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Statlab by Tjerk Stoop

Statlab by Tjerk Stoop

Statlab by Tjerk Stoop is an environmental art project, creating an analog visualization of air quality. From Stoop’s website, “It displays the daily average of CO2 concentration trough a chemical reaction where chalk particles are formed. The result is an analogue graph where the difference in the amount of chalk particles per tank is a global measure for the fluctuating CO2 concentration within one week.” Great to see physical/analog visualization presenting important data in a clear manner (well, assuming you read the accompanying text).

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What To Do With Malls When They Die?

Devonshire Mall, Windsor, Ontario from Google Maps

WorldChanging recently wrote about some malls in the US that died (or are in the process of dying) and what was being done with the space afterwards. It seems that some malls are being redesigned as mixed-use developments, with arts/community centres and housing. Reusing existing spaces for this type of redevelopment and activity is surely positive, but it seems that some of these projects are being billed as new downtowns. As most malls are built away from other other development, and many are designed around (or rather within) fields of parking lots, should these spaces really be considered a new “downtown”?

If this happened in Windsor, what might be the results? Devonshire Mall is over 1,000,000 square feet. That’s a lot of space for apartments, studios, galleries, shopping, markets, even a school. However, would this type of development just take the focus away from fixing our downtown (or is it already a lost cause?) Also, more questions would certainly be raised about a private space functioning as public space, as even the sidewalks of a “street” would suddenly be under private ownership. Other spaces in the city like old factories, the Home Depot right beside the mall, and even shutdown churches all seem like they could foster a good type of growth by converting those spaces into (hopefully) accessible places for artists, community groups, and housing. How do we start?

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Steam Roller Printing

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OK AWESOME. Talk about bringing the arts to the people, Martha Street Studio, a community-based printmaking studio recently conducted their second “Under Pressure” steam roller print festival! Found on MAKE:

For the past two years Martha Street Studio has hosted ‘Under Pressure’, Winnipeg’s only Steamroller Print Festival. High school students, community groups, and artists from across Winnipeg create large linoleum carvings leading up to the festival. On the day of the festival the carvings are inked and printed with the aid of a real steamroller.

GO CANADA!

via MAKE article

above link also provides more pics!

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Jennifer Marsh's Gas Station Cozy

Jennifer Marsh's Gas Station Cozy

Jennifer Marsh’s International Fiber Collaborative gathered 3,000 fiber panels to cover an abandoned Citgo gas station in central New York state. The panels were collected from students and artists spread across 15 countries. Very exciting potential for a collaborative public art project. On top of organizing the project, Marsh also gave workshops on how to crochet and make the panels to a number of students in New York and Virginia.

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Passage by Jason Rohrer

Passage, art game by Jason Rohrer

Passage by Jason Rohrer is a “journey through time.” Created for Montreal’s Gamma 256 competition, Passage allows you to travel through a maze within a 256×256 pixel area, where you meet your partner and travel through “life” together. Play it. Then read the statement.

Its simplicity is quite lovely and I realize more and more that I would enjoy video games a lot if they were all designed by artists. I would also recommend playing the Graveyard and reading Tale of Tales’ Realtime Artist Manifesto.

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GOOD Magazine – Vampire Energy

GOOD Magazine has been creating a number of these short videos with great animations discussing and illustrating a variety of issues. This one, in particular, talks about “Vampire Energy,” the energy that appliances and electronics use, even if they’re in standby mode. Best practice is always to have your TV, computer, etc. connected to a power bar that can be shut off when not in use, thereby cutting the power completely.

I think the video is a good example of distributing knowledge effectively. They took existing information/data (about power consumption) and created an animation that does a better job at communicating it than a bar graph and table of numbers probably ever could.

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Craft Work – Radical Craftivism in Melbourne

Radical Cross Stitch, Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle

Exactly.

In Melbourne, Australia, there is a “ton of land” sitting vacant, while many young people have no place to live. The Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle decided to comment on the situation by cross-stitching “I wanna live here” on the fence containing the land being hoarded by developers. They also planted some vegetable and flower seeds around the area and spent about 3 hours on this intervention.

Very poignant statement and addressing issues local to them = really, really good. Also, exciting to see a way to tackle the fence that doesn’t have to involve leaving plastic cups (biodegradable or not) or other refuse in a neighbourhood to make a point.

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Closed (Eco) Systems

Mathieu Lehanneur - Local River

Saw these two installations, made me wonder about the potentials for filtering water hydroponically, in place of using something like a Brita filter. The first project is Local Riverby Mathieu Lehanneur. The installation consists of a refrigerated aquarium that include live fish and vegetables working together to clean the water and provide nutrients for one another. 

DrinkPeeDrinkPeeDrinkPee by Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray

The second installation, DrinkPeeDrinkPeeDrinkPee, by Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray creates a demonstration of a closed-loop system where viewers are encouraged to sit on the toilet facing the water fountain, thereby closing the loop of tubes that form the installation. The tubes carry urine from the toilet, filtering it through two aquariums and a “biomechanical  reaction mechanism” and a plant that is fertilized by the reaction’s byproduct. There is also a DIY kit to carry out the process at home that was available at the Eyebeam Feedback show back in March.

I think these two projects are interesting in that they tackle a roughly similar idea with two very different types of execution. Lehanneur’s design is very clean and less science-diagram-ish than Riley and Bray’s installation, but I wonder if something like DrinkPeeDrinkPeeDrinkPee is more along the lines of what we might like to show (the aesthetic of naturally filtering water as a science-type project), rather than a demonstration of our collective design skills.