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Sao Paolo: City With No Ads


From Text-In-Transit to …And Then The City, we’ve spent a lot of time  researching ways in which we can subvert some of the advertising spaces in Windsor, but what if we were to just eliminate all of the advertisements entirely?

In January of this year, the mayor of Sao Paolo, Brazil decided to ban all the 8,000+ advertisements in the city in order to “rid the city of visual clutter.” I’d be interesting to see how this changes a person’s behaviour or the city’s culture and personality.

What do you think?  Would you be able to live in a city completely empty of commercial advertising?  What if this happened in Windsor?  How would your re-think all of the empty spaces?

Via: DesignVerb

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Dan Tague’s Live Free or Die

Dan Tague‘s recent body of work reminds me of a brief period in my undergrad when I had an interest in the power and aesthetics of currency. While I tried to duplicate the look of Canadian bills with paint, Dan uses American bills to spell out phrases such as “Reality Sucks” or “Don’t Tread on Me”. Dan’s project statement suggests that “The cost of war has created an internal war on our economy, where the generals are CEOs and the tanks are toxic assets. […] It is not coincidence that our money mimics military camouflage as illustrated in this new body of work.”

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Immaterials: Light painting WiFi

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo.

This project explores the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs.

A four-metre long measuring rod with 80 points of light reveals cross-sections through WiFi networks using a photographic technique called light-painting.

This builds on a technique that was invented for the 2009 film ‘Immaterials: the Ghost in the Field’ which probed the edges of the invisible fields that surround RFID readers and tags in the world. It also began a series of investigations into what Matt Jones richly summarised as ‘Immaterials’.

An interesting and quiet exploration of the city and one of its many infrastructures/interfaces.

via Julia Hall & nearfield.org

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Gagnon & Schott’s 12:31

Since the film-trailer-like synopsis of Croix Gagnon and Frank Schott’s project 12:31 is so epic, I think I’ll start by including it verbatim.

“In 1993, a convicted murderer was executed. His body was given to science, segmented, and photographed for medical research. In 2011, we used photography to put it back together.”

After the page break I’ve included a description of the process involved in making this happen.

Via: Today and Tomorrow

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Steve Lambert: It’s Time to Fight

Two things I can’t get enough of — Steve Lambert and huge text signs.

Lambert’s latest work, It’s Time to Fight was installed recently in Pittsburgh, PA over a waffle shop.

Text-based work continues to inspire me; it’s accesible, layered, timely, and tactical. It can be hidden in plain sight. If you catch it, it can disrupt your experience of a landscape, and if you don’t, it patiently and quietly stands in waiting, alongside its capitalistic brethren. Text can steal our attention and interrupt our experience of space, particularly urban space, and that’s why we like working with it, I suppose.

To take a page from Josh’s book: thank you for existing, Steve Lambert.

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REPOhistory: Lower Manhattan Sign Project

Stock Market Crashes by Jim Costanzo as part of REPOhistory’s Lower Manhattan Sign Project

I’m making my way through Gregory Sholette‘s epic Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. Writing as a participating artist and now dark matter art archivist / dare I say historian of sorts, Sholette writes on an incredible number of projects that work at the edges of the art institution in every sense.

Many of the projects explicitly connect art + everyday life + politics and Sholette offers a generous overview of the practices that build the foundation of dark matter in the art world that art institutions and art superstars rely on for their continued existence.

One of the (many) projects that caught my eye (and on which I’ll be posting) is REPOhistory’s Lower Manhattan Sign Project, which curated these alternative history/information signs into a number of public spaces across New York City.

From the project description: “Placed in front of the New York Stock Exchange, this sign challenges the myths of the free market economy and that stockbrokers jumped out of windows along Wall Street after the 1929 stock market crash. The sign documents that government deregulation and fraud led to market crashes and depressions at the turn of the 20th century, the 1920 and the 1980s.”

In thinking about the projects we’ve done and have considered before, these alternative public demarcation projects continue to feel not only relevant, but necessary. REPOhistory’s project was installed in the early 90s — it’s strange that that is now a long time ago and that urgency seems like a form of nostalgia.

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Glass Microbiology by Luke Jerram

Anyone who has taken a look through a modern scientific textbook probably noticed how vividly coloured most of the diagrams are. While scientific illustrations can be extremely helpful in understanding the inner workings of things like pathogens and plant/animal cells, they can also be a little misleading. Luke Jerram has highlighted this notion with a sculptural series called Glass Microbiology.

“These transparent glass sculptures were created to contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the artificial colouring of scientific imagery affects our understanding of phenomena. Jerram is exploring the tension between the artworks’ beauty, what they represent and their impact on humanity.”

Via: We Make Money, Not Art

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Pablo Valbuena’s Quadratura

Quadratura is a new site-specific light installation by Spanish artist Pablo Valbuena. He projected a perspective grid between two rows of columns and onto the wall behind them, thus creating the illusion of an infinite pathway. Pablo reminds us that “Quadratura was the technique used in the baroque to extended architecture through trompe l’oeil and perspective constructions generated with paint or sculpture.” I suggest watching the short video of the installation setup included on his project page as it highlights the degree to which light transforms this space.

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Book Sprinting

The act of authoring a book has traditionally been a long and arduous task consisting of many revisions and often years of work. Book Sprinting, on the other hand, is a sort of reaction to the traditional method of book production. In this case, a small group of writers collaboratively co-author, edit, and revise a book in a week or so. The end result is a finished publication that probably has a cohesiveness not present in some books.

I wonder if attempting a one-off publication project like this would be a good idea for us (Broken City Lab). We usually have a half-dozen research fellows around the table at most meetings. I bet we could pull off a nice mini-publication over a weekend.

Via: We Make Money, Not Art (Image from another similar Book Sprinting event.)