are jarring, implausible and slightly inappropriate, but the voice-actor’s persuasive tone makes them seem convincing.

Kosloff’s project encapsulates many of the issues Delany has been considering. She says taking over the PAs is about challenging the subliminal messaging we often encounter as we occupy public areas, with speakers, surveillance cameras and advertising screens blurring the line between public and private. Her announcements are jarring, implausible and slightly inappropriate, but the voice-actor’s persuasive tone makes them seem convincing.

“They are quite hard for me to write,” she says. “I don’t want them to be didactic in any way, or to literally mimic what announcements do. But I don’t want them to be nonsensical either. They have subtexts around human behaviour or social dynamics that will register with people ... psychologically, they feel true.“

Other projects include photographer David Wadelton using shopfronts in High Street, Northcote, for photo installations about gentrification; the investigation of a new housing estate in outer-suburban Officer; explorations of surveillance camera technology by Michael Candy; and a Wi-Fi intervention by Steven Rhall that expands the idea of Indigenous Country into the digital realm.